California (State / Territory) (Geographic Keyword)
49,751-49,775 (50,621 Records)
The use of drone based photogrammetry is now well established in archaeology for surface modeling and mapping of archaeological sites. The Arizona Department of Emergency and Military Affairs (AZDEMA) is sponsoring a number of longterm projects on their properties. One project will be using traditional drone photogrammetry to create high resolution maps to assess plant communities, plant health, and canopy structure as a way of exploring links between vegetation and other survey methods. A...
Using Extant Photographs of Ceramic Collections for Geometric Morphometric Archaeological Research (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Emerging Voices in Mogollon Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Modern archaeology is constantly seeking innovative, nondestructive ways to learn new things about the past from existing collections. One powerful tool in the modern arsenal is Geometric Morphometrics (GMM), a method of quantitative shape analysis that can be applied to study technological style and communities of practice through material...
Using Faunal Stable Isotopes to Assess Past Hunting Practices and Landscape Modification Along the Feather River, CA (2018)
Isotopic studies of faunal remains provide an ecological framework from which to interpret human behavior, including diet, subsistence, settlement, and mobility. In this study, we present isotopic analysis of four well-dated sites that span a 3500-year record along the Feather River, the biggest tributary of the Sacramento River located in Northern Central California. Through carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur stable isotopes we explore the effects of human population growth on the type(s) of browse...
Using Fish Remains from Paisley Caves, Oregon to Explore Hunter-Gatherer Lifeways and Lake Level History in the Chewaucan Basin over the Past 14,000+ Calendar Years (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Paisley Caves holds some of the earliest evidence for human occupation in North America. The site’s fish remains have received only limited attention before now. Our pilot study sought to assess the potential for using a sample of the fish remains to help reconstruct lake level history, better understand regional paleoenvironments, and gain insights on forager...
Using Food Web Models to Examine Desert Networks in the American Southwest and Western Australia (2018)
Archaeological studies benefit from rich ecological data, yet linking ecological data to narratives of the past can be difficult. Here I use trophic network modeling to understand both Ancestral Pueblo and Australian Aboriginal food webs, comparing these systems for a greater understanding of human and environmental resilience. Here I show that Ancestral Pueblo people connected themselves into a greater environmental web and use network analysis to examine how the changing network properties of...
Using Formation Process Models Of Educational Institutions At Lake Valley Mining District, New Mexico To Create Public Archaeology Progams (2016)
This paper will use two principle models of site formation processes to understand an emerging field of institutional archaeology that of school house archaeology. By using the mining community of Lake Valley, Sierra County, New Mexico, these two models can compare and contrast the social strata and life-cycle of two school houses that shows the history of the community from founding to the closing of the town in 1954. The existing archaeology and features of will be compared and contrasted by...
Using Geochemistry To Differentiate Copper On The Spanish Colonial Frontier (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Plus Ultra: An examination of current research in Spanish Colonial/Iberian Underwater and Terrestrial Archaeology in the Western Hemisphere." , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Over the past three years, more than 200 copper vessels from archaeological and museum collections deriving from Spanish colonial contexts were analyzed with a handheld portable X-Ray Fluorescence analyzer (pXRF). Originally developed...
Using GIS and Lidar to Re-imagine Historic Immigrant Chinese Placer Mining Landscapes (2016)
The Kam Wah Chung building is a National Historic Landmark with a trove of artifacts and documents recovered from the historic "Chinatown" in John Day, Oregon. Interpretation of the site has been hampered by loss of associated immigrant Chinese gold mining remains due to later development. Recent work in the neighboring Malheur National Forest has identified an extensive placer mining complex with associated Chinese artifacts and features. The mining complex was located using lidar and GIS...
Using GIS for Public Outreach: Making Archaeological Data Accessible to Students, Stakeholders, and the General Public (2020)
This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Geographical Information Systems (GIS) has the potential to make archaeological data accessible to broad audiences, both as a medium for presenting information and as a platform for incorporating diverse perspectives into archaeological research. Drawing on our experiences working with students, stakeholders, and the general public as case studies, we examine the barriers to using...
Using GIS to Critique Federal Agricultural Policy of the 1930s on the Hector Backbone (2013)
Archaeologists typically focus on the mechanics of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). GIS also possesses the capability to incorporate spatial data at a scale previously unfathomable by archaeologists and to aid in interpretations of social processes in the past. In order to evaluate the ways that GIS can be used as an interpretive tool I will critically examine the Federal Government’s purchase of over one hundred farms in the 1930s located along the Hector Backbone in Schuyler County New...
Using Historic Archaeology To Uncover Previously Ignored Collections (2016)
In 1891 George Dorsey conducted excavations Ancon, Peru, as archaeology was still a fledgeling discipline, and his conclusions reflect his naïveté of modern field methods to come. He assessed that the remains derived from one community, and classified the burials as elite/non-elite. From what we know today, there were two distinct time periods, between which mortuary practices and material culture changed dramatically. The collection has been repeatedly ignored due to the theorized disappearance...
Using Landscape Learning to Explore Diachronic Change within the Western Stemmed Tradition (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Far West Paleoindian Archaeology: Papers from the Next Generation" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Western Stemmed Tradition (WST) spanned as much as 5,000 years in the Great Basin. However, due to deflationary erosion, more refined control within this wide temporal range remains elusive. Thus, temporally sequencing WST sites, subtypes, and their diagnostic artifacts is currently difficult, often unattainable, and...
Using Lithic Conveyance to Reconstruct Paleoindian Cultural Landscapes in the Great Basin (2018)
Archaeologists commonly use the geographic patterning of sourced artifacts to understand how prehistoric cultures used their landscapes, yet exactly what this patterning indicates remains unclear. The Paleoindian literature reflects a tendency to assume that toolstone conveyance reflects direct acquisition (i.e., mobility) motivated by subsistence and technological concerns, rather than acquisition (i.e., exchange) motivated by social concerns. Yet the challenge of actually distinguishing...
Using Material Culture to Understand Freed African-American Lifeways in Early 19th Century Borderland Communities of Indiana and Illinois (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Silenced Lifeways:The Archaeology of Free African-American Communities in the Indiana and Illinois Borderlands" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This paper presents a comparative analysis of historic assemblages from two Antebellum African-American communities to better understand resilience among these freed groups. Recently excavated materials from the Lick Creek Community within the Hoosier National Forest and the...
Using Mobile Sonar and 3D Animated Web Modeling for Public Outreach and Management of Historic Shipwrecks in Lake Michigan (2016)
In 2015, the Indiana Lake Michigan Coastal Management Program expanded efforts to connect the public with historical archaeology and better manage submerged cultural resources. For the first time in the Great Lakes region, a mobile sonar survey was conducted in combination with a diver-directed sonar survey to collect three-dimensional data for four shipwrecks. The resulting compilation of remote sensing technology and 3D animated web modeling provides new information about previously...
Using Moments of Inertia to Determine the Positions of Atlatl Weights on a Throwing Board (1999)
J. Whittaker: Unpublished class paper, Anthropology Dept, Grinnell College. Moment of inertia is the tendency of an object to maintain its path of rotation and increases with the mass of the object and the distance from the axis of rotation. Thus a weight on a swinging atlatl stabilizes its motion and should increase accuracy. The greater the weight and the further from the handle, the more the effect, but the force necessary to swing the atlatl also increases. Using 5 prehistoric atlatls...
Using National Historic Preservation Act/National Register of Historic Places Guidelines to Develop a Maritime Cultural Landscape Schema in Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary (2016)
In September of 2014, Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary’s boundaries expanded from 448 to 4,300 square miles, more than doubling the amount of cultural resources co-managed by NOAA and the State of Michigan within the sanctuary area. Pursuant to Section 110 of the National Historic Preservation Act, and in accordance with NOAA Office of National Marine Sanctuary [ONMS] directives, Thunder Bay initiated a review of newly included cultural resources to evaluate their eligibility within the...
Using Photogrammetric Scanning to Account for Vertical Control in Underwater Excavations (2017)
In terrestrial archaeology, creating a vertical stratigraphic profile of a site is crucial to fully understanding site formation processes and wider contexts. Vertical profiling in underwater archaeology however, is more challenging and time consuming. As a result, profile data is often not collected unless there is a distinct difference in stratigraphic layers or it is reserved for more crucial aspects of an excavation such as ship timbers. The purpose of this paper is to propose that...
Using Photogrammetry for Assessment and Monitoring of Site Formation Processes Acting on Vessels from the 1733 Spanish Plate Fleet in the Florida Keys (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Recent Development of Maritime and Historical Archaeology Programs in South Florida" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Using the latest photomosaic software, detailed models were created for two shipwrecks from the 1733 Spanish Plate Fleet located in the Florida Keys. Photographs were taken on the shipwrecks of Nuestra Señora del Populo and Nuestra Señora de Balvaneda and the mosaics proved to be both time...
Using Predictive Modeling to Evaluate Changes in Great Basin Paleoindian Settlement Systems through Time (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Great Basin underwent considerable environmental change during the Pleistocene–Holocene transition, such as lower precipitation, increased temperatures, and the diminishment of lakes and wetlands. Archaeologists have long hypothesized that people responded by altering their settlement-subsistence strategies. Some models outlining these responses...
Using Remote Sensing to Re-evaluate Prehistoric Land Use in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Remote sensing has been used extensively the past several years to study prehistoric land use in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. Previous land use models for Chaco predict economic activities such as agriculture and water management near some of the major sites within the canyon, and these models have been critical to understanding how land use contributed to the...
Using Rules from the Texas Lower Pecos to Interpret Jornada Mogollon Rock Art (2018)
Four principal rules of interpretation for Pecos River Style rock art of the Lower Pecos region of Texas are proposed. These rules were proposed based on a commonality between Pecos River Style and the iconography of historic Corachol-Aztecan speaking tribes such as the sixteenth century Mexica of central Mexico and the present-day Huichol of western Mexico. This presentation shows how the same rules can be applied to the interpretation of the rock art of other prehistoric Corachol-Aztecan...
Using Scientific Diving as a Tool to Tell the Story of Human History: Bringing the São José Paquete de Africa Into Memory. (2016)
Scientific diving is a powerful tool that can be used to tell the story of human history and cultural behavior. On December 3, 1794, the São José Paquete de Africa, a Portuguese ship transporting over 500 captured Africans, left Mozambique, on the east coast Africa, for what was to be a 7,000 mile voyage to Maranhao, Brazil, and the sugar plantations. The ship was scheduled to deliver the enslaved Africans in February, 1795, some four months later. However, the journey lasted only 24 days....
Using Sourcing Studies to Examine Paleoindian Lithic Technological and Socioeconomic Organization in the Great Basin (2017)
In many regions of the world, archaeologists use sourcing studies to document patterns of toolstone procurement and conveyance that, in turn, inform their understanding of prehistoric lithic technological and socioeconomic organization. This is certainly true of Charlotte Beck and George T. Jones’s research in eastern Nevada, where the sourcing of obsidian, andesite, and dacite artifacts has figured prominently in their study of Paleoindian lifeways. In this paper, I briefly reflect on Beck and...
Using STEM to Educate the Public about Cultural Diversity in the San Antonio Missions (2019)
This is an abstract from the "NPS Archeology: Engaging the Public through Education and Recreation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Twice a year Western National Parks Association has a Mexican Art Exhibit featuring pottery from Mata Ortiz at the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park Visitor Center. The pottery from Mata Ortiz follows the centuries-old ceramic tradition of Casas Grandes culture of the Chihuahuan desert. Park interpretive...