Mobility (Other Keyword)
176-197 (197 Records)
The western slopes of the Virginia Blue Ridge contain limited evidence of prehistoric activity, in stark contrast to the eastern slopes where prolific sites model seasonal upland mobility patterns for the southern Middle Atlantic. Fewer than 80 prehistoric sites, the majority identified as small lithic scatters bereft of diagnostics, are documented for the 105 miles of the western slopes of Shenandoah National Park; five times that number are documented for the eastern slopes. Attributed by some...
Towards a Nonlinear History of Lake Cocibolca, Nicaragua (2018)
Traditional narratives within Nicaraguan archaeology, based on primarily ethnohistoric rather than archaeological evidence, have privileged the arrival of external actors from Central Mexico at the expense of indigenous developments and have emphasized imposed change rather than situated continuity. Especially given that as archaeologists, our primary sources are material culture, we should approach mobility from a materialist engagement with the flows and hardenings of matter, sensu Manuel De...
Tracing Mobility in Pacific Coast and Highlands of Southern Mexico during the Classic Period (2018)
This study presents the strontium isotopic analysis of enamel, dentine and bones of four individuals recovered from two sites (Miguel Aleman and PIN7), dating respectively from the Early and Late Classic period, both located the Pacific coast of Chiapas. The enamel samples of the four individuals have a Sr isotopic composition that varies between 0.70540 and 0.70631 for the 87Sr/86Sr ratio. The results were compared to data available for human bones and teeth, as well as rock, plant, water, and...
Trade and Mobility in the Late Eighteenth-Century River World of the Western Great Lakes: the Case of Réaume’s Leaf River Post (2018)
This paper examines the lived experiences of French Canadian fur traders in the late eighteenth-century western Great Lakes region. Even as they labored under – sometimes actively resisted - the Anglo-Scot masters of the trade, a life of travel away from colonial centers provided an arena for voyageurs to enact and reproduce distinct sets of fur trade practices through the transmission of knowledge on the spot, as well as create a place for themselves at the intersection of British colonial...
Traveling Monastic Paths: Mobility and Religion in Medieval Ireland (2018)
Monasteries were powerful social institutions in early and late medieval Ireland that took drastically different forms over time. Medieval historical records, such as annals and Saints’ Lives, and archaeological data, such as the layout of monastic buildings, suggest that small communities of monks at early medieval Irish monasteries followed ascetic or austere ways of life. Contrastingly, historical and archaeological sources indicate that monks at late medieval monasteries, founded by English...
Travelling across the Atacama Desert: New Evidence for Human Mobility in Northern Chile Based on Oxygen and Strontium Isotopes (2018)
The study of human mobility is key to understanding the social and cultural dynamics of the pre-Columbian groups that inhabited northern Chile’s Atacama Desert. Material culture suggests that during the Late Intermediate Period (AD 900-1450) individuals frequently crossed the desert from the coast to the Andes and vice versa. Fish remains have been found in the interior valleys, and inland textiles and crops at the coast. This paper explores mobility in northern Chile through the application of...
The UpNorth Project: Environment Context of Late and Final Palaeolithic Dispersals (2018)
Human mobility and environmental interactions at the end of the Palaeolithic were undoubtedly influenced by large-scale and rapid climate change. With the melting of ice sheets and expansion/contraction of ecosystems, new landscapes and resources became available to late and final Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers. The UP-NORTH project is examining the dispersal of people and animals into Northern Europe after the Last Glacial Maximum. Using a range of techniques, including stable isotopes,...
The Ups & Downs of Iron Age Animal Management on the Oxfordshire Ridgeway, Southern England (2018)
As in any mixed farming system, the management of animals doubtless played an important part in Iron Age societies in southern Britain. Economically, they furnished meat, milk, wool and manure, and served as draught animals for transport and tillage. Intersecting with their economic uses, they were also important socially, politically and ritually. It is relatively straightforward to determine the proportional representation and mortality profiles of the major species – cattle, sheep/goat and...
Upward Mobility Among Smallholders of the Desert North Coast of Peru (2016)
Mobility among smallholders or campesinos is a crucial element for understanding the development of both ancient and modern-day Peru. In the case of the ancient agricultural landscape of Mocán, the movement of people, products, and possibly plants, lead to increasing network complexity eventually culminating in the area’s incorporation into an important coastal polity. Archaeological evidence suggests changing approaches to landscape and water management over the 2,000 years of occupation in the...
Uses and Limitations of the "Sangoan" for Understanding Hominin Mobility and Dispersals: An Example from Northeastern Zambia (2018)
The Sangoan, a late Middle Pleistocene technological tradition widely distributed in Sub-Saharan Africa, follows the Acheulean and is considered by some to represent the earliest manifestation of the Middle Stone Age. It may coincide with the evolution of Homo sapiens and the initial appearance of evidence for complex cognition. Unfortunately, this archaeological construct has fallen in and out of favor and remains poorly defined. It has uncertain dates and environmental associations, and...
Using Multiple Isotopic Analyses to Infer Population Mobility in Iron Age Britain (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster presents the ongoing results on isotopic research on Middle Iron Age (~400–200 cal BC) populations in Wessex and East Yorkshire. The multi-isotopic approach has been employed to infer population mobility for both the inhumed human population at a series of sites and the faunal assemblages from either the associated settlements or directly recovered...
Using stable isotopes to explore ancient wildebeest mobility in the context of pastoral expansion (2017)
The spread of pastoralism through Kenya may have been slowed by novel disease challenges presented to livestock by wild taxa. In particular, wildebeest-derived malignant catarrhal fever (WD-MCF), which is extremely fatal to cattle, would have been encountered by pastoralists for the first time as they moved south of the Lake Turkana Basin into the native range of East African wildebeest (Connochaetes taurinus). Today, migratory wildebeest have well-known annual migration patterns. However, while...
Using Traditional and Nontraditional Isotopic Tracers of Diet and Mobility of Brazilian Shell Mound Populations (ca. 8000–1000 years BP) (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The study of shell mounds can shed light on human occupation and adaptations at coastal environments worldwide. In South America, human groups occupied the territory close to the Atlantic Ocean for millennium (ca. 8000 to ⁓1000 years BP), building hundreds of shell mounds, some with impressive dimensions. After 2000 BP, it is assumed that these populations...
A View from the Mountains: A Test of a Predictive Model in the Southern Wind River Range, Wyoming (2018)
This paper details the results of archaeological survey in the Wind River Range, Wyoming between elevations of 9,000 and 11,000 ft. The purpose of this survey was to test a predictive model of a specific site type (sites referred to as villages) created by Stirn (2014) and tested by Stirn in a different region of the same mountain range. Although the methods of creating the predictive model were not altered, the survey methods were significantly altered. Random survey blocks were created within...
Wealth on the Hoof: Cajamarca Culture Camelid Pastoralism (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Them and Us: Transmission and Cultural Dynamism in the North of Peru between AD 250 and 950: A Vision since the Recent Northern Investigations" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Located in the Cajamarca Valley, the site of Iscoconga (50 BCE–750 CE) represents one of the few extensively explored domestic contexts of the Cajamarca Archaeological Culture. Excavations at Iscoconga revealed, among many things, that the...
Western Stemmed Tradition Lithic Procurement Strategies at the Catnip Creek Delta, Locality, Guano Valley, Oregon: A Gravity Model Approach (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Far West Paleoindian Archaeology: Papers from the Next Generation" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Source provenance analyses have long featured prominently in Great Basin Paleoindian archaeology. Such research has primarily focused on reconstructing Paleoindian settlement/subsistence strategies, territoriality, and socioeconomic interactions by sourcing obsidian artifacts from sites and mapping their geographic...
Where Do We Go from Here? A Review of Prehistoric Forager Mobility in Liguria (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Hunter-Gatherer Archaeology of Liguria: Recent Research and Insights" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Due to a suite of topographical and geomorphological factors, Liguria, and the Liguro-Provencal arc more generally, is an interesting natural laboratory in which to revisit some of the debates about forager mobility and its analysis that have unfolded over the past several decades. This paper presents an overview of...
Whole Assemblage Behavioral Indicators: Expectations and Inferences from Surface and Excavated Records at Elandsfontein, South Africa (2018)
Large scale surface surveys represent singular insights into the landscape scale variation in behaviors. Detailed investigations of the spatial distribution of artifacts across large spatial extents allow archaeologists to investigate a landscape as a single site. Surface assemblages have the advantage of large sample sizes and large aerial extents. However, biases associated with the formation processes of surface assemblages often undermine our confidence in the behavioral inferences derived...
Whose Donkey? Domestication and Variability (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Questioning the Fundamentals of Plant and Animal Domestication" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Morphological, genetic, ethnographic and behavioral research on domestication has provided a basis for understanding variability in the process of donkey domestication. It is clear that the lack of herd-based sociality among wild relatives of the donkey and people’s reliance on donkeys for transport create distinctive...
The World of the Living and the World of the Dead - A Bronze Age Monumental Landscape in Central Mongolia (2019)
This is an abstract from the "From Campsite to Capital – Mobility Patterns and Urbanism in Inner Asia" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Bronze Age landscape in Mongolia is characterized by valleys with regularly arranged groups of monuments which are believed to represent the focus of a community. Depending on the ecology of the area the distance between such site clusters varies. This even distribution is punctuated by large concentrations of...
Wortham Shelter: An Avonlea Site In the Bighorn River Canyon, Wyoming (1978)
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You're Going to Carry that Weight a Long Time (2018)
Mobility is a phenomenon of importance across all past and present societies. For hunter-gatherers, mobility structures ecological strategies, social organization, and response to environmental change. For prehistoric societies, we cannot observe mobility but it is possible to study it through a proxy record of discarded material items and biological remains that form the archaeological record. Increasingly archaeological practice has shifted from proposing intuitive links between mobility and...