Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Goodmaster. Erin Helton.

Recent digital documentation efforts at Panther Cave (41VV83) have yielded a detailed record of current site conditions and provide a wealth of geospatial data pertinent to the prehistoric art preserved at the site. Three-dimensional laser scanning (LiDAR) and digital photogrammetry were integrated to record a highly accurate digital model of the rockshelter and its immediate environment. This documentation effort provides a robust corpus of data for use in the digital visualization, analysis,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alex Knodell.

The pace and scale of technological change in field- and lab-based applications in remote sensing, spatial sciences, and digital media (to name only a few) have fundamentally transformed archaeological research design and practice, especially on a regional level. But have these technological advances changed the discipline in ways that might constitute a paradigm shift? Have they resulted in new disciplinary priorities? Or do they simply represent newer, faster ways to pursue agendas not so...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabriela Montero Mejía. Marcie Venter.

During the 2014 through 2016 field and laboratory seasons of the RRATZ Project, the archaeological site of Mazapa was recorded, mapped, and its pottery and obsidian artifacts analyzed. These efforts reveal that Mazapa, located near Chonegal, Veracruz, is one of the largest Late Postclassic sites known for the southern Gulf lowlands; it contains approximately 170 structures that range from low housemounds to platforms measuring 7 meters high. Although sizeable Postclassic settlements have been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ralf Vandam. Peter F. Biehl. Patrick T. Willet. Jeroen Poblome.

This paper presents the results of a new survey project in the Burdur Region (SW Turkey). Previous archaeological research in SW Turkey has until now mainly focused on the larger fertile lowland areas, which revealed numerous farming settlements from the Neolithic onwards and illustrated clear distinctive periods of continuity and collapse in human occupation in these areas. The more marginal areas in the landscape such as remote, high altitude locations, on the other hand, have not been the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marco Madella. Carla Lancelotti. Alessandra Pecci. Javier Ruiz-Perez. Fernanda Inserra.

The main aim of archaeological research is the reconstruction of past human activities. So far this has been achieved mostly through the study of material culture. However, activities related to food production and consumption represent an important part of human life and leave microscopic and chemical traces. The use of ethnography and geostatistical approaches can help in unlock the patters and identify activity areas in a controlled environment. We present here results from a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Popova.

In this talk I will discuss the categories that will be used for the LandCover 6k Project to track pastoral land use over time. These new categories will be discussed in terms of the more traditional categories archaeologist and historians have used to talk about pastoralism. I will give examples of how these new categories can be used to track pastoral land use in Eurasia using archaeological data.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kevin Lane. Jennifer Grant.

In this paper we contrast and compare the development of pastoralism at two opposite yet complimentary geographical locations with a focus on pastoralist impact on the environment. In Argentina we present the evolution and development of pastoralism [c. 3,300-400BP] in the arid highlands of Antofagasta de la Sierra, as societies negotiated the shift from hunter-gathering to a more mixed, but increasingly, pastoralist economy culminating in late complex agro-pastoralist adaptations. Similarly in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Watkins. Christopher Garraty. Travis Cureton. Dave Bustoz. Erik Steinbach.

O’Odham oral histories describes the overthrow of Hua’m a Nui (Yellow Buzzard) and other arrogant rulers of platform mound villages in the Phoenix Basin. These oral histories are consistent with archaeological data that point to increasing social stratification during the Classic Period. This paper addresses the question of how the household-based egalitarianism of the Preclassic developed into Late Classic hierarchy. Leveling mechanisms that previously channeled aggrandizers into socially...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ivonne Miranda Tapia. Jorge Zambrana.

En esta ponencia discutimos un hallazgo muy importante para la arqueología de Nicaragua, en lo que respecta a patrones funerarios del Período Tempisque terminal y posiblemente Bagaces inicial. El hallazgo fue realizado a 18 kilómetros al sur de la ciudad de Managua, el mismo comparte algunas similitudes con otros sitios de la ciudad de Managua, pero con notables diferencias en lo que respecta a ensamblajes cerámicos y al mismo tiempo en los patrones funerarios en sí, por ejemplo, en Ticuantepe,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Leppard. Jason Laffoon.

During the colonisation of islands in the Pacific and Caribbean by agropastoral communities, a variety of proxies (e.g., material, genetic, zoogeographic) indicate substantial inter-island and inter-community contact. It has been suggested that this contact represents an adaptive response to intrinsic demographic fragility during the initial phases of island colonisation, and that this connectivity imperative faded in the aftermath of initial dispersal as overall population density increased....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sean Hixon. Emma Elliott Smith. Brooke Crowley. Richard Bankoff. Douglas Kennett.

Early human colonists of Madagascar encountered a diverse endemic fauna during the late Holocene that included elephant birds, pygmy hippos, and giant lemurs. All fauna >10 kg went extinct in the past 1,000-2,000 years. Direct human predation and anthropogenic landscape change help explain aspects of the extinction pattern. Increasing aridity may have also played a role in some regions, but its contribution remains controversial. We track changes in aridity during the past 4,000 years in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mike Cannon. Sarah Creer.

The Tosawihi chert quarries of northern Nevada have played a significant role in the development of hypotheses by Great Basin archaeologists about pre-contact procurement and transport of lithic raw materials. Here, such hypotheses are tested using data obtained from ongoing investigations in the nearby Little Boulder Basin. These investigations have resulted in the analysis of chipped stone assemblages from dozens of site loci, which consist primarily of Tosawihi chert and many of which can be...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cory A. Henderson. Ryan M. Byerly. Cynthia Fadem. Curran Fitzgerald. Charles P. Egeland.

Suitable toolstone was a key affordance for Early Stone Age (ESA) populations across Africa. Northern Tanzania’s Olduvai Basin, because it contains numerous ESA archaeological localities and a variety of quartzitic outcrops, offers an excellent opportunity to evaluate the effect of raw material distribution on hominin landuse. While the lithology and mineralogy of these outcrops have been well described, their macroscopic similarities confound efforts to reliably determine the exact source of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Pfeiffer. Judith Sealy. Ronald F. Williamson. Crystal Forrest. Louis Lesage.

We report here on the study of ancestral teeth retained after repatriation, with the permission and engagement of the Huron-Wendat Nation. We have documented temporal patterns in reliance on maize, as well as decisions about infant feeding. Significant differences between time periods before and after European incursions suggest concrete ways in which disruptions altered daily lives. Study of horizontal dentine slices from 74 teeth (35 deciduous molars, 39 permanent M1) from five communities,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lane Fargher. Richard Blanton.

Historically, anthropological archaeologists assumed that intensification, in complex societies, involved a combination of population pressure and state direction, which culminated in the rise of powerful, centralized states. However, intensive research over the last 30 years has considerably altered our concepts of intensification and the state. Drawing on landscape archaeology and alternative pathways theory, we consider how diverse political-economic and landscape strategies interact to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Muir. Jesse Morin. Hilary Pennock. Sarah Dougan. Wedlidi Speck.

Recent excavations at the K'omoks First Nation ancient village site at Pentlatch resulted in the discovery of 122 incised pebbles and small cobbles. Such artifacts are very rare in the Pacific Northwest, with only one other comparably large assemblage having been reported at Tse-whit-zen in Port Angeles, Washington. The incised stones from the Pentlatch site were found throughout the site area and from all stratigraphic contexts, spanning (at least) several hundreds of years of occupation;...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lindsay Johansson.

The faunal assemblages recovered from the Promontory Caves by Julian Steward, and more recently by John Ives and Joel Janetski, suggest that the subsistence practices, hunting patterns, and mobility strategies of those using the caves ca. AD 1100 to 1300 differed greatly from those of later peoples who used similar ceramics in the same region. While there are many potential explanations for these differences, this paper uses faunal data to argue that large game hunting, together with the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Coutros. Jessamy Doman.

The first millennium BC was a time of considerable social, technological, and environmental change for the peoples of West Africa. Despite the growing number and distribution of archaeological projects throughout the region, very little is known about this critical period. Likewise, many of the climate models currently in use lack the sufficient temporal or spatial resolution needed to provide context for the variety of changes occurring at a localized level. Recent research at the Diallowali...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Liye Xie.

Labor recruitment and management are essential to accomplish massive public construction in ancient times, as in today. Archaeologists across the world have examined ethnographic accounts and conducted experiments to understand labor costs and organizational structure for construction and maintenance of large architectural projects. Common conclusions are that the workforce in monument construction during the pre-Iron age could have been easily recruited by non-state level polities. However,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Madelynn Von Baeyer.

This paper presents archaeobotanical data from the Late Chalcolithic (LC) archaeobotanical assemblage at Çadır Höyük, a mounded site on the north central Anatolian plateau with almost continuous occupation from the Middle Chalcolithic through the Byzantine period. The analysis will focus on both descriptive and quantitative data from samples dating to around 3600 B.C.E. from a communal cooking area at Çadır. It will examine how archaeobotanical analysis can be used as a line of evidence to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jae Won Ko.

Paleolithic sties in Jeju Island have been found in the Quaternary sediment layers that are related to volcanic activities. Accordingly, research has been closely related to the geological investigation on sediment formation and volcanic activities. This presentation focuses on two Paleolithic sites, Oeododong along the north coast and Sangsugae cave along the south coast. The Oedodong site contains choppers and is dated to 32,000 BP; the Sangsugae cave site represents the Terminal Pleistocene,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carole Fritz. Gilles Tosello.

En art paléolithique, les "scènes" sont rares et leur identification repose le plus souvent sur la présence d'un acteur humain ou anthropomorphe. Paradoxalement, la thématique paléolithique compte moins de 5 % de figures humaines pour 95 % d'animaux. Cela signifie que la majorité des assemblages que l'on retrouve dans les grottes sont constitués d'images animales. Or dans nos cultures, l'image humaine est centrale et lorsque nous parlons de scène, nous recherchons intuitivement la référence à...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Zarger. Kristina Baines.

What drives human uncertainty when confronting gradual change versus catastrophic, rapid change? Based on longitudinal ethnographic data that includes household behavioral observations, oral histories and structured survey interviews of land use change, and continuous participant observation data, we describe the ways farming families in southern Belize have responded to changing environments over time, within the context of a mosaic of livelihood strategies. Ethnographic interviews with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edward Banning. Isaac Ullah.

Percolation theory, used mainly in physics and materials science, describes the behavior of interconnected clusters in spatial lattices, but is also relevant to an age-old problem in archaeology: how best to detect buried sites with subsurface testing. It can provide insights into adaptive sampling protocols applied to two-dimensional scatters of artifacts. Our research focuses on adaptive sampling's impacts on our understanding of underlying distributions of artifacts and sites in survey by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Chiou. Luis Jaime Castillo.

The site of San José de Moro in the Jequetepeque Valley of the North Coast of Peru is renowned for the discovery of several "Priestess" burials containing women interred with the material accoutrements of the goddess figure from the Moche pantheon. As a burial ground for the Moche elite, San José de Moro presents an excellent case study for ritual performance with burial-related ceremonies taking place concurrently with feasting. In this paper, we discuss the plant evidence for large-scale feast...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Booher. Brett Houk.

This poster details peri-abandonment features from the Maya site of Chan Chich in northwestern Belize. The term peri-abandonment relates to deposits or features dated to around the time of abandonment of the site. Previous research in the southern and eastern lowlands has documented widespread above-floor terminal artifact deposits in primarily epicentral contexts thought to have formed at or near the time of abandonment at many sites in the region. Excavations at Normans Temple complex at Chan...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam Rabinowitz. Ryan Shaw. Patrick Golden.

‘Big Data’ requires consistency in the structure and description of data from different sources, so that patterns in the same attributes can be identified across datasets. Unfortunately, archaeological datasets are notoriously inconsistent in both structure and terminology. Various attempts have recently been made to resolve this problem and enhance interoperability. One strategy that has worked well for the aggregation of spatially-situated data involves spatial gazetteers expressed as Linked...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lauren Ristvet.

Pilgrimage is a popular phenomenon, one which involves people traveling to and gathering at specific places during specific times, usually as part of a shared religious tradition. In the Ancient Near East, religious travel existed alongside other forms of mobility with important political and social consequences, like peripatetic kingship—in which there is no one fixed court—a characteristic of the Urartian (ca. 800-600 BC), Achaemenid (ca. 550-330 BC), and Seleucid (ca. 300-100 BC) empires, or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edith Ortiz-Diaz.

In no other part of Mexico have been found so many gold objects as in Oaxaca. The Mixtecs and Zapotecs from central Oaxaca created amazing pieces with such great mastery as well as in the aesthetic and technological aspects. The Oaxaca artisans worked principally with gold and silver. The mineral needed in order to make these objects was relatively abundant in Oaxaca. Nevertheless, outside the realm of the Central Valleys of Oaxaca and the Mixtec area, mineral resources existed in most of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only J. M. Adovasio.

Perishable Artifacts from the Old Vero Site (8IR009), Indian River County, Florida J. M. Adovasio Florida Atlantic University Despite depositional conditions inimical to the preservation of plant fiber or wood-derived artifacts, several such objects have been recovered during the ongoing re-excavations of the Old Vero Site (8IR009) in Indian River County, Florida. These include a minute fragment of charred, three ply, braided cordage with a contiguous underlying date of ca. 9,000 calendar years...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Pilles.

In the 1960s, a group of students at Arizona State University organized a multi-year program of archaeological survey and excavations in the Perkinsville Valley, an archaeologically unknown region briefly visited by Jesse Walter Fewkes in 1906. Starting with a wide-ranging reconnaissance, a survey identified 21 sites, indicating a long-term occupation throughout the entire cultural sequence of the Verde Valley, from the Early Archaic through the terminal A.D. 1300-1400 periods. A number of sites...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Roscoe.

At contact, a number of New Guinea communities boasted considerable ‘horizontal’ complexity – very large populations (up to 2,500 people) and ceremonial arenas that engaged even more. Many also constructed monumental architectures of organic material and staggering size. These communities included complex fisher-foragers and Big-man horticulturalists, organizations that are commonly identified as only minimally hierarchical. Certainly, their hierarchical institutions were insufficiently...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kimberly Munro.

The Cosma Complex is located in the Cordillera Negra at the headwaters of the upper Nepeña River Valley, Ancash Peru. Fieldwork conducted between 2014-2016 documented repeated reconstruction episodes associated with the reuse of monumental ritual architecture originally dated to the Late Preceramic (3000-1800 BCE). By the Early Horizon infant remains and other offerings were placed into earlier architectural contexts as a final capping episode on at least one mound. As settlement patterns...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angel González López. Andrew D. Turner.

A recurring theme in H.B. Nicholson’s groundbreaking analysis of Central Mexican deities is the application of a holistic approach to the analysis of Mexica stone sculpture, which includes visual and iconographic analysis, and comparison to early colonial texts. This paper will analyze a poorly understood deity that appears in late Mexica stone sculpture based on Nicholson’s innovative methodology. This fanged being appears only in stone sculpture from the imperial capital, and has previously...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aarón Felipe Lopez. Aarón felipe lópez.

The Rio de los Pescados runs in a mountanous zone of the state of Veracruz, Mexico. The river passes through various ecological zones of varying terrain before emptying into the Gulf of Mexico. Tlaltetetla is a small town located on a plateau approximately 60 meters above the basin of the Rio de los Pescados in central Veracruz. Approximately one kilometer from Tlaltetetla, there is a large petroglyph panel on a 7.6 meter high by 24.6 meter long rock wall in the river basin. There are over 100...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Jerrems.

The association of cupules and pit and groove petroglyphs is possibly the oldest form of "rock art" in the Americas as evidenced in the northern Great Basin. Recant methods of dating petroglyphs, made possible by unusual paleoclimatic circumstances, have resulted in what may be the identification of the ‘North America’s oldest petroglyphs." Three sites located on the shores of ancient Pleistocene Lakes, two at Lake Lahontan in northern Nevada and one at Long Lake in southern Oregon, have given...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bryn Tapper.

Ongoing investigation of the Algonquian rock art of the Canadian Maritimes reveals that while some sites, such as Kejimkujik Lake, are well documented as a result of longstanding conservation strategies, these and other petroglyph sites have yet to be adequately and comprehensively framed within their archaeological, ethnohistorical and ethnographic contexts. Combining a landscape archaeology approach with theoretical positions emerging from the ‘ontological turn’ in archaeology, my research...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zhaneta Gjyshja.

The Shkodra Archaeological Project (PASH) took place in the Shkodra region of northern Albania. Shkodra presents a wide variety of ecosystems and landscapes, which interact with each other, leading to variation in human settlement, social behaviors, and land use, from prehistory to modern times. During the project, fifty-nine grinding stones were collected from various sites. Preliminary analysis shows that they vary in size and type, are composed of different materials, and belong to different...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michelle Bebber.

This research elucidates the complex nature of pottery tempers used in the Scioto River Valley of south central Ohio. The data suggest that during the Late Prehistoric Period indigenous potters began using composite temper types with concretionary hematite as a secondary temper — most often found alongside shell as the primary temper. This project involved two phases 1) petrographic research and 2) mechanical properties testing. The initial research phase involved a detailed analysis of the clay...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Janling Fu. Sherry Fox. Rachel Kalisher. Kathryn Marklein. Adam Aja.

During the 2013-6 seasons, an extramural cemetery was discovered at the coastal site of Ashkelon in Israel. Dated almost entirely to the Iron IIA period, more than 200 sets of remains were exposed and excavated, providing for the first time a secure and sizeable number of burials from which to generate an understanding of Philistine burial practices and mortuary ritual. The majority of bodies were found in primary inhumation with various depositional practices observed, among them simple pit,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jordan Downey. Oliver R. Hegge. Kari Lentz. Steven A. Wernke.

In 2016, a large excavation project was carried out at the site of Mawchu Llacta in the Colca Valley of southern Peru. A colonial reduccíon (planned town), Mawchu Llacta is a large site with plazas, chapels, a parish, and domestic compounds. These spaces all consist of complex standing architecture in varying degrees of preservation. Eleven excavation blocks were opened to better understand ritual and everyday life in the town. The extent and distribution of the excavations, however, presented...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Case. Julia Clark. Tumurbaatar Tuvshinjargal. William Taylor.

This study presents results from the photogrammetric documentation of rock art in western Mongolia. Unlike many traditional rock art documentation techniques practiced in Mongolia, photogrammetry presents unique advantages for the study and preservation of cultural heritage. These include the production of a digital 3D model, preservation of color and original lighting conditions, ease of documentation, and the inclusion of contextual information such as surrounding features, panel orientation,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Graff. John Marston.

At the Iron Age site of Kerkenes in Central Turkey, researchers are using different analytical methods to study cooking and food preparation. Evidence for cooking pots and other ceramic containers used for preparing, storing, and cooking food are found together with a variety of botanical remains. A new project at the site initiated the complementary analysis of ceramic container production and use with plant preparation, storage, and consumption. Situating these data in context, taking...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rong Fan.

Because of a lack of artifacts or archaeological features which can indicate social status, the Early and Middle Neolithic periods ca.7000-4000 BC in China are considered to be relatively egalitarian periods. Differences within and among settlements became pronounced in the third millennium BC. The adaptation of agricultural lifeways might be a cause of social complexity. However, it requires further investigation into how and why this happened. In the case when there are not enough artifacts to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lenville Stelle.

The pictographs of the Bloodvein River, Artery Lake, Ontario offer an important view of rock art design and purpose during the late prehistoric period and perhaps continuing well into the nineteenth century. All images are finger applied and utilize iron oxide based pigment. The sites appear to be of varying function. The largest and most complex consists of seven or eight panels and may reveal a narrative of healing associated with the Fourth Degree of the Midewiwin or Ojibwe Grand Medicine...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Anderson. David Echeverry. D. Shane Miller. Stephen Yerka.

Compiling and making accessible primary archaeological data from multiple sources and across large areas is one of the grand challenges facing archaeology in the twenty-first century. The Paleoindian Database of the Americas (PIDBA) has been operating for over 25 years to make Paleoindian data openly accessible online to all interested parties. Data from more than 100 scholars, including locational data on over 30,000 projectile points, has been made available in digital form that has been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Fash.

Copan's longest-lived ruler dramatically expanded his realm, reach, and resources. The valley population nearly doubled, and the historical record indicates he was active in the ritual and political lives of other centers both near to home and farther afield. Ruler 12 contextualized his defensive perimeter within the sacred geography of the valley by erecting six stelae in 652 C.E. His successor enshrined that achievement and his memory in the most elaborately decorated temple outside the royal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamín Ballester. Marcela Sepúlveda. Francisco Gallardo. Gloria Cabello. Estefanía Vidal.

The mineralogical richness of the Atacama Desert allowed for the development of an important set of mining-extracting and metallurgic, lapidaric and pigmental productive activities, which became significant activities in the sociocultural dynamics of desert dwellers. El Cóndor mine, an important hematite source located in the middle section of the Loa River, was exploited from the Formative Period (~A.D. 300) until Inka times (~A.D. 1500). In contrast to other mining sites in Atacama, El Cóndor...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Lash.

This paper explores how a relational approach centered on the concept of taskscape could reinvigorate analyses of how pilgrimages create, sustain, or transform human-environment relations. Medieval and modern traditions of pilgrimage in Ireland are renowned for their engagement with ‘natural’ places and objects, such as mountains, springs, and stones. Some take this focus as evidence of an animistic pre-Christian heritage, but few have questioned how such practices structured peoples’ ideas and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dena Doroszenko.

In 1964, pharmacist E. W. Field, closed his practice in Niagara-on-the-Lake due to ill health. This pharmacy had been in operation for a total of 156 years by 6 pharmacists, 5 of whom had been apprenticed to their predecessors. Re-opened in 1971 as an authentic restoration of an 1866 pharmacy, the building is owned by the Ontario Heritage Trust and curated by the Ontario College of Pharmacists. Several archaeological investigations have taken place in the rear yard of the apothecary, most...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Courtney Rose. Ian Milliken.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) modeling is vital to improve and focus cultural resources management strategies on the approximately 100,000 acres of conservation lands acquired by Pima County since 1997. These lands are dedicated for cultural and biological resource conservation and are the result of lands identified in the Pima County Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan (SDCP). The SDCP includes a static model depicting archaeological sensitivity that combines all archaeological site types...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marx Navarro-Castillo. Hector Neff.

Soconusco, a rich ecological environment in far-southern Chiapas, Mexico, has been occupied throughout Mesoamerican history. The Proyecto Arqueológico Costa del Soconusco (PACS) focused on settlements in the mangrove zone of Eastern Soconusco. A LiDAR survey identified a total of 203 features thought to be associated with human activities. This paper focuses on site Pin7, which is located in the mangrove zone about 1.5 km west of the Rio Cahuacan. Magnetometer and ground-penetrating radar...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Henry Tantaleán. Alexis Rodríguez Yábar. Kelita Pérez Cubas. Charles Stanish.

During the last five years, we have developed an archaeological research program in the southern Peruvian coastal valley of Chincha. This project focuses on the rise of the Paracas society ca. 800-200 BCE. We excavated the monumental Paracas site of Cerro del Gentil located in the Chincha mid-valley where we recovered an important ritual context in a sunken court related to the Pinta phase. The Pinta phase was defined by Dwight Wallace in 1950´s but not has been systematically described. In...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Damitio. Shannon Tushingham.

Smoking has been practiced by native peoples throughout the inland Pacific Northwest—and especially along the Columbia and Fraser River systems—for several millennia. This is evinced by the presence of stone pipes and pipe fragments in sites across the region. This poster presents the spatial and chronological distribution of archaeological smoking pipes throughout the inland Pacific Northwest based on literature and database searches, with a particular focus on those collections held or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jo Burkholder.

Drawing on the archaeological excavations at the site of Pisanay, located in the Sihuas Valley of Arequipa (southern) Peru, this paper will situate the rock art at the site within the broader contexts of multiple rock art traditions in the region. These traditions include both painted and pecked images on rock surfaces, a wide variety of geoglyphs, mobilary art, and sacred offerings made to particular rocks and geographic landmarks that represent huacas (loosely ‘holy places’). Within the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jay Franklin. S. D. Dean.

Pisgah in upper East Tennessee appears to represent fluid, adaptable communities of practice in the upper reaches of the Tennessee Valley. It reflects various but limited elements of Mississippianization. Pisgah also appears to have crosscut ethnic boundaries. On the Holston, it was associated with the Dallas archaeological culture, while on the Nolichucky and Watauga, it was associated with Qualla (Cherokee) and also perhaps proto-Catawban wares. Pisgah in the region does not appear to have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victoria Ingalls.

Public structures across the Maya lowlands functioned as materializations of ideology, memory, and identity. However, documentation of public ritual structures is typically limited to formal ceremonial centers. Little is known about public spaces within hinterland communities. Excavations at the site of San Lorenzo offer insight into the use and transformation of ritual space within a hinterland community. Recent excavations of a public structure group have uncovered multiple construction phases...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Hoffman.

This study focuses on the cultural, political, and biological factors that led to the formation of a unique pattern of dental pathology within an Icelandic population at Haffjarðarey, Iceland between the 13th and 16th Centuries . The Haffjarðarey church and cemetery clearly served as an important meeting place and burial site for the surrounding region during this period. A paleopathological analysis of the population reveals a high rate of ante-mortem tooth loss, severe tooth wear, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only François Gagnon. Dagmara Zawadzka.

The rock art of northeastern Ontario is less well-known than its counterpart in northwestern Ontario. However, recent explorations of the numerous lakes and meandering rivers in the Canadian Shield have led to the identification of previously unknown sites, as well as to the proper documentation of previously known sites, thus increasing greatly the sample and allowing for the emergence of a more complex regional picture. As an example, the rock art of Temagami area is discussed. This large...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ellen Hsieh.

Manila was a critical link between Asia, Europe, and the New World during a pivotal period in world history; however, little attention has been paid to its colonial live. This paper aims to fill this void by re-examining consumption patterns of various types of ceramics excavated from sites in the Spanish walled city. The result shows that the Spanish colonists consumed better products than other subordinate groups and demonstrated their power by using customized Chinese goods rather than their...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Penny Minturn.

The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) is tasked with recovering missing military personnel from conflict areas all around the world. In the past we have dealt most often with individual ground losses, expedient burials, and aircraft crashes. But soon we will be confronting the daunting, and very different, responsibility of the recovery of multiple individuals from battlefields. Battlefields differ from our ‘standard’ excavation sites in many ways, namely, the number of casualties, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephanie Hacker. Beatrix Arendt. Derek Wheeler. John Jones.

This research emphasizes the value of studying plant remains recovered from archaeological contexts while contributing to our understanding of the lifeways of enslaved African-Americans from late eighteenth -century Virginia. The primary objective of this research is to identify plants selected by enslaved field laborers living on the Home Farm Quarter of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello plantation. This study incorporates both macrobotanical and pollen analysis and presents a wide variety of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Kenoyer.

Excavations at the site of Harappa undertaken by the Harappa Archaeological Research Project between 1986 and 2010 have recovered a wide variety of artifacts relating to plant based textiles and basketry from between 3700 to 1900 BCE. This paper will present the results of the analysis of archaeological evidence and experimental studies used to develop more accurate interpretations of the nature of early plant based fibers and basketry. Woven textile impressed terracotta beads and spindle whorls...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sheahan Bestel. Tianlong Jiao.

A mid-Neolithic expansion of farming cultures into the coastal areas of Fujian province, located opposite Taiwan on the other side of the Taiwan Strait, occurred around c. 4300 cal BP. Crops including foxtail millet and rice formed part of these farmers' diet, and plant remains such as bamboo, possibly used for wooden cooking implements, were also common in sediments and residues at these Longshan-period sites. Plant residues from pottery fragments excavated from the Tanshishan site, located in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Oas.

The dynamics of household economies provide an important window into processes of social, economic, and environmental change in plantation settings. This paper examines household food production and consumption activities and the use of local landscapes at Morne Patate to better understand the relationships between daily life, landscape use, and the broader political economic changes that influenced plantation life on Dominica over several generations of occupation. I present the results of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sophie Reilly.

Paleoethnobotanists study human-plant interactions in the past, including the role of plants in ancient foodways. Microbotanical remains (phytoliths and starch grains) enable the identification of many plants because their morphology can be diagnostic to the family, genus, and species. Microbotanical samples can be extracted from specific artifacts, such as ceramics, enabling a better understanding of their use. Paleoethnobotanists can thus discern associations between certain vessel types and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leah McCurdy. M. Kathryn Brown.

In 2016, we discovered a sage’s chamber in the El Castillo acropolis at the ancient Maya site of Xunantunich, Belize. In the Late Classic Tut Building on the east side of El Castillo, all interior and exterior plaster walls are incised with "graffiti." The total number of elements documented is nearly 300 with themes ranging from human and animal forms to glyphs and multi-figure scenes. We expect to encounter more in future field seasons. Based on a variety of factors, we view this as practice...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Weiner.

Chaco Canyon is generally understood to have derived its regional influence by virtue of ceremonial power. But what exactly - experientially, sensorially, affectively – was so compelling about the experience of Chacoan ritual, and how might we approach these immaterial dimensions of the archaeological record? In this paper, I suggest that ceremonial gambling/gaming was an important practice during Chacoan gatherings that allowed participants to interact directly with supernatural forces. After...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Kelly.

In the summer of 2015, the Public Archaeology Laboratory, Inc. (PAL) conducted data recovery excavations at Susquetonscut Brook Pre-Contact Site 11 (SB 11), a multi-component site in Franklin, Connecticut. Prior archaeological investigations had produced a high density of pre-contact artifacts, but very few artifacts that would have suggested a sizeable post-contact occupation. However, the data recovery yielded 1,798 post-contact artifacts, revealing a substantial post-contact component to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Curtis Runnels.

Palaeolithic stone tools have been identified on a number of Greek islands recently. These include the oceanic island of Crete, where lithic artifacts on the southern coast at Plakias occur in association with raised marine beaches and paleosols in karstic depressions dated to > 130 kyr, and on the northern coast at Mochlos Bay associated with as-yet undated Pleistocene alluvial fans. Other islands, including Ayios Efstratios, Alonissos, Gavdos, Kephalonia, Lesvos, Melos, and Naxos, have also...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Randee Fladeboe.

Macaws are not native to the American Southwest, but were imported into this region from central Mexico for hundreds of years. Recent research has demonstrated that the wing feathers of Southwestern turkeys were regularly plucked, as evidenced by significant scarring on the birds’ ulnae. This paper provides a macroscopic analysis of macaw skeletal remains from Pueblo Bonito and Pueblo Arroyo in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, and argues that these elements also show evidence of a practice of regular...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katharine Williams.

Plumbate is a lustrous hard-paste ware characterized by small effigy vessels, some of which bear Central Mexican ideological influences. It was widely traded during the Terminal Classic/Early Postclassic across ethnic, political, and linguistic boundaries. Its widespread distribution and luster mark plumbate as unique among contemporaneous wares. It is sometimes found alongside locally produced wares that bear superficial resemblances, leading to the belief that they are imitations of plumbate....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victor Thompson. Thomas Pluckhahn. Matt Colvin. Jacob Lulewicz. Brandon Ritchison.

Community making during the Woodland period in Eastern North America manifested itself in a variety of material forms, most notably in the wide distribution of elaborate artifacts dispersed as part of Hopewellian related exchange. In this paper, we examine the role that one particular class of artifact, plummets, played in community making during the Woodland period in Florida. Often interpreted as fishing gear, we suggest that instead such artifacts played a large role in community style dances...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jay Johnson. John Connaway.

Drawing primarily on data from the Carson Mound Group located in the Mississippi River floodplain of northwestern Mississippi, this paper considers the timing, duration, and nature of the substantial evidence for what appears to have been direct contact between the polity that centered on Cahokia and the people who built the mounds at Carson. Distinctive northern traits include raw material, lithic technology, projectile point styles, ceramics, and architecture. These traits appear for a very...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chris Webster. Tristan Boyle.

Archaeologists are increasingly collecting and storing archaeological data in a digital format. While a lot of time and effort has been spent on the HOW of digital information collection, little time has been spent on the other side - public outreach. An archaeologist's job is only half complete when the digital data are safely stored on multiple servers and in an archival format. If no one knows about it did it ever really matter? Podcasts are typically free and are accessible by everyone with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Linda Wheelbarger.

San Juan College field school excavations at Point Pueblo in Farmington, New Mexico, have revealed a great house with attached great kiva constructed of both local vernacular and stylized Chacoan Type II architecture. Extensive early southern influence, A.D. 850-1050, is based on the dominant presence of Red Mesa Black-on white pottery. The great kiva floors demonstrate a continuous ritual placement of artifacts subsequent to a major ritual remodeling event of the floor and roof support piers,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Steinberg.

The 9th century Norse settlement of Iceland resulted in a system of semi-territorial petty chiefdoms, with local and island-wide regular assemblies. The volcanic island was divided up into four quarters, each with three or four local assemblies. Farmers had to pledge their allegiance to one of the chiefs within their quarter, creating a patchwork of alliances. Farms themselves may also have been cobbled together from non-contiguous blocks which allowed access to different environmental...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nathan Meissner. Marc Marino. Emmalea Gomberg.

This study focuses on the social aspects of craft production among outlying populations of the greater Copán Valley of Honduras during the Late Classic to Early Postclassic transition (A.D. 800-1200). Lithic data from four valley sites including Rastrojón, Río Amarillo, Quebrada Piedras Negras, and Site 29 are compared to elucidate raw material procurement strategies and methods of chert reduction by local producers. Interesting differences emerge among the sites concerning changes in raw...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan deFrance.

The Moquegua Valley in southern Peru was the locale where the rival early imperial states of Wari and Tiwanaku established provincial colonial centers. Both Wari and Tiwanaku colonists concentrated their settlements in the low to mid-sierra elevations of the valley, elevations that are not modern zones of camelid husbandry. The political ecology of imperial settlement at this elevation fostered the development of local systems of camelid pastoralism that were significant economic components for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only J. Daniel Rogers.

By 200 B.C.E. the eastern steppe regions of Inner Asia saw the development of expansive and complex political systems usually referred to as empires. The origins of these polities and the processes of consolidation can be described within the concept of a political community, reflecting the actions of competing groups in expansive social network. For Inner Asia, community was linked to issues of mobility, dispersed control hierarchies, and the economics of multi-resource pastoralism. Together,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marieka Arksey.

This paper investigates the use of caves as performance spaces for water and agriculturally focused rituals during the Maya Late Classic period (~ A.D. 750-900) and the events of the 'collapse'. Although the ‘collapse’ of the social, economic, and political systems during this period has been the subject of much study, the majority of research has focused on the environmental factors with little consensus as to how rulers attempted to maintain order, social solidarity, and political power...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ann M. Scott. Judith Maxwell.

Caves and other sacred landscape features such as clefts in rocks and mountain voids embody special powers controlled by earthen, spiritual entities. To the Highland Maya that power personified by the earth owner needs to be maintained, appeased, and managed, even on a daily basis. This maintenance comes in the form of elaborate ceremonies utilizing a number of special items deemed suitable for pleasing the ancient entities. Mayan ritual specialists or daykeepers, who perform the ceremonies, are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Atiba Rougier.

Three kinds of post-mortem manipulations occur for three distinct reasons. They are connected by the need for authoritative power and the desire to be seen as strong. Selfish notions of self-preservation are manifested through governmental bodies in the name of freedom and evolution. The three kinds of post-mortem configuration can be categorized like this: (A) political ascension; (B) national or geographic control and domination; (C) reactive exclamations, usually performed by the powerless...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Baires.

Anthropocene: a hotly debated geological epoch entangled with climate change, the Industrial Revolution, and the perceived deleterious effect of humans on the natural world. A dialectic surrounds the Anthropocene because identifying this epoch, geologically, has real implications for global politics and the future of humanity in a changing global environment. Crossland (2014) suggests that to understand the palimpsest of global human action that resulted in the Anthropocene requires us to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Bracken.

Dissertation fieldwork since 2014 at Muralla de León has documented, mapped, and partially excavated an integrated system of earthworks that appears to have served both large-scale defensive and hydrological functions. Located on the shores of Lake Macanché, the site sits atop a steep-sided natural rise, artificially augmented in height by an encircling stone rampart wall, or enceinte. A defensive function for the enceinte is hypothesized, though it also appears to serve as a means of water...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Jones.

The University of Minnesota Duluth Project is working at al-Lajjun to understand the initial period of population aggregation in the southern Levant. At this time, settlements of 5-10,000 people, some with fortification walls, developed. The economic and political organization of these larger groups of people, whether hierarchical or heterarchical, competitive or cooperative, embedded in or separate from kin groups is under debate. Our research seeks to add to this discussion by detailing the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Courtney Lakevold. Jennifer Hallson.

The extraordinary preservation and narrow time frame (A.D. 1240-1290) for the occupation of Promontory Cave 1 on Great Salt Lake allow for unusual insights into the population and demography of its Promontory Culture inhabitants. We use two methods to determine population size. First, with accurate data on the habitable space in Cave 1, we calculate space needs per person from ethnographic accounts of Western North American hunter-gatherer groups in order to estimate likely group size. Second,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marcus Hamilton. Robert Walker.

Sublinear population-area scaling relations have been documented across a range of human societies, from hunter-gatherers to both ancient and modern cities. As such, these scaling patterns seem to capture a common statistical feature of human spatial ecology. In this talk we examine the spatial ecology of both recently-contacted and uncontacted groups in the Amazon Basin. Using a combination of census data, government estimates and imagery we find sublinear scaling between the size of villages...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claire Smith. Ines Domingo. Didac Roman. Gary Jackson.

The rock art of Doria Gudaluk (Beswick Creek Cave) in the Northern Territory of Australia provided a valuable lesson in the difficulties of interpretation without local knowledge. Now, newly recorded motifs at the site—some only visible through digital enhancement—highlight the dangers of relating stylistic changes to population replacement. When considered in the context of local history, developments in the rock art of Doria Gudaluk during the second half of the twentieth century can be...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Miller.

Abstract: Porcelain and White Salt Glazed Stoneware at Hanna’s Town Previous archaeological investigations at Hanna’s Town have involved locating the homes within the town and locating the fort. My research involves analyzing Porcelain and White Salt Glazed Stoneware to determine if there is a spatial pattern across the site. This may shed light on wealth distribution at historic Hanna’s Town. Detailed analysis of decorative motifs will also provide insight on trade patterns and economics...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Wagner. Kayleigh Sharp.

Illinois rock art studies conducted in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries typically used drawings, tracings, and print photography to record prehistoric petroglyphs and pictographs. These types of studies have been replaced in recent years by a variety of new methods including digital photography, DSTRETCH enhancement, photogrammetry, pXRF analysis, and other technologies. These new techniques have greatly enhanced our ability to quickly and accurately record rock art sites in comparison to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Castañeda. Charles Koenig. Karen Steelman. Marvin Rowe.

Painted pebbles are the primary mobiliary art found in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas and northern Mexico. Previous studies of these artifacts have focused on stylistic variation of the imagery and interpretation of the role these artifacts played within Lower Pecos societies. The focus of this study is the use of portable X-ray fluorescence on Lower Pecos painted pebbles to conduct elemental analyses, providing insight into the chaîne opératoire of painted pebble production....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Carlucci. Jianfeng Cui. Ling-Yu Hung.

The site of Dayatou is located on a terrace bluff in the Tao River Valley in Gansu province, Northwest China.In 2015, the Tao River Archaeological Project team conducted systematic collection across the surface of the bluff and recovered thousands of Majiayao culture potsherds. To identify the technology and provenances of these potsherds, in the 2016 field season we used a portable XRF in a handheld configuration to analyze the chemical elements of the black paint decorated on 124 selected...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Duelks. Jacob Jones. Steve Mozarowski. John Maxwell. Bryn Letham.

We present a relative sea level (RSL) curve for the Prince Rupert Harbour area for the last 15,000 years that is based on nearly 150 radiocarbon-dated data points. RSL dropped from at least 50 m asl to several m below current sea level immediately after deglaciation, before rising again to 4-6 m asl during the early Holocene. By 6000 years ago RSL had approached its current position, though there have been some late Holocene fluctuations. We used this RSL history in conjunction with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ian Armit. Lindsey Büster. Rick Schulting. Laura Castells Navarro. Jo Buckberry.

As liminal places between the above-ground world of daily experience and the underworld, caves form a persistent focus for human engagements with the supernatural. As such they have frequently been used as places for the dead, whether as final resting places or as places of transformation. Late Bronze Age human remains were recovered from the Sculptor’s Cave, on the Moray Firth in North-East Scotland, during the 1920s and 1970s. They suggest the curation and display of human bodies and body...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jess Beck.

Post-mortem manipulation of human remains played a critical role in mortuary practices in Copper Age Iberia (c. 3250-2200 BC). During this period in Spain and Portugal, individuals were buried communally in tholos-type tombs, as well as natural or artificial caves and rock shelters. Evidence from across Iberia suggests that mortuary practices included the manipulation and movement of previously interred bodies, either in order to clear space for new individuals, or to facilitate secondary...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bradford Andrews.

Analysis of the obsidian artifacts recovered from households in the city of Calixtlahuaca (AD 1130–1530) indicates that prismatic blade production was not a domestic affair. Furthermore, intensive survey did not reveal evidence of onsite blade workshops anywhere in the city. This finding is at odds with what has been reported for many other Postclassic urban centers. This paper discusses why the blade-core data are not consistent with onsite blade production. It then evaluates three models for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelsey Johnson. Heather McKillop. Bretton Somers.

Arvin’s Landing is a Postclassic (A.D. 900-1500) settlement located on Joe Taylor Creek near Punta Gorda in southern Belize. The abundance of obsidian in the artifact assemblage at Arvin’s Landing indicates trade from the Maya highland sources of obsidian. During the Classic period (A.D. 300-900), obsidian was transported along the coast and by inland routes to the Maya in the lowlands. There was a shift from a dominance on El Chayal obsidian in the Classic to Ixtepeque obsidian in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only M. Kathryn Brown. Carolyn Freiwald.

Ritual feasting as a practice by which sponsors create uneven social relations with other participants has been suggested to play an important role in establishing social hierarchies in many ancient societies including the ancient Maya. Feasting activities may have also been an important part of Preclassic communal building projects in the Maya lowlands. In this paper, we present data from Middle Preclassic special deposits associated with a series of early public platforms at the site of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ruth Maher. Robert Friel. Lindsey Kemp. Julie Bond. Stephen Dockrill.

Coastal erosion sites contain the same complexity as any other site; however, the sequences are often truncated and the recovery conditions require adaptive approaches. Although these sites are eroding, there is a need for equal rigor in their recording. The coastal erosion site at Swandro, Rousay, Orkney, has been recorded using a variety of georeferenced data sets. This paper examines the potential of micro-analysis of the 3-dimensional coordinate records of artifacts and geo-referenced...