Mortuary Analysis (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mirko De Tomassi.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Weaving-related objects, mainly spindle whorls and needles, found in prehispanic Maya burials are usually interpreted as an indication of either the identity of the deceased or the activities carried out in life. Such a symbolic approach is valuable in tracking the construction of identity in funerary contexts. However, it can be misleading in some contexts....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Koji Mizoguchi. Junko Uchida.

This presentation argues that the decision of the locations of the so-called royal tombs of the Anyang Hsi-Pei-Kang cemetery involved various social-strategic concerns. Although badly robbed, the excavations of the tombs yielded rich grave good assemblages, allowing archaeologists to approach to various elements of the theocratic authority of the late Shang kings. The reconstruction of the formation process of the cemetery has been attempted in the hope that the tombs can be assigned to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Vitale Sparacello. Stefano Rossi. Julien Riel-Salvatore. Irene Dori. Alessandra Varalli.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in the Prehistory of Liguria and Neighboring Regions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Epigravettian "necropolis" at Arene Candide Cave (Finale Ligure), excavated in the 1940s, yielded a large Late Upper Paleolithic skeletal series consisting of 10 primary burials and six clusters of bones in secondary deposition, accumulated during two distinct phases separated by a few centuries (AMS dates spanning...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Györgyi Parditka. John O'Shea.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The transition from Middle to Late Bronze Age (ca. 1600 – 1300 BC) in the Carpathian Basin encompassed a broad range of changes in material culture, settlement, and societal organization. While the narratives have somewhat shifted from the traditional model that primarily associated these changes with the arrival of the Tumulus culture population, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kyle Waller. Gordon Rakita.

The diversity of Casas Grandes mortuary practices has often been cited as strong evidence for hierarchy and political centralization at Paquimé. Initial mortuary analyses argued that variability in grave furniture, corpse treatment, and burial location represented the social identity of the deceased. A central finding of these analyses was that mortuary variability cross-cut age and sex categories, supporting inferences of ascribed vertical status differentiation. In this study, we use recent...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Markus Eberl. Sven Gronemeyer. Claudia Marie Vela González.

In Classic Maya society, termination rituals were conducted to ‘kill’ buildings and artifacts, predominantly in elite contexts. The resulting deposits were rapidly deposited in intentionally damaged buildings. They contain dense artifact assemblages with exotic objects and refittable ceramic sherds. After burning them, the artifacts were covered with white marl. Here, we report the extensive excavation of non-elite Structure 5PS-12 at the outskirts of the Classic Maya capital of Tamarindito. Its...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Markens. Cira Martínez López.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Oaxacan Cuisine" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From 500 BCE onwards, religion in the Valley of Oaxaca was organized in part as an ancestor cult as materialized by the appearance of household tombs in the archaeological record. Heads of households were laid to rest for a number of generations with offerings consisting most often of ceramic vessels, which in domestic contexts were used to serve food...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bryan Miller.

Material remains of communities and peoples enmeshed in imperial regimes are most often assessed as representations of incorporation into empires. Yet many of the objects in consideration were not so much passive material declarations as they were tools for active demonstrations. Authority, regional and local, derived from membership in exclusive imperial echelons; membership that required more than mere badges of identity but performances of imperially-derived authority. This paper addresses...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lynn Gamble.

The Chumash Indians of southern California made and used beads of stone, bone, and a variety of species of shell for over 8,000 years. A noted shift in shell beads occurred about 800 years ago with the appearance of a new bead type, cupped beads, made from the thick callus of the Callianax biplicata, a portion of the shell that had previously not been used. These types of beads were common throughout the Chumash region and elsewhere during the Late period and have been identified as money beads...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brooke Drew.

This is an abstract from the "The Bethel Cemetery Relocation Project: Historical, Osteological, and Material Culture Analyses of a Nineteenth-Century Indiana Cemetery" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the 2018 Bethel Cemetery Relocation Project, 26 concrete or metallic burial vaults were recovered. Established field protocol dictated that these were to remain unopened and were to be reinterred at the new cemetery location without further...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ruth Trocolli. Christine Ames. Delande Justinvil.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Covid-19 lockdown, the DC Archaeology Team completed emergency salvage of burials found in a Georgetown basement crawl space, part of an undocumented cemetery. We have visited this block on multiple occasions and believe that the cemetery likely served Georgetown’s large African American community - both enslaved and free - in the first half of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephanie Sperling.

Excavations at the Pig Point site have redefined our understanding of Native American history in the Mid-Atlantic. The site is located near the freshwater-saltwater interface on the Patuxent River in Maryland, an area tremendously rich in biodiversity, and radiocarbon dates from stratified deposits at the site span more than 9000 years; however, artifacts uncovered more than two meters below surface suggest people have lived in this area far longer. Features discovered at Pig Point include a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tomás Gallareta Cervera. Anna Novotny. Brett Houk.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Funerary customs and monumental architecture in the Maya Region are viewed by archaeologists as markers of social status and complexity. The intersection of mortuary rituals and the built environment gives us a window through which to understand the development of social complexity. Excavations at Chan Chich, a medium-sized city located in northwest...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Cartwright.

This is an abstract from the "Small Things Unforgotten" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Board games, from a psychological standpoint, have been seen as a reflection of skill, cunning, wisdom, and intelligence. Since most board games were developed in order to hone one’s skills in a certain area of life, the presence of them in graves should indicate a level of intellectual prowess. However, from an archaeological viewpoint, the presence of board...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kacey Grauer.

This is an abstract from the "Materializing Political Ecology: Landscape, Power, and Inequality" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Post-humanism importantly considers active roles of nonhuman entities in society. However, it is crucial that power relationships between people do not fall by the wayside when studying past societies. In this paper, I approach geological features at the ancient Maya city of Aventura, Belize, from a perspective that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael J. O'Brien. Robert E. Warren.

This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. Most NADB-R records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us at comments@tdar.org.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Schach. Donna Nash.

This is an abstract from the "Exploring Culture Contact and Diversity in Southern Peru" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological investigations in Moquegua indicate that this valley has been the site of multi-ethnic imperial processes since the Middle Horizon. Large cemetery sites in Moquegua have largely dated to the Middle Horizon Period, however, and thus little work has focused on the transition between the Late Intermediate Period and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jenna Hurtubise.

Around A.D. 1300, the Chimú conducted a series of expansions south of the Moche Valley conquering the Casma, a regional group whose territory spanned from the Chao to the Huarmey Valleys. While past research has examined this event in the northern and southern extent of the Casma’s territory, there exists a void in our knowledge on the Casma’s experience during the Chimú conquest in the central Santa and Nepeña Valleys. In 2017 the Proyecto Investigación de Arqueología de Pan de Azucár (PIAPAN)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Luis Jaime Castillo.

Starting in 1991, more than 20 female elite burials have been excavated among the 800+ burials dug in San Jose de Moro, Jequetepeque Valley, Northern Peru. Female burials tell us stories of the rise to power of females in the Late Moche society, of their singular power, emanating from roles in Sacrificial Ceremonies, but mostly each burial is a representation of the specific life of each one of these females, where more is singular than common and shared. Rather than a repetitive pattern, each...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kerry Gonzalez. Joseph Blondino. Joanna Wilson-Green. Jazriel Cruz. Martin Levin.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dovetail Cultural Resource Group conducted an emergency excavation of two Native American burials in the Southern Chesapeake Region of Virginia which were AMS dated to 620±20 and 540±20 RCYBP. The ensuing analysis of the human remains showed evidence for prehistoric dentistry in one of the individuals, a male who died between the ages of 40–45. A large...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Catherine Jones. Shannon Freire.

The excavation, reburial, and permanent curation of human remains from historic cemeteries is inherently linked to complexities of Western paternalism, medical consent, nationality, traditional cultural practice, and a too-common absence of stakeholder engagement, among other pressing concerns. These important and fundamental considerations are often ignored or glossed over in both archaeological project planning and in publications utilizing these remains. The ideal of scientific objectivity...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Smith.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Hinterland communities are important arenas for understanding community-level cultural and social development at the periphery of state power. In such communities where writing is not present, symbols become important vehicles for the transmission of identity information. Ceramic motif preference among individuals within these communities is one such mode...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nathan Klembara.

This is an abstract from the "The Future Is Fluid...and So Was the Past: Challenging the 'Normative' in Archaeological Interpretations" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Studies of Upper Paleolithic burials in Europe have illuminated several aspects of Upper Paleolithic lifeways, from health and diet, to status and social organization. These studies, while recognizing the rarity of Upper Paleolithic burials, interpret the Upper Paleolithic burial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Temple.

This is an abstract from the "Cooperative Bodies: Bioarchaeology and Non-ranked Societies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Social complexity is a term that often refers to the evolution of inequality in human populations along socioeconomic scales. This concept is historically traceable to unilineal evolutionary paradigms where reduced complexity is often defined based on othering in comparison to Western industrialized capitalism. This study...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicole Slovak. Brittany Ricketts. Christopher Philipp. Stacy Drake. Patrick Ryan Williams.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Necropolis of Ancón, Peru represents one of the largest pre-contact cemeteries in the Andes, with more than 3,000 burials and tens of thousands of associated grave goods excavated from the site. Despite more than a century of archaeological research at the Necropolis, not a single C-14 date from the burial ground has ever been published. In this...