Jamaica (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
1,376-1,400 (1,413 Records)
Funding in small developing countries like Belize for archaeological research and post excavation curation remains one of our greatest challenges to preserving our tangible cultural heritage. The state of curation of human remains and artefact collections at St. John’s College in Belize City is a perfect example of what can go wrong when there is not established a properly funded and managed curation program both at the national level or the institutional level. This paper highlights the...
When Technological Analysis Becomes a Setback: The Case of the Points in the Interior of São Paulo State, Brazil (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Historically, the shift from the study of form to the study of techniques was guided by the transition from the Cultural History approach to the New Archeology. This theoretical readjustment was incorporated into Brazilian archeology decades later, strongly impacting the way that the collections was studied. Today the reality is that, although lithic...
When Traditions Are Manufactured, Used and Broken: examples from Tupian contexts in Amazonia. (2017)
One of the most insightful contributions recently put forward by Anthropology and Ethnoarchaeology is related to the concept of the "communities of practice". It is naturally connected to issues such as the relation between language and material culture, transmission, identity, persistence, structure as well as the limits of socially permitted restructuring of practices, and even the possible contingencies which might cause deep change and break the structure and, therefore, Tradition. The...
When Window Mesh is Worth It: Assessing the Potential of Microrefuse in Spatial Analysis of Hunter-Gatherer Sites (2018)
The smallest pieces of chipped stone flaking debris are often overlooked in the analysis of hunter-gatherer camps. Several factors account for this, including recovery methods, research focus, and time and cost allotted for a project. At shallowly-buried sites where features have been obliterated, concentrations of microrefuse have the potential to reveal in situ activity areas or secondary deposits formed by batch dumping. This paper presents a case study of the Mountaineer Folsom site near...
Where are the camelids? II: contributions from the stable isotope ecology to understand mobility and exchange patterns in the South Central Andes (2017)
There is a growing volume of literature arguing that camelids were a local resource for Prehispanic societies that inhabited the coastal and intermediate Andean valleys from Peru. Indeed, existing evidences show uninterrupted herding practices along the Peruvian lowlands (>2,000 masl) at 8°S-16.5°S during the interval 800 BC-1100 AD. Although camelids archeofaunal remains, textiles and iconographic representations are recurrent in low-elevation sites from the northernmost Chile (17°-19°S), the...
Where are the camelids? Mobility models and caravanning during the Late Intermediate Period (ca. 1000-1400 A.D.) in the northernmost Chile, South Central Andes (2017)
Llamas were one of the most valued animals in the Andes. Their importance has transcended the subsistence sphere as they were not only used as a source of food but also served for medicinal and ritual purposes; their fiber was fundamental for manufacturing textiles, and they were a source of symbolism and "food" for thought and ideologies. Nevertheless, their use as pack animals in exchange caravans has been prominent, stimulating intense mobility and long distance traffic between diverse...
Where Are You Staying? Lodging Facilities in San Juan, Puerto Rico (2018)
In the 19th century there was a large influx of people traveling to Puerto Rico, many stayed in lodgings throughout the capital city of San Juan. This study focuses on the hotels, guest houses and hostels within the walled city, currently known as Old San Juan, during the late 19th century and early 20th century. Using primary sources that include photographs, maps, blueprints and newspaper advertisements, the goal of my research is to establish the location of this type of businesses. Also, to...
Where condors reign: Methodological challenges in the bioarchaeology of Chachapoya cliff tombs in Peru (2017)
Traditional archaeological practice involves horizontal mapping and excavations of ancient settlements and cemeteries, but bioarchaeological research of mortuary practices in the Chachapoyas region of northeastern Peru is stymied by the challenging vertical slopes, almost constant rain, and the placement of burial structures on seemingly impossible to reach ledges on exposed rock escarpments. Exploring and registering archaeological vestiges of these cliff cemeteries requires the combination of...
Where Have All the Women in Archaeology Gone: Gender (In)Equity in Tenure-Track / Tenured Academic Jobs (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Beyond Leaky Pipelines: Exploring Gender Inequalities in Archaeological Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent studies have shown that the proportion of female faculty members in anthropological archaeology—while still below the proportion of women receiving doctoral degrees in the discipline—has increased over time. Nevertheless, there has been little consideration of the types of tenure-track / tenured...
Where Is the Chief? A Reevaluation of the Concepts of Chiefdoms and Cacicazgos in Caribbean Archaeology (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Traditionally, the terms chiefdoms and cacicazgos have been used throughout the Caribbean as synonyms of stratified sociopolitical systems encountered by Europeans at the time of contact. However, recent data unearthed by the Archaeological Project of the Ceremonial Center of Tibes put into question the applicability of these categories based on generic...
Where My Ladies At? The Fight to Erase the Gender Gap in Publication (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Feminist scholars have observed the gender disparity in archaeological knowledge production since the 1980s. Since then, both broad, discipline-wide, and smaller regionally focused studies have repeatedly demonstrated the same pattern of male-dominated publication trends. The lack of diverse voices in archaeological research has implications for the questions...
Where the Land Meets the Sea: Preceramic Complexities on the North Coast of Peru (2017)
Interdisciplinary investigation of the large coastal mounds of Huaca Prieta and Paredones and their associated domestic settlements represent Preceramic human occupation as far back as ∼14000 cal BP. Research at these sites has documented a long Preceramic sequence from the activities of the first maritime/terrestrial foragers from the late Pleistocene to early Holocene to the construction of the mounds and the introduction and development of agriculture and monumentality from the middle to late...
Where We Are Five Years Later: A Reexamination of Gender Disparities in Publication Trends in North American Archaeological Journals (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This project builds on the work of Dr. Bardolph's 2014 gender research, where she analyzed gender publication trends across 11 major archaeological journals from 1995 to 2014, assessing disparities between men and women in their number of publications. Her research put statistical value on what many researchers had before found to be true—men had higher rates...
Why did people begin to make rock art?: A study case from Central North of Chile (2017)
The origin of rock art has frequently asked from an evolutionary and cognitive perspective to understand the dawn of making images in the Paleolithic. But in many regions of the world the beginnings of rock art production occurred later. The Central North of Chile is one of these places. In this area, the practice of marking and chipping rocks surfaces started around 2.000 BCE in coherence with the transition from the Middle to the Late Holocene and the start of many transformations in the...
Why did they leave? The Wari Withdrawal from Moquegua (2017)
In Moquegua the monumental provincial center of Cerro Baúl was ritually abandoned circa 1050CE. It is at this time that Wari affiliated occupation of the sacred summit ended and production of imperial Wari goods ceased in the region. This evidence does not indicate that the empire collapsed at this time, but instead suggests when Wari officials chose to withdraw from this frontier region. Why did they leave? In this paper we discuss the changing population dynamics in Moquegua at 1050CE and how...
Why Pacific Nicaragua Should Not Be Considered Mesoamerican during Prehistory (2017)
During Pre-Columbian times, it is well-known that the societies of Mesoamerica developed monumental architecture with a high level of complexity. During this same period, much if not all of lower Central America never achieved higher complexity other than that of chiefdom level. Honduras is the one major exception. While the societies of Nicaragua had similar gods and ceramics much of this can be explained through other means. The gods that were similar were "lesser" gods and not the main gods...
Why We Should Reassess How We Define Sensitive Archaeological Data and How We Share It (2019)
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...
Why We Shouldn’t Wait until a Project is Proposed (2018)
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...
Will Summing of Radiocarbon Dates Unlock Scales of Socio-environmental Transformations? (2021)
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...
"Winged Worldviews": Human-Bird Entanglements in Northern Venezuela, A.D. 1000–1500 (2017)
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...
Women’s Territorialities within Indigenous Societies in Brazil: Past Discourses, Present Relations (2019)
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,...
"A Wondrously Fertile Country": Agricultural Diversity and Landscape Change in French Guiana (2018)
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,...
World Heritage Listings, Changing Climate, and the Salalah Doctrine: Archaeological Heritage Management at Nan Madol Monument, Pohnpei, FSM (2018)
Nan Madol monument in Pohnpei in the Federated States of Micronesia was inscribed on the World Heritage list in July 2016. The same day it was listed on the Endangered List for World Heritage sites by the Committee. The designation was meant to insist on the seriousness of conservation and management planning and it has had a profound impact. A Conservation Plan has been launched, supported in part by UNESCO, and fine-grained monitoring with geocontrols, 3-D mapping, UAV structure-in-motion...
WyoARCH: An Update on Digital Developments to Improve Professional and Public Interaction with Federal Repositories (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Both the Office of the Wyoming State Archaeologist (OWSA) and the Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office are shifting towards digital-only submissions for professional archaeological projects through two new and interconnected database-and-web-interface systems going live in 2018/19. This talk will focus on the benefits and drawbacks to the various public...
A Yard and It’s Belongin’s: Archaeological Research of Laborer Houseyards on the Morne Patat Estate, Dominica (2017)
Caribbean ‘yards’ and their associated structures have long been of interest to archaeologists determined to understand how the domestic spaces of enslaved laborers both embodied and reflected kinship ties, labor arrangements, and socio-political shifts. Often regarded as an elemental feature of Caribbean society, houseyards are the spaces where the repeated acts of daily life took place, as a result, understanding how enslaved laborers utilized and altered their domestic space over generations,...