Society for American Archaeology

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Netherly.

In the last 1000 years before the arrival of the Spanish in 1532, the expansionist states of the Andean region of Peru—like those of the Old World--appear to have grown incrementally, flourished briefly, and disappeared. Despite intensive study in the 1970’s and since, the inner structure and dynamics of Chimor have eluded archaeologists because there is limited information from European observers and because there are many questions archaeologists have not yet addressed. At its maximum, Chimor...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew LoBiondo.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Research on Glass Beads and Ornaments in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Scholarship has long recognized the significance of glass beads in postcolumbian North America. For northeastern Native Americans, beads were relationally entangled within sociopolitical relationships and the spiritual world. In the Mohawk Valley, bead types and colors have been useful temporal markers, but their social and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ian McNiven. John Bradley.

Archaeological approaches to stone-walled tidal fish traps of Indigenous Australians focus on the technology and subsistence, with chronological development linked to demands of increased food production associated with demographic change and social intensification. For the Yanyuwa ‘Saltwater People’ of tropical northern Australia, old stone-walled fish traps found within the intertidal zone are associated with the creative acts of ancestral spirit beings. As such, these fish traps are imbued...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michelle Bebber. Michael Wilson.

In biology the concept of theoretical morphology has been used as a heuristic device for better understanding the evolutionary trajectories of organisms. Theoretical morphology proceeds by creating and examining hypothetical specimens not actually found in nature. So instead of asking "why does feature X exist", a theoretical morphological approach asks "why doesn’t feature Y exist?". Here, we use this approach to address the question of why ceramic technology did not evolve to replace stone...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carlyn Stewart.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The underlying goal of Public Archaeology is to make archaeology accessible to the public in engaging ways that inspire meaningful connections to the people and places of the past. By presenting archaeological facts and theories in an interactive manner, it is more likely that the information not only sticks, but is also personal, thus inspiring a more active...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Shakour.

Public involvement and collaboration with communities are major concerns for archaeologists around the world. Community outreach efforts are major components of research projects and require an immense amount of resources. Further, different stakeholders have varied responses to those efforts. This paper uses data from the Cultural Landscapes of the Irish Coast (CLIC) project’s community outreach on Inishark and Inishbofin, County Galway, Ireland, islands five miles into the Atlantic Ocean. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anne Vawser.

This is an abstract from the "Openness & Sensitivity: Practical Concerns in Taking Archaeological Data Online" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We all want to be published and want our archeological research to be relevant, useful, and available to other archeologists, but in this digital age, it may be too easy to share, and too easy for sensitive site location information to end up in places that could cause irreparable harm to the archeology that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Byron Loosle. Ranel Capron.

Tribal officials suggest the National Historic Preservation Act should more appropriately be called the National Mitigation Act. For several years we worked to develop policy to direct more effort into identification of areas of cultural concern even before projects proposals were received. We advocated production of appositely designed projects to reduce the amount of adverse effects and mitigation. This effort included encouraging the use of the planning process to assemble data and add...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Harrod.

This is an abstract from the "Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Debra L. Martin" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dr. Debra Martin’s work has enhanced our understanding of how different forms of violent interaction are often culturally sanctioned in society. Her work has revealed the physical and social impact on individuals who sustained violence-related trauma. My scholarship continues her work, and explores the ways human skeletal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Costello.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists operate within a conflicted position in the commercial business of cultural heritage management. As collaborators with industry and as players within a state bureaucracy, they are beholden to regulations and complicit in the destruction of sites. While archaeologists aim to produce practical benefits for society in general, or at the very least,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Troy Lovata.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation examines how wickiups—light, compact wooden structures common across many times and places in the American Mountain West—reflect the conception and use of contemporary mountain landscapes. Landscape archaeology allows us to understand how people’s actions and experiences transform the physical environment from an abstract space to a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tatiana Niculescu.

This is an abstract from the "Seeing Migrant and Diaspora Communities Archaeologically: Beyond the Cultural Fixity/Fluidity Binary" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Historical archaeological investigations of Jewish diaspora sites have often heavily relied on faunal remains, particularly the presence or absence of pig remains, as a proxy for Jewishness. Keeping kosher is not the only relevant component of Jewish diasporic identities or even the only...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yutaka Tanaka.

In Japan, pottery of various regions was transported for long distances in different directions at the same time and was incorporated into local pottery assemblages from the late second to third centuries A.D. This happened prior to the appearance of the highly-standardized keyhole-shaped burial mounds all over Japan and, in western Japan, local adoption of the type of pottery typical of the Kinki region where the central polity emerged. In eastern Japan, the type of pottery under the influence...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Bustos. Matthew Bennett. Daniel Odess. Tommy Urban. Vance Holliday.

This is an abstract from the "The Paleoindian Southwest" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. White Sands National Monument (WHSA) is well known for the world’s largest gypsum dunefield, but the geological elements that created this dunefield also persevered one of the largest (in area and number) assemblages of human foot prints in the world. Tracks are revealed under specific moisture conditions, linked to near-surface geophysics. Human and megafauna...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Kessler. Greg Hodgins. Matthew Guebard. Lucas Hoedl.

This is an abstract from the "Constructing Chronologies I: Stratification and Correlation" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Most radiocarbon measurements informing Bayesian models of cultural sequences are obtained from short-lived organisms such as annual plants and animal bone. Short-lived organic material from plateaus in atmospheric 14C production have a calibrated error that corresponds to the duration of the plateau. This fact hinders Bayesian...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steven Ammerman.

This is an abstract from the "Cultivating Cities: Perspectives from the New and Old Worlds on Wild Foods, Agriculture, and Urban Subsistence Economies" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Urban settings are often imagined as fully domesticated landscapes, but in fact cities are complex ecosystems where many kinds of animals, including non-domesticates, play important roles. Textual evidence from the Early Historic period of South Asia gives us a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather McKillop.

A natural harbor, strategic location in the mouth of a navigable river and opposite the Paynes Creek salt works, Wild Cane Cay developed from a fishing village in the Early Classic (A.D. 300-600) to a major trading port from the Late Classic (A.D. 600-900) through the Postclassic (A.D. 900-1500). As skilled mariners, the Wild Cane Cay Maya were familiar with the shoals, storms, and other hazards of the sea, as well as the endless opportunities for travel on the sea. During the Classic period,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Haslam.

The known record of tool use in the human lineage now extends back 3.3 million years. For other animals, however, we have very few clues as to how and when their tool use behaviors evolved. Study of tool use among extant primates, in particular, offers an opportunity to develop comparative models and analogies for human technologies. Here, I present the results of recent archaeological investigations into stone pounding behavior by wild bearded capuchin monkeys (Sapajus libidinosus) in Brazil....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Traci Ardren.

This is an abstract from the "Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Academic reconstructions of south Florida Indigenous lifeways prior to European contact have focused primarily on the deliberate choice of these highly complex societies to rely exclusively on wild foods, even while corn agriculture was practiced in nearby parts of the peninsula....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nerissa Russell.

One of the classic ways the nature/culture dichotomy manifests itself in human interactions with the environment is through the categories of wild and domestic. Some have argued that this distinction is not helpful, and certainly the boundaries are complicated, but it seems most useful to start by asking whether it was meaningful to particular people in the past. Here I will explore whether wild and domestic were relevant concepts to the inhabitants of Çatalhöyük (Central Anatolia), and to some...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marion Coe.

Perishable artifact analysis in the Great Basin has often focused on whole or complete pieces to address questions regarding broad social groupings and environmental adaptation. In the Great Basin, past populations targeted distinct ecological zones to tend and gather wild plant species for the manufacture of perishable material culture, and by focusing on technological organization and the manufacturing process, there is great potential to better understand how these activities contributed to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nadia Johnson.

In 1570, 50 years after the conquest of Mexico, King Philip II of Spain sent one of his court physicians, Francisco Hernández de Toledo, to the new colony. The goal of this venture was to compile a detailed account of the natural history of New Spain, emphasizing indigenous medicine and the uses of local plant, animal, and mineral resources. The result of his efforts was a series of volumes, describing in detail the virtues of local Mexican resources, and his own observations of Mexico. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gustavo Neme. Adolfo Gil. Miguel Giardina. Clara Otaola.

Southern Mendoza region has been considered the meridional boundary of South American farmers, which arrive at this region ca 2000 years BP. At the time of the Spanish arrival, there was coexistence among north Patagonian hunter gatherers and southern Andean farmers along Atuel and Diamante basins. However the real impact of the first domesticates (corn, squash, quinoa and beans) as well as how their latitudinal distribution could vary through time are still on debate. Different lines of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leilani Lucas.

Recent research from both the island and the mainland Near East have changed what we know of the timing and dynamics of the spread of agriculture to Cyprus. The timing of the arrival of the initial explorers and colonists by late Pre-Pottery Neolithic A cultures of the mainland Levant, and the dynamics of cultural developments in subsequent cultural phases is providing further support for the unique Cypriot prehistoric culture. One aspect that has long characterised Cyprus in prehistory is the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lawrence Todd. Daniel Dalmas.

This is an abstract from the "A Further Discussion on the Role of Archaeology in Resource and Public Land Management" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since 2002 the Greybull River Sustainable Landscape Ecology (GRSLE) project has undertaken an artifact-based, landscape-scale inventory in the eastern Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, on the Shoshone National Forest in NW Wyoming. Much of the project has been conducted in the Washakie Wilderness and has...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Cromartie. Chéïma Barhoumi. Guillemette Ménot. Erwan Messager. Sébastien Joannin.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Humans today and in the past have to contend with the impacts of wildland fires. In grasslands, these fires occur frequently at annual to decadal scale. In the Kasakh valley, Armenia, recent research has revealed periods of increased fire activity during the Early Bronze and Late Iron Age and decreased activity in the Middle and Late Bronze Age (Cromartie et...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anastasia Steffen. Rachel Loehman.

Recent wildland fires of western North America are occurring in some landscapes at intensities, severities, and extents that are far outside the historical record. These fires and their ecological and social consequences are highly-reported, and there is emerging awareness of the potential for large and severe wildfires to alter or destroy cultural legacies in fire-prone landscapes. Contemporary anthropogenic land use and management have contributed to altered wildfire regimes, but this can be...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Magdalena Schmid. Fiona Petchey.

This is an abstract from the "Constructing Chronologies II: The Big Picture with Bayes and Beyond" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Demography is a key factor in investigating the relationships between population levels, along with resource availability, environmental dynamics, social organization, and mobility. Prehistoric human activities and population levels can be modeled using summed probability distributions of calibrated radiocarbon dates...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Agata Kostrzewa.

Could shorter legs mean premature death? Stature is a highly complex trait which seems to be influenced by many different factors. To name a few; genetics, social status, through to environment, diet or health issues. However, it has been observed for some time that taller people live longer. For the purpose of current research, data from 10 multi-period sites were collected. The main focus of project is to explore the correlations between height and age-at-death. Additional to this, as it is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Florencia Pezzutti. Naomi Brandenfels. Austin Pratt.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Willamette Valley Projects (WVP) has been partnering with Colorado State University Center for Environmental Management of Military Lands (CEMML) to create a GIS database of historic properties on the WVP lands, which include the Willamette River Basin 13 dams and their associated lakes or reservoirs. Existing USACE documentation exists from all phases of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Sears.

As both space and material are used to create interpretations or infer ancient ritual meanings concerning the Late Classic Maya, the consideration of caves and ceramic figurines provide interesting comparators as they evoke restrictions of intent and imagery within a regional setting. Opportunistic sampling of figurines from cave contexts for compositional analysis has resulted in chemically-based patterns from which one can glimpse directional patterns of movement from resource area to recovery...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joel Gunn. Lynda Florey Folan.

This is an abstract from the "A Session in Memory of William J. Folan: Cities, Settlement, and Climate" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We recall the moment that William J. Folan was struck by the Climate Fascination. In 1978 he had a visiting professorship at the University of Texas at San Antonio and we were sharing an office. He suggested that JDG should do an article on Maya Lowlands climate change. JDG responded that Willie was the expert who...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Dewhirst.

This is an abstract from the "A Session in Memory of William J. Folan: Cities, Settlement, and Climate" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although most recognize William Folan’s contributions to Mayan archaeology, his early career was devoted to significant national heritage projects in Canada. From 1965 to 1972, Willie carried out two unprecedented large archaeological projects for Parks Canada. It was a ground-breaking time in Canadian archaeology,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Allan Cobb. Jeremy Coltman.

Among the hundreds of caves I have observed in the Maya area a number stand out in possessing relatively large tunnel systems with restrictions near the entrances. When air is driven from the caves due to atmospheric pressure, the restrictions create a fast moving flow of air that is quite noticeable around the entrance to the cave. Ethnographic evidence suggests that modern Maya are quite aware of such air movements. Because rain was closely associated with caves among the ancient Maya and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Vivian.

Chaco Matters because Windes Matters. There are few subjects in Chacoan prehistory for which Tom has not contributed thoughtful analysis - from ants to Zuni spotted chert. His insights regarding agriculture in the Chaco Core are basic to understanding the long history of farming in this area. Some of those insights are reviewed. SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wendy Bustard. Dabney Ford.

Documenting field work has been standard archaeological practice for over a century. Long-term preservation and continuing use of those records has been less standard. Tom Windes’ documentary record of his work in Chaco Canyon is an example of what best practices can achieve. In particular, Windes developed a style of mapping archaeological sites that has proved invaluable in relocating, monitoring, and maintaining Chaco’s World Heritage resources. Standards for archaeological site documentation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Ives.

Supported by the U.S. National Park Service’s Historic Preservation Fund Program, the Rhode Island Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission administered surveys of coastal archaeological sites damaged by Hurricane Sandy in Rhode Island. This paper considers, from a management perspective, some of the unique constraints and challenges of this work, including incomplete property access, bureaucratic delays, and a Tribal collaboration that fell short. The insights provided by this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Györgyi Parditka.

The transition from Middle to Late Bronze Age in the Carpathian Basin encompassed a broad range of changes in material culture, settlement, and societal organization. This transition is traditionally seen as a short, war-ridden horizon reflecting the arrival of the Tumulus culture population. Recent research, however, emphasizes the complexity of these transformations, and suggests a longer, less abrupt transition, in which existing Middle Bronze Age populations play a significant role in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eleanora Reber.

Nahal Tillah is an Early Bronze I site in the Southern Levant with evidence for a strong Egyptian trade presence. Twenty-eight sherds from four different vessel types underwent absorbed pottery residue analysis to identify possible traded resources and to confirm vessel functions. Although wine and olive oil are believed to be the major trade resources in the region, wax was an unexpectedly important resource in the pottery sampled, particularly among the Southern Levantine styled jars. SAA...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Magdalena Antczak. Andrzej T. Antczak.

Drawing from archaeology, zooarchaeology, ethnohistory, ethnology, and avian biogeography, this paper aims at (re)constructing the interrelations between indigenous peoples and birds in north-central Venezuela, between AD 1000 and 1500. Amerindian narratives and premises of perspectival ontology from the South American Lowlands suggest that certain birds were more closely interrelated with humans then other beings. The analyses of nearly 3000 avian bone remains recovered in six late Ceramic Age...

DOCUMENT Citation Only François Lanoë. Pierre Desrosiers. Dominique Marguerie. Daniel Gendron.

The site of Kangiakallak-1 (JeGn-2 – AKU-10-018), located near Akulivik (Nunavik, Québec), has yielded several occupations attributed to the Dorset and Thule periods. Level A corresponds to a Thulean winter house for which collapse and preservation in permafrost provides an excellent and undisturbed record of Thulean lifeway. This paper presents the results of a faunal analysis conducted on animal remains found within the Level A house. The dominant species recovered were caribou Rangifer...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robin Cordero.

This is an abstract from the "Birds in Archaeology: New Approaches to Understanding the Diverse Roles of Birds in the Past" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Garden hunting is a topic that has received substantial attention in archaeofaunal research over the past 30 years. However, these studies have tended to focus on hunting in active gardens during the growing season, or in fallow fields. Consequently, these past studies have often focused on the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Igor Chechushkov.

The case study comes from the southern Urals, Russia. Since 1970’s the walled settlements of the Sintashta archaeological culture (2000-1700 BC) have been interpreted as the fortified towns and centers of social life for the religious and war leaders of the local communities. However, settlements’ primary locations on the bottoms of the rivers’ valleys, as well as lack of other evidence for the warfare, cause doubts about such interpretation. Analysis of natural environments (e.g., local wind,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Green. Roland Rodell.

The social and political ferment of the Progressive Era (1890s-1920s) was associated with a golden age in Wisconsin archaeology for avocationals and professionals alike. In 1901, a group of archaeological enthusiasts led by Charles E. Brown founded the Archeological Section of the Wisconsin Natural History Society. The Section soon became the independent Wisconsin Archeological Society (WAS). Its promotion of the “scientific and educational value” of archaeology was meant to engage “scientists,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeb Card.

Egyptologist and Folklorist Margaret Murray was a major figure in the creation of professional archaeology in the United Kingdom, President of the Folklore Society, and advocate for women’s rights in higher education. However, another major part of her legacy was the mainstream acceptance of the concept of the "witch-cult," a hidden ancient religion dating back to the Pleistocene but continuing until at least the seventeenth century when it was persecuted by witch-hunters. Historians have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carla Hernandez Garavito.

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. In 1660, Francisca Melchora, widow of the lord of the Huarochirí people in the Viceroyalty of Peru, became immersed in a witchcraft criminal case. However, she was not accused of being a witch herself, but instead of hiding accused women and resisting a Spanish lieutenant sent to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Evelyn Billo. Robert Mark. Kelley Hays-Gilpin.

This is an abstract from the "The Art and Archaeology of the West: Papers in Honor of Lawrence L. Loendorf" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A Navajo prayer ends: "with beauty all around, may I walk." Canyon de Chelly National Monument in the heart of Navajo country presented Larry Loendorf, then Professor at New Mexico State University, and his rock art recording crew with beauty in the alcoves, on the cliffs, and with every landscape view. Canyons...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sturt Manning.

This is an abstract from the "Constructing Chronologies II: The Big Picture with Bayes and Beyond" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent years have seen major developments in accuracy and precision for several aspects of radiocarbon dating. There is a new annual-resolution (last 5K) Northern Hemisphere calibration curve, increased focus on sample selection and processing (chronometric hygiene), and widespread application of sophisticated Bayesian...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maxine Oland. Debra Walker.

Chetumal Bay had political and economic importance for local Maya populations for more than 2000 years. When the Spaniards entered the region in the 16th century, they settled near its political capital and attempted to incorporate it into a larger colonial world system, only to be met with wide-scale resistance. This paper examines the shifting dynamics of the Chetumal Bay territory, from the Preclassic through Postclassic-Colonial Periods, with perspectives drawn from Cerros and Progresso...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Céline Lamb. Scott R. Hutson.

Long-standing research at sites like Cerén exemplifies the increased interest in rural households and settlements and the shift away from the elite-centric nature of many earlier projects in Maya archaeology. Our expanding knowledge of ancient Maya hinterlands has allowed us to consider the heterogeneity that these smaller settlements displayed and revise our western binary perspective of "urban versus rural". Recent investigations by members of the Ucí-Cansahcab Regional Integration Project...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elaine Jamieson.

Medieval motte castles are large flat-topped earth and stone mounds, often coupled with an enclosure or bailey, and represent a characteristic component of the British landscape. Mottes often dominate their immediate surroundings, with many remaining visually impressive monuments to this day. Although their creation often involved substantial landscape change, it is becoming increasingly clear that continuity could also be maintained. Many mottes were placed at points in the landscape with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Wheeler.

In the spring of 1989 Jerry Kennedy hired me to conduct fieldwork for the first archaeological reconnaissance survey of Palm Beach County. I drove around the county in Florida Atlantic University’s late 1980s model Ford Taurus wagon with a list from the Florida Master Site File, attempting to revisit as many sites as possible. The station wagon endured a fair bit of off road driving, including an excursion into the South Florida Water Management District’s newly establish DuPuis Environmental...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julia Morris. Severin Fowles.

The nomadic tribes of the Plains—notably, the Comanche and Apache—are typically considered the main obstacles to the northern expansion of the Spanish empire in North America. But early Spanish settlers in New Mexico found themselves up against another formidable foe that has received far less attention in the literature: the wolf. Indeed, for an expanding pastoral society, the wolf posed perhaps the biggest threat to local economic welfare. In this paper, we report on the recent discovery of a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ora Elquist.

Locus 3 of the Strow’s Folly Site (19-PL-1161) in Wareham, Massachusetts represents a small, temporary camp. Archaeological investigations at the site resulted in the recovery of an unusual artifact assemblage believed to be associated with a single component dating to the Middle Woodland Period. Evidence for hunting was notably absent, and the presence of processing tools and relatively dense deposits of ceramics indicate that women were present at the site. Domestic activities associated with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claudia Garcia-Des Lauriers.

This is an abstract from the "The Role of Women in Mesoamerican Ritual" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Teotihuacan is a complex multiethnic urban metropolis whose history is slowly becoming more nuanced after more than 100 years of research. Despite the recent attention that this Mesoamerican city has received, we still have many questions, among them, about the role of women, their life histories, their identities, and their role in the ritual...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Baustian. Claira Ralston. Maryann Calleja. Debra Martin.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. When examining violence in archaeological contexts, the roles of females have often been undertheorized or omitted completely. Violence research is quick to identify males as warriors and aggressors but women should not be ignored as actors in past violence. Our perception and interpretation of females as actively engaged in violent interactions in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bailey Raab. Dana Bardolph.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As Patricia Galloway aptly observed in her 1998 paper, “Where Have all the Menstrual Huts Gone?”, menstruation is rarely discussed in archaeological literature. Recent research in the Ohio River Valley has brought renewed interest to these ‘invisible’ spaces, attempting to identify potential menstrual structures in the archaeological record. It was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Witcher. Emily Hanscam.

This is an abstract from the "Documenting Demographics in Archaeological Publications and Grants" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recently, some academic archaeology journals have evaluated the gender distribution of authors, often finding female contributors underrepresented. *Antiquity is a journal of world archaeology with submissions from authors of many nationalities; however, we lacked data on the gender of our authors. We therefore analyzed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer French.

Demography has re-emerged as a growing research area within archaeology. Recent studies have refined archaeological demographic methods and developed models which cite demographic change as a key variable in explaining social and artefactual change. However, one aspect which has not been explicitly acknowledged is how archaeological demography is intrinsically concerned with women. In this paper I explain the importance of women to the demographic regimes of small-scale societies and discuss...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Akin Ogundiran.

This is an abstract from the "Essential Contributions from African to Global Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Women’s work and administrative leadership were essential to the running of the Oyo Empire (ca. AD 1570–1836). As wives, mothers, sisters, daughters, enslaved and free bureaucrats, traders, artisans, and laborers, women played a wide range of roles in palace administration and in financing and reproducing the state (materially...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Al Schwitalla. Marin Pilloud. Terry Jones.

This is an abstract from the "Women of Violence: Warriors, Aggressors, and Perpetrators of Violence" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Participation of females in inter-group combat is well-attested in the historic and ethnographic record of central California, but is often overlooked and/or trivialized in contemporary archaeological research. Drawing from the Central California Bioarchaeological Database (CCBD) that includes information on more than...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Helen Alderson.

In Oceania, archaeologists have examined perishable ethnographic items to gain fresh insights into past people’s identities. This paper presents a new analysis of 19th and 20th century Micronesian loincloths from European and American museums, explaining how their construction offers insights into islanders’ socio-political identities during a period of rapidly intensifying global interconnectivity. On the island Kosrae, Micronesia, tol (loincloths) were the primary garment of every polity...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elena Mazzetto.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper aims to study the role played by female characters presented in the Mexica and Inca religious hierarchy in a comparative perspective. In first case, we mention the cihuamocexiuhzauhque, the "women who fast for a year," (Mazzetto 2017, 2020) while in the second we refer to the acllacuna. The activities carried out by these ritual specialists...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Chamberlin.

Katherine Spielmann's work in the Salinas Pueblo area of New Mexico has, among other things, emphasized how ritual and economic interconnectivity among late prehistoric pueblo villages articulates with internal social and cultural changes. One thread of this work, developed by several of her students, has been change in gender relations during the rise of the large towns of the Pueblo IV period (AD 1400–1600), especially involving women's roles in exchange, production, and ceremonial life....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacob Lulewicz. Lynne Sullivan.

This is an abstract from the "Kin, Clan, and House: Social Relatedness in the Archaeology of North American Societies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mississippian societies were undoubtedly underwritten by networks of kin, clan, and other social relationships that are difficult to discern in the archaeological record. Structures of social networks provide contexts for social, political, and economic institutions and serve as conduits through...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Juliette Testard.

Recent strontium analyses have revealed that many women buried in the Feathered Serpent Pyramid in Teotihuacan changed their environment at least two times during their lifetime. This suggests that their role, especially in cultural interactions, was particularly important, an hypothesis already presented by Gillespie and Joyce (1997) for maya societies. An iconographic study of mural painting, figurines and sculptures from Cacaxtla-Xochitecatl and Xochicalco, two epiclassic cities well known...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shankari Patel.

This paper queries models of Mesoamerican fertility that define women’s social roles in terms of dependency, and interrogates narratives that link gender relations to nature where they are beyond critique. The problem with the category women is that it is often thought of as an ahistorical and eternal facet of biology hidden within an implicit model of human nature. Biology becomes a metaphor for social relations and wifehood or motherhood is then characterized as a relation of dependency...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erica Hill.

Moche iconography depicts women in ritual roles as priestesses, objects of sacrifice, and possibly as deities; however, the roles of ordinary women have received much less attention from archaeologists. This paper explores the nature of women’s power in Moche society as represented in iconography and as inferred from bioarchaeological data, contrasting the roles of women in elite and non-elite contexts. With the exception of elite women performing rituals, Moche ideology inextricably linked...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charles Cheek.

This is an abstract from the "The Role of Women in Mesoamerican Ritual" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dress is an important way people interact with others. Modern concepts of dress include the entire body and how people adorn or change it. Maya rituals use specific sets of dress elements to convey not only what is happening but also to ensure the ritual was done correctly. After a brief review of women’s dress, I identify dress in ritual and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fabiola Sanchez. Joel Palka. Joshué Lozada.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Representations of hands in rock art is a polysemy motif registered among different archaeological sites in Chiapas, Mexico. Painted hands are a recurrent representation in the cliffs of Mensabak Lake in the Lacandon Rainforest, where these paintings were made by both positive and negative techniques. This paper will discuss the semantics of hand...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Teresa Raczek. Namita Sugandhi.

Rita Wright’s transformative work on gender and women’s labor in West, Central, and South Asia provided an important framework for the archaeological study of craft production and the organization of labor. This interrogation of gendered practice was complemented by a parallel investigation of equity in academic archaeology, particularly through the work of the SAA’s Committee on the Status of Women in Archaeology. In addition to her research and professional service, another significant...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patrycja Przadka-Giersz.

The second half of the first millennium A.D. witnessed some significant changes in gender roles and traditions in the Andes. The discovery of the first undisturbed burial context of fifty-eight noblewomen with hundreds of precious artifacts found at Castillo de Huarmey provides important evidence about women and their roles played in ancient society in the Wari Empire. The amount and the richness of the luxury and prestige items, which comprise hundreds of objects of the most diversified types,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Juliana Machado. Jozileia Daniza Kaingang.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The aim of this paper is to contribute to a still scarce reflection on the practices, their effects and meanings, of women within indigenous and traditional societies in their territorial processes, from interdisciplinary and collaborative perspectives. This research is sought to consolidate an already existing network of collaboration between historians,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandra Greenwald.

This is an abstract from the "Life Is Risky: Human Behavioral Ecological Approaches to Variable Outcomes " session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Population growth during the Medieval Climatic Anomaly (MCA) (1100–600 BP) and into the Late period (~600–180 BP) in Central California drove increased intensification and reliance on low-ranking, low-risk food sources, primarily acorn and small seeds inland, and shellfish and small schooling fish on the bay...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julia King.

How does one go about using legacy archaeological collections – or any archaeological collection, for that matter – for research? The prospect can be daunting, especially if you are staring down dozens of dusty boxes on shelves. This paper offers direction for studying even the most untamed collection by understanding it as a type of secondary data – lessons learned while working with legacy collections from the Potomac and Rappahannock river valleys in Maryland and Virginia. Secondary data, a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Clay.

As a circum-Caribbean, non-island space on the coast of northeastern South America, French Guiana presents a distinct context in which to explore plantation slavery and Caribbean commodity production. The "sugar revolution" that overtook areas of the Caribbean at various historical moments reached French Guiana during the nineteenth century, yet monocultural production of the crop never took hold. Instead, plantations producing a variety of agricultural commodities including cotton, coffee,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chloe Atwater. Jan de Vynck. Alastair Potts. Jayne Wilkins. Kim Hill.

Wood is an essential resource for hunter-gatherers. It is necessary for cooking fuel, heat, and potentially safety, and hence influences site location choice and group size. Due to a low diversity and abundance of trees, wood may have been a limited resource for early humans in the Cape Floral Region (CFR) of South Africa. Drawing from behavior ecology foraging models, experiments with modern wood foragers were conducted to test this hypothesis. Foragers were observed collecting indigenous wood...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marion Coe. Joshua Keene.

Charcoal identification is a crucial part of proper AMS dating archaeological sites, particularly in the Great Basin and Snake River Plain, where issues of old wood and root contamination can yield inaccurate dates. In addition to fuel, humans in the Great Basin and Snake River Plain have used wood from trees and large shrubs to construct spear and arrow shafts, bows, digging sticks, cradleboards, baskets, promontory pegs, and a variety of other artifacts. Wood identification is also...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Phyllis Kolianos.

Almost 120 years has passed since Frank Hamilton Cushing recovered hundreds of wood artifacts from a peaty muck lagoon at Key Marco, Florida. Relatively few of these extraordinary, fragile wood specimens remain in existence today due to difficulties with excavation and preservation methods in the late 1800s. In 2001, at Weedon Island Preserve, another mangrove peat saltwater site was discovered containing an ancient waterlogged canoe and pole. The salvage of Florida’s longest and only maritime...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Vaclav Hrncir.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There is a popular idea that archaic humans commonly used wooden clubs as their weapons. This is not based on archaeological finds, which are minimal from the Pleistocene, but rather on a few ethnographic analogies and the association of this weapon with simple technology. This paper presents the first quantitative cross-cultural analysis of the use of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Margarita Mancilla Medina. Laura Angélica Ortíz Tenorio. Mirsa Alejandra Islas Orozco.

The excavation of the Great Temple, one of the most important precincts in Mexica society, began more than thirty years ago. Since then, the examination of thousands of artifacts and organic materials has greatly increased our knowledge about Mexica cosmovision. During its seventh field season, the Templo Mayor Project has excavated thirty-six offerings. The flooded context of these oblatory deposits enabled the conservation of various organic materials that commonly degrade with the passage of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Darvill.

This is an abstract from the "Monumental Surveys: New Insights from Landscape-Scale Geophysics" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Circles, variously of wood and stone, are a major feature of the ceremonial centres dating to the third and early second millennia BC in northwest Europe. Some, such as Stonehenge, are very well known and complicated in their design and layout. Many others are more modest in scale and form. Geophysical surveys and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edward Fleming.

This is an abstract from the "Interactions across the North American Midcontinent" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Saint Croix River is a major tributary to the Upper Mississippi River and forms a boundary between eastern Minnesota and northwestern Wisconsin. Flowing southward out of northwestern Wisconsin and entering the Mississippi near the Twin Cities, this 170-mile, north–south valley offered a passageway connecting communities of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amelia Jansen. Martin Walker. Heather Woods. Alexander Craib. Anita Lehew.

The Topper Site (38AL23) is a multi-component prehistoric site located along the eastern bank of the Savannah River in South Carolina. The focus of ongoing University of Tennessee, Knoxville excavations at the Topper Site are the extensive Woodland and Mississippian occupations that have until recently gone unexamined. To date, two block excavations and a dispersed 1x1m unit survey have been completed to better define these later occupations. Excavations have also resulted in the mapping,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charlie Harper. Daniel M. Seinfeld.

The Letchworth Mounds site (8JE337), located near Tallahassee in Jefferson County, Florida, is a predominately Woodland period site that encompasses the largest earth mound in Florida. In addition to this monumental earthwork, a number of smaller mounds survive and it is thought that as many as 20 mounds may have been lost to modern land use. During the summer of 2014, the Florida Bureau of Archaeological Research and the Florida State University conducted a field school at the Letchworth Mounds...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Connie Randall. Meagan Dennison. Jay Franklin. Bruce Manzano. Renee Walker.

This paper describes the species diversity and taphonomic modifications of Woodland Period fauna from Upper East Tennessee. Fauna from both rock shelter and open-air locales from the Early Woodland (ca. 3000 years B.P.) to the Late Woodland (ca. 1000 years B.P.) period are used to characterize subsistence practices and site use in the region. In this paper, we present the MNI, NISP and measures of diversity, richness, and evenness of different animal species identified in the faunal assemblages...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Everhart.

The Caldwell Mound was a prehistoric conical mound located in the central Scioto River Valley, in modern-day Ross County, Ohio. Excavated by prominent amateur archaeologist, Donald McBeth in 1942, the Caldwell mound revealed a unique, if detailed funerary complex. Yet, these results remained largely unpublished. Exhibiting characteristics historically considered "Adena" and "Hopewell", the Caldwell mound presents either a call to update local cultural systematics or adds data speaking to a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Haas.

This is an abstract from the "Histories of Human-Nature Interactions: Use, Management, and Consumption of Plants in Extreme Environments" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper implements a multiproxy approach to Woodland foodways, integrating plant macrobotanical studies, faunal analyses, ceramic morphological and use-wear analyses, and absorbed residue analyses. Datasets from southeastern Wisconsin and the surrounding region highlight...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Lipe. RG Matson.

For the past decade Tom Windes and his volunteer band of merry beamsters--the Woodrats-- have been collecting dendrochronological samples from cliff dwellings in the Natural Bridges and Cedar Mesa areas of southeastern Utah. As a result, the number of dated sites has increased dramatically, and it has become clear that in the AD 1200s, building in these canyons declined before the onset of the "great drought" of 1276-1299. The meticulous maps and records made by the Woodrats also enable...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zachary Cooper. Damien Marken. Douglas Perez.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2016, a 91 square kilometer lidar survey was completed of the region surrounding the Classic Maya center of El Peru-Waka’, as part of the PACUNAM LiDAR Initiative. Visual analysis was then conducted from 2017-2018 by members of the Waka’ Archaeological Project (PAW) to identify new and previously recorded structures and other settlement features visible in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alicia Beat.

This is an abstract from the "Outreach and Education: Examples of Approaches and Strategies from the Pacific Northwest" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation will discuss the Colville National Forest Heritage Program’s collaboration with the Kalispel Tribe of Indians Language School on the reimagining of the Pioneer Park Heritage Interpretive Trail. The trail was constructed in the mid-1990s as mitigation for construction of a forest...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Inge Særheim.

Place-names are important sources to understand and reimagine past conceptions of the landscape. Toponyms map animal lives on to the landscape. In some cases, however, words for animals – wild as well as domestic – are used as metaphors. In some names denoting sunken rocks along the Norwegian coast, e.g. Sugga (’sow’), Oksa (‘bull’), Hesten (’horse’), Porthunden (‘watchdog’), the words either refer to the shape or sound of the locations, or to some special circumstances, e.g. dangerous rocks in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marco Meniketti.

Industrial design can increase labor management and mobility, increase efficiency, and structure worker behavior. As the industrial period evolved during the eighteenth century experiments in factory layouts produced efficient modes of production. But when the labor is enslaved, efficiency may not always be defined in terms of time or cost. This paper presents the industrial foot-print and spatial design of factories at several sugar plantations spanning over two centuries of operation on a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carlos Lazcano Arce. Marianne Sallum.

During the Epiclassic Period (650-950 CE) was the peak of Xochitecatl-Cacaxtla. It became the most important center in the Puebla-Tlaxcala Valley. There were numerous small groups who vied for a place in the landscape after the fall of Teotihuacan in the central highlands. There was a clear hierarchical division, as the society was formed by the elite, priests, and groups of peasants. The artisans were different specialists whose work allowed for the biological and social reproduction of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jason Kennedy.

This is an abstract from the "Raise Your Glass to the Past: An Exploration of the Archaeology of Beer" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeology of beer has received significant attention in the last three decades. However, many studies focus on the special role that beer played in sumptuous prestige feasts and for conducting commensal politics with an emphasis on elite motivations. In this paper, I view the production of beer as a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeffrey Blomster. Victor Salazar Chávez.

This is an abstract from the "Cholula to Chachoapan: Celebrating the Career of Michael Lind" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Large felines play crucial roles in origin narratives, cosmologies, and political authority in Mesoamerican societies, yet actual faunal remains and feline imagery are uncommon for the Early Horizon, from 1400 to 1000 cal BCE, especially in the highlands. Feline imagery appears in the stone sculptural corpus of the Gulf Olmec...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Loretta Dibble.

A detailed study of the variation in Holocene worked bone harpoons from the Lake Turkana/Omo Basin (Northern Kenya/Southwest Ethiopia) has been conducted. Bone harpoon sites in this basin span a more than 6,000 year period (approximately 9,000 or 10,000 bp through 3,000 bp). A review of the dates associated with these archaeological assemblages (and the dating of sedimentary features correlated with the changing lake levels in the basin) is presented along with new dates 00000000and new material...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rosemary Sucec.

The most challenging work begins with federal management of these "historic properties." The term belies that TCPs are managed not only for their physical integrity, but for their intangible, associative values vital to maintaining the contemporary identities of indigenous and other traditional communities. Consequently, rather than merely relying on determinations by agency professionals of issues related to boundaries, integrity, adverse/cumulative effects and mitigation, it becomes imperative...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lise Truex.

To test the value of the neighborhood concept in archaeological practice, this paper relies on a model of socioeconomically diverse, urban Mesopotamian neighborhoods and tests the model by analyzing households within a neighborhood at Tell Asmar, Iraq. Tell Asmar became one of several major urban settlements in the Diyala River region, with occupation of the site extending back into late prehistory. The dataset comprises a subset of archaeological evidence recovered from the Tell Asmar Northern...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Latham.

The use of dogs to pull or carry loads is well documented in the recent and historic past, but the origins of these working relationships are not well understood. Although it is likely that humans utilized dogs for transport activities in the prehistoric period, there is no clear archaeological evidence of dog transport until the historic era. Some archaeologists have suggested that pulling or carrying loads leaves unique signatures of stress on the skeletons of dogs. The use of skeletal...