Republic of Guatemala (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
2,226-2,250 (2,537 Records)
Juvenile mortality and morbidity is a sensitive marker of overall group health, as juvenile individuals are more susceptible to circulating endemic diseases and nutritional stress. Thus, reconstructing relative frailty of the juvenile population at Mawchu Llacta provides important data about daily life at this colonial site, in a relatively understudied transitional period of Peruvian history. In this paper, we present the results of preliminary skeletal analyses of burials excavated from the...
Stressing differences while appearing to be the same: a case study from Lapita pottery motif analysis (2017)
In previous research, employing a dataset composed of motifs recorded from 60 Lapita sites spread across the southwestern Pacific, we argued that a general trend of making highly similar, but not identical, motifs can be seen when motif repertoires of different island groups are compared. We thus proposed that the elements of surprise or amusement, generated from making something similar yet different from what the intended audience expected to see, was employed to stress shared traditions while...
The Stromsvik Macroblade Cache from Copan, Honduras: A Symbolic Analysis (2017)
Among the myriad types of votive offerings created by the Classic Maya, many contain chipped-stone obsidian and flint materials. These caches often consist of debitage, cores, flakes, blades, and sometimes so-called "eccentrics", which are elaborately chipped ceremonial items that sometimes take the form of god effigies. The contexts of these deposits can include the stairways, centerlines, and corners of important structures, below stelae and other monuments, and in the center of royal or elite...
Structurally Speaking; Architecture of El Rayo and the Greater Nicoya Region (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Reconstructing the Political Organization of Pre-Columbian Nicaragua" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Located on the shore of Lake Nicaragua, El Rayo is a unique archaeological site, enriched with a large material base and many examples of human burial practices. Dating from the Late Bagaces Period (500-800 CE) to the Sapoa Period (800-1300 CE), El Rayo’s stone architectural features cover both major timeframes,...
Struggling with Complex Decision-Making in Public Policy (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Attention to Detail: A Pragmatic Career of Research, Mentoring, and Service, Papers in Honor of Keith Kintigh" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) and other archaeological organizations struggled with a variety of public policy decisions and organizational policies that eventually resulted in major public laws on both the state and federal levels...
Student-Driven Case Studies of Private Collector Collaborations: From the San Luis Valley of Colorado to Portland, Oregon (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Because of private land and genuine human curiosity, members of the public often hold considerable archaeological knowledge and cultural resources that professionals in the field have historically overlooked. When these collectors are "responsible, responsive stewards", language set forth by the SAA Archaeologist-Collector Collaboration Interest Group, they...
Studying Past Human-Environment Interactions with High Precision AMS 14C at Penn State (2017)
The newly established PSU AMS Radiocarbon (14C) Facility provides high-precision measurements of 14C content in a wide range of carbon-bearing materials. Our primary mission is the study of human-environment interactions in the past and present with the goal of working with archaeologists in the context of inter-disciplinary environmental research. The facility operates a NEC 1.5 SDH 500kV Tandem Pelletron accelerator optimized for relatively small samples, requiring only 700µg of graphitized...
Style vs. Function in Polynesian Fish Hook Shank Variation (2018)
Polynesian i’a makau, or fishhooks, may stand in for ceramics for the purpose of generating culture-historical units, facilitating relative dating of the three Hawaiian assemblages under scrutiny (Allen 1996). Artifact assemblages at Waiahukini, Makalei, and Pu’u Ali’i contained over 1000 intact or partial fishhooks and fragments of shaped pig bone representing unfinished manufacture. Allen’s (2015) conceptual style-function model of hook attributes necessitates a focus on stylistic shank...
Style, Memory, and the Production of History: Aztec Black-on-Orange Pottery in Xaltocan, Mexico (2017)
This paper will explore shifting patterns in ceramic consumption and stylistic design during the Postclassic period (AD 900-1350) at the site of Xaltocan in the Basin of Mexico. Xaltocan is the only site in the northern Basin of Mexico associated with a large percentage of early Black-on-Orange pottery. This same pottery is rare at contemporaneous sites located a few kilometers away. Because Black-on-Orange ceramics were used by elites and commoners alike, and also cross-cut various ethnic and...
Submerged Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene Cave Sites on the Yucatan Peninsula: Recent Advances in Virtual Access and Visual Analytics (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Re-Visualizing Submerged Landscapes", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The submerged cave systems of the eastern Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico, provide access to well preserved prehistoric deposits that reveal a wealth of information about the ecology of the region and its Paleoamerican inhabitants. Ongoing interdisciplinary research efforts aim to identify and reconstruct the processes that have formed and...
Subsistence in the Peripheries: Modeling Ancient Maya Milpa Cycles in Western Honduras and Southern Belize (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Provisioning Ancient Maya Cities: Modeling Food Production and Land Use in Tropical Urban Environments" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient Maya agricultural practices varied based on heterogenous landscapes across the Maya Lowlands. While such variations may cause hesitation in comparative models, we find utility in assessing such differences to understand dynamic past human behaviors. Following the methods...
Subsistence variations and landscape use of marine foragers in southern South America. New perspectives from an isotopic zooarchaeology (2017)
Predictions based on resource distribution and abundance throughout patches (i.e. patch choice model) are critical to model human-specific decisions. However, information about past abundance or distribution of preys is rare, and archaeological evaluations are normally based on modern ecological parameters. This procedure can face some problems since species distributions are likely to have fluctuated along time as a consequence of different environmental factors, or as the product of human...
Successes and Challenges of Documenting Traditional Cultural Properties/Places (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Documenting traditional cultural properties/places (TCPs) have become much more commonplace in the world of cultural resource management. Increasingly, more and more tribes and descendant communities across the United States have successfully identified, documented, and in some cases, nominated TCPs to the National Register of Historic Places. Although...
Supplies, Status, and Slavery: Contested Aesthetics at the Haciendas of Nasca (2017)
The coastal wine and brandy-producing estates owned by the Society of Jesus in Nasca held captive a large enslaved population in the 17th and 18th centuries. With a combined population of nearly 600 slaves of diverse sub-Saharan origins, San Joseph and San Xavier de la Nasca were the largest and most profitable of the Jesuit vineyards in the viceroyalty of Peru. These estates were also home to black freepersons and itinerant indigenous and mestizo wage laborers who engaged, exchanged goods,...
Surveyed with LiDAR: Identifying Lo’i Pondfields in Windward Kohala, Hawai’i Island (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Geospatial Studies in the Archaeology of Oceania" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This project is a demonstration of GIS methods for identifying irrigated agricultural complexes in the heavily vegetated drainage of Halawa Gulch, windward Kohala. Through use of GIS tools on a LiDAR data set I created slope interpolation and elevational profile graphs of potential agricultural sites. In some cases these could be verified...
Surveying the Utility of Field Schools in Preparing Students for Compliance Work (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology Education: Building a Research Base" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cultural Resource Management (CRM) professionals lament that they felt unprepared upon graduation for entering the field of compliance archaeology and recent graduates often complain that they are not qualified for CRM jobs as posted. This anecdotal information raises the question of whether field schools and undergraduate programs...
Sustainability and Climate Change in the Ancient Maya Area: Evidence from Remote Sensing and Long-Term Land Use (2018)
The sub-tropical forests that once covered the ancient ruins of much of Mesoamerica are being rapidly removed due to modern subsistence practices. Yet, archaeological and ecological research shows that this is not the first time that extensive human-caused deforestation has occurred in this region, minimally representing the third iteration of such an event. Analyses of lake-cores and remote sensing imagery provide evidence for extensive land clearing around 1000 BCE and again after CE 250, with...
The Sustainability Lessons from the Archaeological Work of Lynne Goldstein: The Curious Environmental Stories of Aztalan, Fort Ross, and Michigan State University (2018)
Sustainability can be defined as meeting the needs of the present without depleting natural resources for the future. With such a time focused definition, there is no doubt that the meaning of sustainability changes over time and by culture. An examination of three of Lynne Goldstein’s field sites, Aztalan, Fort Ross, and Michigan State University, provides an opportunity to dissect our modern take on sustainability. At Aztalan, sustainability of Native American culture comes into question as...
Sustainable Heritage through Community Engagement and Education (2018)
In addressing the problem of burning libraries, this paper focuses on sustainable heritage through public awareness and civic engagement. Political rhetoric and limited first-hand experience has created a system whereby the impacts of climate change, coastal erosion, and rising sea levels are no longer a priority; and for students, it has become but a distant concern. This paper addresses these problems through education programs designed to (i) get students involved in the archaeology of...
Swandro, Rousay, Orkney: Between Sea and Land (2018)
The site of Swandro is on the eroding coastal fringe of the island of Rousay, Orkney and has been the focus of field training for the next archaeological generation between the University of Bradford, Archaeological Institute UHI and Hunter College, CUNY since 2010. Such sites are a finite resource, endangered by coastal erosion exacerbated by the effects of climate change. The site straddles both the shore and the land and consists of a Neolithic Chambered Cairn and a later settlement dating...
Swordfish Hunting as Prestige Signaling within Middle Holocene Fishing Communities of the Atacama Desert Coast? (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Human Behavioral Ecology at the Coastal Margins: Global Perspectives on Coastal & Maritime Adaptations" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since around 8500 years BP, the archaeological record on the Southern Coast of the Atacama Desert shows evidence of growing population density and low residential mobility. A maritime specialization process is also evident by a rich set of specialized tools, and a pronounced increase...
The Symbolic Centre: The Pre-Classic Legacy of Yaxnohcah’s E-Group (2017)
For nearly two thousand years, the E-Group at Yaxnohcah served as this city’s spiritual and administrative heart. From the early facet of the middle Pre-Classic through the Terminal Classic, as the rest of the site grew, morphed, and ultimately fell into disuse, this group continued to be remodelled, refurbished, and rededicated. Further, in a stunning testimony to social memory, and after a period of clear abandonment, it became the focus of Post-Classic activity that included the erection of...
Symbolic Conflict and Mobility in Village Formation (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper considers whether processes of symbolic conflict propel change in the spatiality of social groups from ethnographic and archaeological vantage points, particularly with respect to the mobility of agents positioned differently within and at the edges of nascent communities such as small villages. Of special interest is the interaction between...
Symbolism of Frogs and Toads in Postclassic Mesoamerica (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Animal Symbolism in Postclassic Mesoamerica: Papers in Honor of Cecelia Klein" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Frogs and toads were important animals in Mesoamerica with several species of Mexican frogs. They were especially associated with the rainy season. Some species of frogs are active above ground only in the reproductive period while some species of toads spend part of the year underground. These batrachians are...
The symbolism of the animals found inside Offering 125 of the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan (2017)
In the seventh field season of the Templo Mayor Project, we discovered various ritual deposits in an inverted pyramidal monument located west of the monolith of the Tlaltecuhtli Goddess. We determined that this space symbolized the threshold to the underworld, or realm of the dead. In this space we made the exceptional discovery of the Offering 125, associated with the ruler Ahuítzotl (1486-1502 CE). In this offering we found three flint knives that were dressed like Ehécatl-Quetzalcóatl (God of...