Society for American Archaeology

DOCUMENT Citation Only Davide Zori.

Viking Archaeology, conceived of here as a particularly influential subfield of medieval archaeology, originated in antiquarian efforts of early Scandinavian scholars who helped to shape the identities of their nation states. From C.J. Thomson, to Jens Worsae, and Oscar Montelius, these early Scandinavian archaeologists were formative in the establishment of a periodization of the past, development of dating techniques, and the professionalization of archaeology as a discipline. The Viking Age...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Konnie Wescott. Jenn Abplanalp. Lee Walston. Emily Zvolanek. Conner Wiktorowicz.

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. In response to a recent shift toward a regional landscape-scale approach to resource management on public lands, Argonne National Laboratory in collaboration with multiple federal agencies developed a cultural heritage values and risk assessment strategy to support interagency land-use planning in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandra Jamieson. Greger Larson.

This is an abstract from the "HumAnE Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mountain hares today can be found from Scandinavia to Eastern Russia with isolated populations in Ireland, Scotland and the Alps. While their modern distribution is well understood, the extent of their past range and interactions with humans remains unknown. The primary aim of my research is to assess the natural and human-aided distribution of mountain hares across...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Cohen.

Regime change is a social process that has occurred throughout human history and yet much is still unknown about how political developments shape local communities. This paper examines the impacts of the Late Postclassic (1350-1530 CE) Purépecha Empire on residents at Angamuco, an ancient city within the Lake Pátzcuaro Basin imperial heartland in Michoacán, Mexico. Imperial narratives in ethnohistoric texts emphasize that authorities controlled craft production, tribute, and social practices....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marley Brown.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Thirty-five years of very active advocacy of the importance of the archaeological record of Bermuda, England’s second and oldest continuing New World colony, has had little or no effect. Unlike many places in the world, which have embraced the scholarly significance of historical archaeology only within the past two decades, Bermuda continues to ignore...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Peresolak.

The Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR) manages over two million acres of state land. Forbes State Forest, located in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, is home to numerous cultural resources, including the Morrow Jones cabin. Given its location on state-owned property, neglect and natural decay are greater threats to this historic house than development, yet DCNR has limited funding and a finite amount of time to devote to such resources. Detailed study of this house...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ani St. Amand. Daniel Sandweiss. Alice Kelley.

Los Morteros is a preceramic mound located on the North Coast of Peru composed of anthropogenic structures interlayered with aeolian deposits. A study combing multidisciplinary approaches and methodologies was used to evaluate the hypothesis of mound construction through intentional aeolian sand deposition via manipulation of strong winds across the desert environment. Wind velocities were measured across the site and in the surrounding valley. A complex wind model was created utilizing these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniela Raillard Arias.

This is an abstract from the "Adventures in Spatial Archaeometry: A Survey of Recent High-Resolution Survey and Measurement Applications" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For centuries, Indigenous Andean communities known as the Chachapoya placed their ancestral dead in aboveground architecture across the landscape of the Amazonian Andes, in what is now northeastern Peru. The study of Chachapoya ancestral sites presents a series of ethical and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Searcy. Scott Ure. Michael Mathiowetz. Jaclyn Eckersley. Haylie Ferguson.

In 2017, we used UAVs (drones) to record eight archaeological sites from the air. As this type of technology becomes more refined, we have found that it is especially useful in carrying out three specific tasks: contour mapping, archiving site conditions, and identifying architecture. This paper reports our findings resulting from aerial images captured while flying archaeological sites in Nayarit and Chihuahua, Mexico.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelsey Pennanen. Peter Dawson. Christian Thomas.

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 strong need to document heritage landscapes impacted due to rapidly changing climates in Canada. This paper presents two case studies about using UAV-based technology to better understand landscapes impacted by climate change. Both examples use UAV photogrammetric methods to monitor large and complex archaeological heritage sites. The first case...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Boulanger. Michael Glascock.

What happens to artifact-sourcing data after a laboratory closes? We provide an update on the ongoing effort to preserve archaeometric data produced between 1968 and 1990 at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Over the past decade, we have located and digitized chemical and contextual data for over 10,000 archaeological specimens analyzed by the laboratory. Our efforts are now turning toward analysis and application of these data, many of which have never been published let alone...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew MacIver.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The transition from the Late Shang state (ca. 1300 – 1046 BC) based in Anyang to the Western Zhou state (ca. 1046 – 771 BC) founded in Shaanxi represents one of the most significant geopolitical and cultural transformations in ancient China. The conquest of the Shang by a Zhou-led alliance precipitated in the elimination of the human sacrificial rituals...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelsey Hanson.

This is an abstract from the "Political Geologies in the Ancient and Recent Pasts: Ontology, Knowledge, and Affect" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Color is a deeply pervasive element of cosmology in the Pueblo World of the US Southwest. In these rich, affectual ecosystems of chromatic metaphor, cosmological balance is achieved through nuanced relationships between plants, animals, natural phenomena, and cardinal directions. Relationships are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Hannigan. Laura Heath-Stout.

This is an abstract from the "What Have You Done For Us Lately?: Discrimination, Harassment, and Chilly Climate in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In response to the contemporary critiques about discrimination and inequality within the archaeological academic community, many individuals and advocacy groups have suggested field school scholarships as one tactic in promoting diversity in the field. In this paper, we will explore the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Atifa Rawan. Jamaludin Shable. M. Hussain Ahmadzai. Jodi Reeves Eyre.

The Afghanistan Cultural Heritage Education Program (ACHEP) is a collaborative project administered by the United States National Park Service and implemented by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, University of Arizona and the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, Kabul University. This international outreach effort engages Afghanistan’s educators, students, and professionals in educational programs and activities to preserve and protect the country’s rich cultural heritage and to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stanley Ambrose. Jibril Hirbo.

Neanderthal and Denisovan genetic admixture with Eurasian modern humans, and a "signature" of Neanderthal admixture in African populations, are widely accepted "facts". Inferences of admixture are based mainly on the assumption that Yoruba, San and/or Pygmy populations contain all African genetic variation. Variants shared among Neanderthals and modern Eurasians, but not present in these Africans, are assumed to reflect 2-4% admixture. However, genetic diversity and geographic structure are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michelle Gray. Meredith Hardy.

This is an abstract from the "To Move Forward We Must Look Back: The Slave Wrecks Project at 10 Years" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As part of the Slave Wrecks Project, excavations at Christiansted National Historic Site on St. Croix, US Virgin Islands, have resulted in the collection of thousands of artifacts associated with the Danish West India and Guinea Warehouse Complex. Within this assemblage, hundreds of sherds of Afro-Caribbean...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa Lucero.

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. Lidar mapping has revealed extensive ancestral settlement patterns signifying a low-density urban system. Maya archaeologists are tasked with interpreting how the ancestral Maya interacted and kept this system working for over 1,000 years (ca. 100 BCE–900 CE) in the southern Maya lowlands of Central America. It was a complex...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Henry Lamb.

From about 15,000 to 5,000 years ago, lakes and rivers existed across now arid areas of northern Africa, accompanied by extended ranges of vegetation, animals and human settlement. In eastern Africa, lake levels were very much higher than present, with now-closed lakes overflowing into the Nile and tributary rivers. While it is widely recognised that this African Humid Period resulted from an intensified African summer monsoon linked to the early Holocene precessional increase in summer...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Walz.

This paper grapples with seemingly mundane objects frequently encountered, but largely ignored, in East African archaeology: beads and shells. I report on beads of various materials, shells, and other residues identified during systematic research in hinterland NE Tanzania, AD 700-1350. Finds of glass and stone beads with Indian Ocean origins and local beads of landsnail shell alter, in a meaningful manner, archaeological views of oceanic ties to interior East Africa. Material patterning...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Farnsworth.

Historical archaeologists have explored the plantation landscapes of the Caribbean for more than 50 years, and there have been archaeological excavations at historical sites on every major island. However, there are still islands where there have not been any previous excavations at historic sites, including plantations. Anguilla was one such island until June 2017 when archaeological survey and excavations began at the Wallblake Estate to understand the plantation landscape and the major...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michelle Gray.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From 2016 to 2019, excavations at Christiansted National Historic Site on St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands associated with the Slave Wrecks Project, have resulted in the collection of thousands of artifacts associated with the Danish West India and Guinea Warehouse Complex (AD 1749 to circa AD 1854). This assemblage contains hundreds of Afro-Caribbean...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tomas Mendizabal. Jordi Tresserras. Javier Laviña. Ricardo Piqueras. Marta Hidalgo.

The first free African peoples of the Americas were the inhabitants of the town of La Villa de Santiago del Príncipe, founded in 1579 when Don Luis de Mozambique and his followers became the first group of cimarrones (escaped slaves) to negotiate a peace with the Spanish Crown, after decades of what came to be known as the "Cimarron wars". These were a conflict in which cimarrones would predate upon Spanish isthmian trade routes and even support foreign attacks on the mainland. Weary of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Miriam Domínguez.

The archaeological study of intercultural encounters in the context of a geographically interstitial zone, such as the Jubones River Basin in present-day Ecuador, elucidates the interconnectedness of multiple historical processes and evaluates the notion that such convergences have existed since antiquity. Preliminary archaeological fieldwork and analysis of the material culture from Potrero Mendieta revealed monumental architecture, and ceramic and lithic traditions that denote cultural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shadreck Chirikure. Munyaradzi Manyanga. Genius Tevera.

This is an abstract from the "After Dark: The Nocturnal Urban Landscape & Lightscape of Ancient Cities" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. What was night life like at Great Zimbabwe? While this question excites imagination in numerous ways, in fact and myth, not much is known about nocturnal life in this ancient African urban landscape. Most archaeological reconstructions of urban life at Great Zimbabwe create the erroneous impression that the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Simon Martin.

This is an abstract from the "The Movement of People and Ideas in Eastern Mesoamerica during the Ninth and Tenth Centuries CE: A Multidisciplinary Approach Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Maya inscriptions have long been considered an impoverished source on the momentous changes that gripped society at the close of the Classic era. Not only do we see a steep decline in quantity as major centers fall silent, but the texts that were produced...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Breiter.

One of the more dramatic results of the English Reformation was the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Once these institutions were closed and sold off, they often had a secondary purpose for the new landholders, such as working farms, personal residences and colleges. In spite of this, much of the architecture of the original monastery was destroyed, with stone, brick, and metal carted off. This paper focuses on how the stone from monasteries became a resource in the immediate vicinity of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sean Roades. Juliet Morrow. J. Christopher Gillam.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Fluted point techno-complexes of the Ozarks include Clovis, Gainey, Folsom, and Dalton. Folsom point-making people are comparatively less well represented in the interior Ozarks possibly because of the lack of grasslands and bison. In this presentation, we explain the origins and evolution of Clovis technology and the exploitation of lithic resources from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Micca Metz.

This historical archaeological analysis examines differences in the age of mortality for US Army personnel who fought for America in the last 100 years. This study centers on the historical data gathered from historic mortuary monuments and compare that data with contemporary mortuary monuments. Specifically, I focus on the timing of death for returning veterans and the increased occurrence over time and by war, as reported by Veterans Affairs (2016). The data are separated by years of service,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Annabeth Headrick. Dorie Reents-Budet.

The Teotihuacan-style censers from Guatemala have received relatively little attention since the 1980s. Following upon earlier suggestions for a merchant-warrior presence in the Escuintla region, this study examines the butterfly imagery on a group of Teotihuacan-style censers in the national collections of Guatemala. This group of unprovenanced artifacts has research value because (1) its original imagery is intact, and (2) all have been sampled for paste analysis (instrumental neutron...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dawn Hadley. Elizabeth Craig-Atkins. Jenny Crangle.

The practice of charnelling human remains has recently been revealed to have been widespread in medieval England, with chapels specially built for this purpose. However, this practice ceased at the time of the early sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation, and the charnel chapels were emptied and in some cases demolished. A rare exception is at Rothwell (Northamptonshire, UK), which survived the Reformation intact, apparently because it was closed up at this time with the charnel in situ. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angelyn Bass. Heather Hurst.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2001, rarely preserved Maya murals were discovered at the site of San Bartolo, Guatemala. Subsequent archaeological excavations revealed an elaborate artistic program of wall paintings and numerous hieroglyphic texts buried in successive architectural phases dating from ca. 400-100 B.C. The corpus of paintings found within the Las Pinturas pyramid includes...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gwen Bakke.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. European colonization of North America had profound impacts on Native American populations. These include the introduction of European diseases and warfare, the consolidation and abandonment of traditional lands, and the eventual forced relocation to reservations. Previously, much archaeological focus has been on the demographic, social, and political...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Matthews. Emma Gilheany. Megan Hicks. Eric Johnson.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Congress: Multivocal Conversations Furthering the World Archaeological Congress Agenda" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Working with marginalized Black and Indigenous communities shines a light on the use of archaeological research to support struggles for heritage, recognition, and well-being in settler colonial states. We highlight archaeology’s potential to alienate, whether alienating heritage as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brigitte Faugere. José Luis Ruvalcaba.

This is an abstract from the "Late Pleistocene Stemmed Points across North America: Continental Questions and Regional Concerns" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A complete black obsidian Agate Basin Point was found in a rockshelter in the state of Michoacán, Mexico, during the excavations realized by the CEMCA team. Despite the fact that the stratigraphy of the shelter had been completely disturbed, this point was found associated with a complete...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Stark.

This is an abstract from the "Hot Rocks in Hot Places: Investigating the 10,000-Year Record of Plant Baking across the US-Mexico Borderlands" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Fire cracked rock (FCR) and hearth features represent one of the most commonly observed cooking features encountered by archaeologists. This research presents an ethno-archaeological context in which FCR utilization and discard is observed, providing a Middle Range theoretical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Holly Houghten.

This is an abstract from the "Hot Rocks in Hot Places: Investigating the 10,000-Year Record of Plant Baking across the US-Mexico Borderlands" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the main staple foods of the Mescalero Apache was Mescal or Agave. The heart of the plant is cooked in an earth oven for four days. The plant is then eaten straight out of the oven or dried for storage and supply. Today the roasting of Mescal is still done every year in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Baumann. Gary Crites.

Arriving after AD 1000, the common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) was the last domesticated plant to be adopted in the prehistoric Eastern Woodlands. Beans were combined with corn and squash to create the "three sisters" agricultural system. Recent scholarship has argued that the earliest beans entered the eastern US from the lower Plains and through the Great Lakes. When and how beans entered into the southeastern U.S. is not clearly understood because very few beans have been directly dated. New...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Harvey. Judson Byrd Finley. Erick Robinson. Edward Herrmann.

This is an abstract from the "The Socioecological Dynamics of Holocene Foragers and Farmers" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Utah’s Fremont archaeological complex is well-known as a transitional foraging-farming society from AD 300–1300. Individual Fremont systems included a set of bundled agricultural niches with associated foraging ranges. In a recent survey above Cub Creek in Dinosaur National Monument, we discovered many slab-lined stone...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jesse Wolfhagen.

Zooarchaeologists reconstruct age- and sex-specific animal mortality profiles in order to examine past human strategies of animal exploitation. Traditionally, animal age structures and sex ratios were derived from complementary but distinct data (e.g., age via epiphyseal fusion data, sex via bone morphology or metrics), though recent research has highlighted the value of integrating these data. This paper describes how zooarchaeologists can further that integration by fitting standard...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meagan Pennington.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Childhood growth and development remains difficult to estimate in past populations, yet, it provides a unique window into childhood experiences in prehistory. This study considers subadult skeletal remains estimated to be 1-21 years of age at the time of death from the ancient Maya population in Copan, Honduras based on the end of the eruption/development...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Igor Chechushkov.

The Eurasian Bronze Age has been in focus of archaeologists, historians and linguists at least for last 50 years for the rich and striking records of Indo-European origin and movements. Important topics, strongly attached to this theme, are horse utilization and emergence of battle chariot. However, previously they have not been analyzed statistically and rarely treated from the positions of anthropological archaeology. This paper examines the modern level of knowledge of archaeological records...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Moeana Franklin. Nick Kardulias.

The original age at death estimations of the adult individuals excavated from Helton Mound 20 (Middle to Late Woodland) in the Lower Illinois Valley were re-evaluated using Transition Analysis. In addition, a taphonomic evaluation of each individual was undertaken to determine the ways in which the bones would have been modified during their interment. The goal is to understand how the current recognition of taphonomic processes differs from the original estimations from the 1970s and how that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Penny Bickle. Linda Fibiger.

Identity is an embodied experience and, as such, it has the capacity to change over a lifetime as the body grows, goes through puberty, suffers illness and becomes inscribed with habitual movements from daily tasks. Understanding the process of maturation is therefore an important facet of investigating identity. In this paper, we focus on ageing and childhood in the early Neolithic of central Europe, the Linearbandkeramik (LBK) culture (5500–4900 cal BC), with particular reference to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Allison Mickel.

Digital recording methods offer a range of new means of collecting, organizing, and presenting archaeological information, which lead to new ways of thinking about the past. Capitalizing on the intuitive design of digital technologies additionally creates the potential for communities whose voices have been missing from the archaeological record to contribute their perspectives. In this paper, I draw upon my experiences experimenting with multimedia recording strategies at Petra, Jordan and at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Josuhé Lozada. Joel Palka. Alice Balsanelli.

This is an abstract from the "The Vibrancy of Ruins: Ruination Studies in Ancient Mesoamerica" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this presentation, we analyze Lacandon Maya communication with nonhuman forces through pilgrimages to ritual landscapes, particularly ancient Maya ruins in the lowlands of Chiapas, Mexico, and Petén, Guatemala. Through archaeological and ethnographic evidence we examine these spaces where Lacandon Maya have undertaken...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelsey Reese. Timothy Kohler.

There are many architectural features in the Mesa Verde region that have been defined as "community centers," or rather, specific areas of cultural and social significance. Community centers may contain several public features, including a: Great Kiva, Reservoir, Great House, Plaza, Tower, and others. Although these features are assumed to have served a large surrounding population, the placement of these structures on the landscape can help us understand the ease with which the surrounding...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephanie Salwen.

Water is one of the most powerful agents of change on the planet. Flowing water can build and destroy landscapes rapidly in dramatic fashion as with flash flooding or gradually through incremental natural processes, shaping the terrain through sedimentation, erosion, and seasonal fluctuations in water flow. Within human societies, these waterways may be perceived as a source of danger, but also provide subsistence and non-subsistence resources, and serve as landscape features that alter how...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kanika Kalra.

Every June through September, the inhabitants of South Asia welcome and celebrate the southwest monsoons. The monsoon winds are the lifeline of this region but also a major threat, inspiring societies to devise mechanisms to both harness their potential and subvert the damage they may cause. This paper analyzes prehistoric and historical responses to monsoons in South Asia in terms of their unpredictable nature, and examines how the monsoons both facilitate and constrict people’s actions. In...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Whitley.

Recent theoretical over-emphasis on human agency and denial of the significance of socio-cultural structure presents a radical challenge to a century of research. It implies that Durkheim, Boas, Weber, etc., are irrelevant, and that long-standing structures of inequality (e.g., of gender or race) somehow do not exist or are not important. Examination of recent human-agency studies illustrates that, instead of studying human agency as action, interpretations are based on the kinds of structures...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Darby Filimoehala.

Exploring the complex relationship between humans and the environment is essential for understanding important mechanisms of cultural change. The last decade has given rise to advances in zooarchaeological research and computer-based modeling that provide tools to examine the links between environmental variability and human cultures. This paper draws on assumptions derived from evolutionary ecology using Agent Based Models (AMB), to test predictions regarding foraging and marine exploitation in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Francisco J. Miguel Quesada. Eduardo Tapia. Débora Zurro. Jorge Caro.

Social differences between men and women are still an object of debate among several areas of knowledge. These differences are the result of a long historical process that led to the establishment of the sexual division of labour as we know it, although we do not know the original cicumstances and steps that initially originated it. In order to throw light on this, we are focusing on hunter-gather societies; ethnographic and historical documentation about these human societies points to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kim Hill. Marco Janssen. Eric Fisher. Curtis Marean.

We show using detailed environmental and behavioral data from the Ache of Paraguay that agent based modeling can simulate correctly many aspects of human foraging behavior. We then show how this modeling technique can be used on projected paleolandscapes in the Cape Coastal Region between Blombos Cave and Pinnacle Point to predict diet, movement patterns, group size, population density, and other aspects of the behavioral ecology of human foragers in the region. SAA 2015 abstracts made...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Seth Price. Benjamin Vining.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ecological disasters are often argued to be forces of large-scale societal change, including the primary causes of major cultural collapses. This concept is reevaluated in light of the recent 2016-2017 El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which provides an opportunity to examine the ways in which this event affects the landscape. Through integration of remote...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cecilia Padilla-Iglesias. Claudine Gravel-Miguel. Robert Bischoff.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The need to relate static archaeological sites to the dynamic processes responsible for their formation is central to the utility of archaeological data for testing hypotheses about the lives of prehistoric humans, and how ecological and social changes affected them. Here we use an agent-based simulation to investigate how different factors influence the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Todd Surovell.

This is an abstract from the "Current Perspectives on the Western Stemmed Tradition-Clovis Debate in the Far West" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While the relative and absolute ages of fluted and stemmed points remain unclear in the Great Basin, particularly in the earliest periods of prehistory, to the northeast in Wyoming the archaeological record is unambiguous. Fluted points are consistently older than stemmed points, an observation supported...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Soraya Alencar.

In the past decades, new theoretical and methodological developments in bioarchaeology and archaeology of death have allowed the exploration of age categories that are very challenging to access archaeologically: infants and older adults. Although Mesoamerican archaeology has largely used evidence for representations of aging in different sources of information (textual and iconographic) to engage in a broader consideration of funerary practices, approaches of old age as an identity category has...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Owens. David Byers. Molly Boeka-Cannon.

This talk presents a new, non-destructive, empirical, and replicable method for aging bison teeth with mandibular tooth photos and ArcGIS digital mapping. Tooth eruption, growth, and attrition can document age-at-death, which informs on hunting strategies, occupation seasonality, environmental conditions, and herd health. Previous dentition studies utilize numerous tooth metrics that commonly require specimen-destructive research methods. Also, occlusal wear age estimates rely on subjective wear...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Krigbaum. Christina Giovas. Scott Fitzpatrick.

Light isotope data for bone collagen, bone apatite, and tooth enamel apatite have been collected for prehistoric agouti (Dasyprocta sp.) recovered from secure archaeological contexts on Carriacou (Sabazan and Grand Bay) and Nevis (Coconut Walk) in the Lesser Antilles, West Indies. Stable carbon isotope ratios of individual specimens exhibit a wide range of values for both bone collagen (-20.0‰ to -11.5‰; avg = -17.8‰) and bone apatite (-13.6 to -6.5‰), with apatite-collagen spacing also quite...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Countryman. Gregory Zaro.

Generalized models of Mediterranean agroecosystems often elide the specific historical and political contexts in which food production necessarily takes place. This paper presents new historical-ecological research currently underway at the multi-period settlement site of Nadin-Gradina near the Adriatic coast of southern Croatia, a typically "Mediterranean" landscape that has hosted a dynamic social-political history of repeated invasion, migration, and colonization by a variety of human actors....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amelia Sánchez Mosquera.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Innovations in Ecuadorian Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Durante el monitoreo arqueológico de la línea 1 de Metro de Quito se identificó 23 evidencias de campos de cultivos antiguos. Los resultados de los análisis confirman su presencia desde el periodo Formativo, y una persistencia hasta el periodo republicano. Se observó que las evidencias más antiguas se encuentran hacia el NW de la ciudad. Por...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chris Stevens. Dorian Fuller.

Mesopotamia and the Yellow River of China had long trajectories from early farming through to primary urbanisation, but to what extent do the archaeobotanical records indicate parallel developments in terms of agriculture? In both areas agriculture diversifies during the later Neolithic, with an increasing range of annual field crops as well as evidence for the cultivation of some perennials (tree fruits or vines). However, diversity was much higher in western Asia, from both a highly diverse...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Geoffrey Hedges-Knyrim.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The agricultural economy of the Iron Age Southern Levant remains underexplored archaeobotanically, especially at an integrated, regional level. The data that is available suffers from few abundance datasets and is often difficult to access or unpublished. Out of 26 Iron Age sites with available data, only 6 have abundance values and other quantitative...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alemseged Beldados. A. Catherine D'Andrea.

Archaeobotanical analysis of samples from the site of Mezber are underway with the goal of investigating the early agricultural history of northern highland Ethiopia. Mezber is a Pre-Aksumite site excavated by the Eastern Tigrai Archaeological Project (ETAP) with cultural deposits dating from 1600 BCE to CE 1, and occupied over four phases. In 2014-16, a total of 59 soil samples ranging in size from 1.8 to 7.5 liters was processed by manual flotation. Macrobotanical remains from light fractions...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yufeng Sun. Yonggang Sun. Petra Vaiglova. Xinyi Liu.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Food preparation is an arena for the understanding of social performances, and its scope is often indicative of the fabrications of social relations in historical contexts. This paper investigates daily food preparations in archaeological contexts and considers social bonds through the lens of mundane meals. By doing so, we aim to shift the focus from the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeremy Kulisheck. Sandra Arazi-Coambs. Jess Gisler. Kathi Turner. Christina Sinkovec.

The Cañada Alamosa is the northernmost frontier of the ancestral Pueblo Mimbres people of the U.S. Southwest. Intensive survey of a side canyon has defined a distinct agricultural landscape composed of small pueblos, farmsteads, field houses, shrines, and other features. Occupation was centered around alluvial fans located on the first terrace above the drainage, fed by runoff from upper terraces, rather than the floodwaters of the drainage bottom itself. While the Cañada Alamosa has significant...

DOCUMENT Citation Only María Albeck.

Quebrada de Humahuaca is an important gorge in northwest Argentina, which lies between the altiplano-like puna to the west and the forested lowlands to the east. It has a long and interesting agricultural history spanning nearly three millennia from the settlement of the first farmers to the present. The prehispanic archaeological landscapes are best preserved in the northern part of Quebrada de Humahuaca, due to the strong erosional processes that cut deep into geological sediments. On the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elise Jakoby Laugier. Jesse Casana.

This is an abstract from the "Finding Fields: Locating and Interpreting Ancient Agricultural Landscapes" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Upper Diyala River Region in northern Iraq has long served as a strategic political, economic, and cultural borderland between the Mesopotamian alluvium and the Zagros Mountains. The region is also environmentally complex, encompassing a steep gradient of agroecological zones ranging from irrigated alluvial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Weiss.

This is an abstract from the "Wheels, Horses, Babies and Bathwaters: Celebrating the Impact of David W. Anthony on the Study of Prehistory" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The first speakers of Indo-European languages who entered Europe brought with them a fairly coherent agro-technological package. This is clear from the significant agreements that can be shown to exist in the lexicon describing the ard and its subparts among the Western...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicolas Gauthier.

Earth system models are climate models capable of simulating land-atmosphere feedbacks and the complex biogeochemical and biogeophysical processes that drive them. These models are particularly well-suited to studying the impact of preindustrial land use on regional climate change, as they explicitly resolve the impacts of irrigation, deforestation, and agropastoral production on the flow of water and energy between the land and atmosphere. Generating realistic maps of past land use is a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Francisca Santana Sagredo. Julia Lee-Thorp. Rick Schulting. Mauricio Uribe. Chris Harrod.

This is an abstract from the "Challenges and Future Directions in Plant Stable Isotope Analysis in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Agricultural practice began in arid northern Chile during the Formative Period just prior to 1000 yr BC. Unusually, preservation of crops, including maize, squash, quinoa and beans is excellent due to the extremely arid conditions that characterise the Atacama Desert. In order to explore crop management,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Liya Tang. Hui Zhou. Zhiyou Wang.

This is an abstract from the "Populations of Early Medieval China: Developing Anthropological Approaches to Historical Archaeology in China" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In archaeological studies, the Qin people have often been the subject of research. The areas of investigation about the Qin include their origin, structure of tombs, funeral rites and interment processes, and cities and settlements. Although there are some studies on the Qin...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Raymond Mueller. Jessica Hedgepeth Balkin. Arthur Joyce.

As part of the larger Río Verde Settlement Project (RVSP), soil sampling of different physiographic zones was conducted during the spring of 2016 in the lower Río Verde Valley. The major goal of this sampling program was to assess variation in soil fertility across the region, as related specifically to maize agriculture. The lower Verde Valley was broadly divided into four physiographic zones (floodplain, coastal plain, piedmont, and secondary valleys). Previous studies identified the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicolas Gauthier.

Small-scale agriculturalists in the Mediterranean Basin rely on multiple strategies including diversification, intensification, and storage to maintain a stable food supply in the face of environmental uncertainty. Each of these strategies requires farmers to make specific resource allocation decisions in response to environmental risks and is thus sensitive to variability in both the spatiotemporal pattern of risk and the ability of farmers to perceive that pattern. In this talk, I present an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Carr. Vernon Scarborough. Nicholas Dunning. Elizabeth Haussner.

From approximately 850 to 1250 A.D., despite an extremely arid environment, the ancient people of Chaco Canyon were able to marshal the food production and engineering skills to build a string of "Great Houses", several containing hundreds of rooms. This poster describes a system of multiple water sources supplying the agricultural area below the Great House at Peñasco Blanco. High-resolution aerial lidar was key to identifying the multiple water sources. Rainfall and snow are the source of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Macrae.

The decisions and consequences behind the intensification of agricultural strategies among past societies has long been a topic of debate among archaeologists. These discussions are often dominated by factors of population dynamics and production capacity. This paper will explore the less discussed factor of risk management. Controlling the variation of production in regard to fluctuating natural and social pressures was critical to past agrarian societies and undoubtedly played a role in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only C. Margaret Scarry. Margaret Mook. Donald Haggis.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Azoria (630-480 BC) is a small urban center on the island of Crete. Ten seasons of large-scale excavations have shed light on the formation, organization and operation of this Archaic city. At its heart is a massive civic complex with shrines, assembly halls, public dining rooms with associated kitchens and storerooms, a large free-standing storehouse, and an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alejandra Vidal Elgueta. Magdalena García. Jorge Razeto. Pablo Mendez-Quirós. Mandakovic Valentina.

Se discuten los nociones de progreso y complejidad social arraigados en la concepción del Formativo, a partir de la evidencia de antiguos campos de cultivo, hoy en desuso, asociados a las aldeas formativas (sensu. 1000 a.C- 1000 d.C) de Caserones, Pircas, Ramaditas y Guatacondo, localizadas en la región de Tarapacá, Chile. Se presentan la coexistencia de al menos dos sistemas agrícolas diferenciados, uno que denominamos continuo o anual y otro discontínuo o estacional que requirieron del manejo...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Frances Hayashida. Andrés Troncoso. Diego Salazar. César Parcero-Oubiña. Pastor Fábrega-Álvarez.

How did prehispanic farmers make a living in the hyperarid, high-altitude Atacama Desert, and how did their lives and landscapes change under different political regimes? In this paper, we discuss our ongoing project on irrigated landscapes in the interfluvial region between the Upper Loa and Salado rivers in northern Chile. Research has focused on two sites (Paniri and Topaín) with remarkably well preserved spring-fed canal and terrace systems and a residential and administrative center...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jack Rossen.

Ancient Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) settlement patterns have been commonly presently as a series of well-spaced two acre defended agglutinated villages. Inter-village space was generally viewed as dangerous within a landscape of endemic warfare. Surveys and excavations in the Cayuga heartland (east side of Cayuga Lake) of the Finger Lakes region, central New York, are altering that vision. By at least the 15th century, agricultural complexes and stations were established between villages. These...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alison Damick. Arlene Rosen.

This is an abstract from the "From Collaboration to Partnership in Pojoaque, New Mexico" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The relationships of people with their land over time leaves visible and invisible traces. As archaeologists we are confronted with landscapes that are the resulting accumulation of these traces over time, such that they may no longer resemble the place that people of the past interacted with. Place is not just a geographic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Neuhoff-Malorzo.

Collection and examination of botanical remains has led to evidence of the development of agriculture in conjunction with the collection or procurement of wild resources at a number of Castro sites across the NW of Portugal and Galicia. Evidence procured to date from a number of such sites stretching from the Galician Region of Spain to the site of Monte Mozinho near the municipality of Penafiel in Portugal covers a span of time from Early Bronze Age to Roman Period and exhibits a combination...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fred Nials.

Las Capas is an Early Agricultural period site in the Tucson Basin, Arizona. Canal irrigation began at the site as early as 1200 BC and the canal system encompasses more than 50 hectares. Agricultural features are unusually well-preserved, and more than 250 canals of various sizes and over 1000 bordered fields were exposed in multiple stratigraphic levels during excavation. The unusual degree of preservation provides an exceptional opportunity to examine the mode of construction, hydrology,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Guiyun Jin. XianJun Fan. GuoKe Chen.

The combination of crops and weeds found in the site reflects a typical rainfed agriculture dominated by foxtail millet and broomcorn millet. Under the external cultural influences, wheat and barley started to be cultivated. Since late Machang culture and, through the agricultural development during the "Transitional type" period, were widely cultivated during the period of Siba culture, when marijuna appeared in the crop assemblages. The integrated study of archaeobotanical and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lorenzo Castellano.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Hittite empire is the first supraregional polity documented in the history of central Anatolia. The core of the Hittite polity, the “Land of Hatti”, extended on a landscape which could be regarded as particularly challenging to the establishment of a reliable and productive centralized agricultural system. The traditional Anatolian farming system...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine Hastorf.

Most scholars agree that territoriality and commitment to a landscape participated in the domestication syndrome and agriculture. The geophyte Solanum, the potato, is a particularly engaging crop to study domestication origins, being a stem tuber, with wild species growing throughout the Andes of South America, it is only with recent genetic research that we know its likely location of domestication. Wild potatoes continue to be found in potato fields today, aiding the diverse varieties still...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Alejandra Korstanje. Marcos Quesada. Mariana Maloberti.

Traditionally, the Agriculture of the Formative Period (1000 BC-100 AD), was conceived as technologically simple and spatially reduced. However, this simplicity is reconsidered when we take into account that these technologies made possible the practice of agriculture in desert environments with eroded and underdeveloped soils, during millennia. Our research in El Bolsón valley, which is a high basin in western Catamarca, allowed us to know in detail some peasant practice as the irrigation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yahui He.

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. The late Neolithic period in China witnessed a boost of settlement scale and number, interregional interactions and exchanges, and sociopolitical and economic complexities. The Shimao site, located in the north Loess Plateau, China, was one of the most important urban...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Finn. Jacob Freeman.

This is an abstract from the "The Socioecological Dynamics of Holocene Foragers and Farmers" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster presents data on the area, group size, and prey/plant richness of agricultural and pastoral societies. We test the hypotheses that (1) the richness of prey harvested by human groups correlates with the well-known species richness-latitude gradient; (2) that as groups increase their commitment to agriculture, they...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David L. Lentz. Nicholas Dunning. Vernon Scarborough.

While it seems evident that the elites and royal personages at Tikal influenced at least some aspects of day-to-day activities of the Maya inhabitants, it has not been clear how this influence became manifest, particularly in regard to agriculture and other aspects of land management decisions. Recent paleoethnobotanical and archaeological studies at Tikal, however, bring some insight to this cultural black box. Three examples from the paleoethnobotanical record provide empirical evidence that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Charles. Charlotte Diffey. Laura Green. Amy Bogaard.

This is an abstract from the "Questioning the Fundamentals of Plant and Animal Domestication" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Domestication has been discussed inter alia as a syndrome, a case study in niche construction and a reversible process. These perspectives frame new understandings of how management practice shaped domestication processes. For plants, recent experimental work has also been important for clarifying the effect of domestication...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Bogaard. Valasia Isaakidou. Erika Nitsch. Amy Styring.

In this talk we use case studies to compare the agroecology of relatively egalitarian Neolithic communities (low ginis) with that of early urban societies featuring high levels of inequality (high ginis). We use a combination of novel archaeobotanical and -zoological approaches to investigate arable land management. Neolithic sequences in western Asia, the Aegean and central Europe present contrasting settings in which early farmers developed labour-intensive cropping strategies that buffered...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Don Butler. Zachary Dunseth. Yotam Tepper. Guy Bar-Oz. Ruth Shahack-Gross.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We report new geoarchaeological evidence for a community-scale response to changing agropastoral economics in the Negev Desert during Late Antiquity (c. fourth–tenth century CE). Sustainable resource management is of central importance among agrarian societies in marginal drylands. In the Negev, the importance of hinterland trash deposits as archives of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jordan Dalton. Colin Quinn.

The Bronze Age was a period of dynamic social transformations in Transylvania. Unfortunately, there have been no systematic archaeological studies of the subsistence economy that funded, and was affected by, the social transformations of emergent inequality. In this poster, I present the first analysis of faunal assemblages from Bronze Age contexts in Transylvania. The faunal assemblages, collected during the 2012-2014 surveys of the Geoagiu and Mureş Valleys, provide the first opportunity to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mauricio Cuevas. Lourdes Budar.

El corredor costero al este de Los Tuxtlas delimitado por las lagunas de Sontecomapan, y del Ostión, los volcanes de Santa Marta y San Martín Pajapan y el mar del Golfo de México, fue el escenario prehispánico de una alta densidad poblacional que entre su desarrollo contó con el emplazamiento de un complejo sistema portuario. Los recursos naturales que ofrecen los cuerpos de agua en esta zona sin duda fueron explotados para su consumo y comercio desde el Formativo Medio hasta el Clásico Tardío....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Verónica Vázquez López. Daniela Triadan.

This is an abstract from the "Preclassic Maya Social Transformations along the Usumacinta: Views from Ceibal and Aguada Fénix" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The site of Aguada Fénix, located on the San Pedro River in northeastern Tabasco, Mexico, was recently discovered by the Middle Usumacinta Archaeological Project through LiDAR mapping. The site layout corresponds to what the project has defined as the Middle Formative Usumacinta Pattern...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Augusto Oyuela-Caycedo.

This is an abstract from the "Dedication, Collaboration, and Vision, Part II: Papers in Honor of Tom D. Dillehay" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Subject to different historical forms of colonialism, the northern tip of South America is a politically marginalized area that is arguably the least understood from an archaeological perspective. While there is a basic understanding of ceramically defined periods, little is known about human interactions...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Humphreys. William Griswold. Steve Roskams.

This is an abstract from the "Applying the Power of Partnerships to the Search for America's Missing in Action" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In September 2019, American Veterans Archaeological Recovery (AVAR) served as the lead partner of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) in the search for aircrew losses associated with a World War II-era B-24H crash in southern England. Fieldwork consisted of a site survey and bulk excavation. Over a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Brown. Linda Popelish. Steve Owen.

Early airway beacons, which marked transcontinental flyways, may not be what you first think of when you see the term archaeology but they are a part of our broader history as a nation, and as historic structures or sites can be eligible for the National Register. In order to preserve a key piece of recent national history, two Passport in Time projects on the Mt. Taylor Ranger District of the Cibola National Forest focused on airway beacon sites. The partnership between the Forest Service and a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chris Loendorf. Shari Tiedens. Brett Coochyouma. R. Scott Plumlee.

This presentation summarizes a Gila River Indian Community research program that is designed to provide quantified projectile point data, which are used to address significant research questions for the Pima-Maricopa Irrigation Project data recovery investigations. In contrast to people from most other regions of the world, the Akimel O’odham continued to extensively employ flaked stone points until the late 1800s. Consequently, considerable ethnographic and ethnohistorical data are available...