Jamaica (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
301-325 (1,413 Records)
Archaeologists increasingly emphasize the role of social and cultural context in understanding how indigenous groups in colonial settings appropriated foreign goods. While documentary accounts of explorers, traders, and missionaries have long been used by Pacific historians to examine foreign trade in Hawaii’s early colonial period, archaeological sites from this period have rarely been identified. As a result, we know little about how foreign goods acquired through such exchanges were actually...
Contrast and Connection in a Colonial-Era Hawaiian Hinterland: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Households on the Nā Pali Coast, Kaua‘i Island (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Hinterlands in Polynesia" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While researchers once considered the residents of hinterlands as the passive recipients of social and cultural influence, scholars have increasingly reframed these regions as dynamic zones of innovation and creative adaptation. Hinterlands have often been mentioned in investigations of indigenous sites in the context of European colonialism. Still,...
Contrasting worldviews in Hispaniola: Places and Taskscapes at the age of Colonial Encounter (2017)
Landscape has been an useful analytical tool for archaeologists for a long time. Its definition since its first uses in the discipline has grown and diversified to the point that is has been called a "usefully ambiguous" concept. However, this broad definition should not be applied everywhere and in every temporal/historical context. This concept should not be used as an straight forward analytical tool, but requires a critical contextual revision. For an alternative approach in the area of this...
The contribution of Northwestern Argentina to the metallurgical Andean tradition (2017)
The most ancient metallurgy of pre-Columbian America originated and evolved in the Andes, reaching great levels of technical sophistication. However, as a few interesting cases of these first moments of experimentation with metals come from Perú, with them comes the popular idea that any technical advance took place in the Peruvian Andes. Because complex societies later emerged in what is now Central Andes, there is a tendency to think that all technological innovations did as well. This could...
Contributions from the Archaeological Record: Climate Proxies and El Niño-Southern Oscillation (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a complex climatic phenomenon that has shaped both the environment and human behavior on the North Coast of Peru for millennia. Currently, El Niño, a component of ENSO, occurs every 3-8 years. Often associated with heavy rains that penetrate this normally arid coastal desert, ENSO brings flooding, erosion, and an...
Contributions of Osteological Evidence to Repatriation Assessments (2018)
Since the inception of the Repatriation Office at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in 1991, the documentation of Native American skeletal remains has been accomplished by the Repatriation Osteology Lab. The need for a computerized data entry system was recognized as a critical component to the success of this process along with a structured database for data access and management. The resulting software interface and SQL relational database, called Osteoware, is available to...
The Convergence of Metal Projectile Points: Assessing the Relative Influence of Function in Nonhomologous Technological Traditions (2023)
This is an abstract from the "From Hard Rock to Heavy Metal: Metal Tool Production and Use by Indigenous Hunter-Gatherers in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recently, more attention has been focused on the assessment of convergence versus divergence of technology in the archaeological record. This ties into long-standing debates concerning our ability to recognize if similar traditions resulted from diffusion or migration, as well as...
Cookbooks as Documentary Sources: The Material Culture of Kitchens and Tables from 19th-Century Puerto Rican Households (2017)
Puerto Rico’s culinary history is characterized by a blend of the different ethnicities that settled in the island after the Spanish Conquest, as well as the incorporation of pre-Columbian food ways. This ethnogenesis can be studied through the culinary traditions that conform what we now refer to as criollo. This presentation uses El Cocinero Puerto-Riqueño, the only cookbook available from the 19th century in Puerto Rico, as a primary source to address the material culture associated to...
Cooking across the Continent: Overview of Pleistocene Archaeobotanical Remains and Exploration of Biases Affecting Botanical Visibility (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Hearths, Earth Ovens, and the Carbohydrate Revolution: Indigenous Subsistence Strategies and Cooking during the Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Understanding how Indigenous communities used plants during the Pleistocene is fundamental to addressing questions about long-term ecological relationships, dietary practices, and adaptive strategies. Pleistocene plant...
Cookware and Crockery: A Form and Functional View from the Southern Bahamas (2018)
Recent archaeobotanical research on the Palmetto Junction archaeological site located in Providenciales, Turks and Caicos Islands, provides new insights into the livelihoods and subsistence practices of the peoples who inhabited this coastal region from c. AD 1200-1500 Significantly, the plant microbotanical remains, identified as primarily seeds and tubers provide evidence for a continuation in the consumption and manipulation of plant resources. During the late precolonial period people used...
Copan in the Wider Maya World (2017)
The peripheral location of Copan has always raised questions about the ways in which it related to the core of the Maya world. Clearly Copan was no isolate in the Classic Maya tradition, divorced from developments elsewhere, but what did it continue to draw from the center and what were the mechanisms underlying those contacts? What do we know about the influence of centrally placed polities in this far-flung region, which held a symbolic status in the far east, but could never be a significant...
COPING WITH CONFLICT: DEFENSIVE STRATEGIES AND CHRONIC WARFARE IN THE PREHISPANIC NASCA REGION (2017)
Warfare was a significant sociopolitical practice throughout the Andes during the Late Intermediate Period (AD 1000–1450). A salient research topic within broader investigations of conflict is how populations cope with chronic warfare. This article utilizes statistical and GIS-based analyses of architectural features and settlement patterns to reconstruct defensive coping mechanisms among fortified settlements in the Southern Nasca region of Peru. Specifically, this research evaluates how...
Copper Trade Network from Canada to South America (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pre-contact copper manufacture and trade in the Americas is poorly understood. To remedy this, over the last decade I have compiled a master database of over 85,000 pre-contact copper artifacts recovered from across the Americas, with source materials from museums, online, and private collections. I present an overview of the pre-contact copper industry in...
Coral Islands, High Islands: A Case of Continued Contact and Cultural Divergence in East Polynesia (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Hinterlands in Polynesia" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Polynesian atolls are often viewed as outlying provinces or "outer Islands" as compared to larger high islands. These often remote and diminutive coral islands are, and were, home to relatively small populations. Many coral island groups trace ancestry to, and had sustained contact with, high islands. These past connections and modern sociopolitical...
Core-Hinterland dynamics in New Zealand Archaeology (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Hinterlands in Polynesia" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The concept of ‘hinterland’ encompasses ideas of distance, marginality and challenge and is often contrasted with ‘core’, which in turn implies centrality and resource richness. In this paper we address the applicability of both these concepts in New Zealand and examine their role in understanding long-term Maori history. We suggest that high...
Cosmology, Calendars and Horizon-Based Astronomy in Ancient Mesoamerica (2015)
Cosmology, Calendars, and Horizon-Based Astronomy in Ancient Mesoamerica is an interdisciplinary tour de force that establishes the critical role astronomy played in the religious and civic lives of the ancient peoples of Mesoamerica. Providing extraordinary examples of how Precolumbian peoples merged ideas about the cosmos with those concerning calendar and astronomy, the volume showcases the value of detailed examinations of astronomical data for understanding ancient cultures. The volume...
Costs of Acquiring Lithic Materials in High Altitude Environments (Northwestern San Juan Province, Argentina): A GIS-Based Evaluation (2017)
Based on geo-archaeological studies on the Argentine–Chilean border in the southern Andes, a method is proposed for ranking lithic sources based on the quality of the material, cost of accessibility, and location along travel corridors. In the upper Las Taguas river valley (northwestern San Juan Province, Argentina, 5500–3700 masl), 32,622 lithic artifacts from 30 sites were analyzed to study the variation in the use of seven lithic sources between 10,000 and 500 cal BP. We ranked the time...
Costume and Identity in Pacific Nicaragua (2017)
Sixteen years of archaeological research along the shore of Lake Cocibolca in Pacific Nicaragua has yielded a wealth of material culture relating to domestic practice and mortuary rituals for the period from AD 500 to 1250. Among these are numerous objects of adornment, such as pendants, beads, and ear ornaments. Additional costume information is found on small ceramic figurines, primarily of females with painted decoration indicating clothing, hairstyle, tattooing, and jewelry. Based on initial...
Craft Production at Cerro Baúl: Unattached Specialization on the Wari Frontier (2017)
This paper presents preliminary analysis and interpretations of a craft production space located within a single residential patio group on the summit of Cerro Baúl, located in the Moquegua Valley of Peru on the Wari- Tiwanaku frontier. Excavations in a patio group located close to a Tiwanaku temple exposed a dense artifact midden which included obsidian points and debitage, shell and lithic beads, burnt ceramics, and bone. Evidence of subfloor offerings, marked by multiple cuy internments in...
Cranial Vault Modification in the Mariana Islands (2018)
Cultural flattening of the posterior skull, rare in the Mariana Islands, was recently observed in multiple human skeletons from a Latte Period site in Guam. Prior to this study, only one case of possible artificial cranial modification was reported for this region. The cranium of a young adult female from Songsong Village, Rota, was described as having "asymmetrical deformation in the occipital region consistent with artificial shaping practices." In a review of the ethnohistoric literature,...
Critical Dimensions in Obsidian Provenance Analysis (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Ann F. Ramenofsky: Papers in Honor of a Non-Normative Career" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Geochemistry, geology, and archaeology all conjoin contemporary provenance studies. Geochemistry provides the chemical signatures of parent geological materials and the requisite data to support attributions of archaeological artifacts to "source" (chemical type), geology provides the overarching context for understanding the...
CRM and Synthesis (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Refining Archaeological Data Collection and Management to Achieve Greater Scientific, Traditional, and Educational Values" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Today there is a growing movement to use accumulated archaeological information to contribute to discussions of general issues facing human societies, including our own. In this regard, the archaeological record is most unique and helpful when viewed at broad...
CRM Workers Are Key to Changing Archaeology: Epistemic Lessons from Quebecois Practitioners (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cultural resource management (CRM) archaeology is the most common way for archaeologists to practice their craft in North America. As the field’s major workforce, CRM workers occupy a strategic position to change the discipline. In this presentation, I argue that an epistemic injustice framework can help CRM workers organize by participating in the...
Crop Management and Domestication in Eastern North America Inspired Both Cooperative Niche Construction and Territorial Competition (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Fifty Years of Fretwell and Lucas: Archaeological Applications of Ideal Distribution Models" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Much recent research has emphasized the importance of both within-group cooperation and between-group competition in the human past. We hypothesize that the shift from foraging to food production in Eastern North America provided novel ecological conditions which impacted human sociality in the...
Cuban-Canadian Collaboration at the Sites in the Canímar River Basin and in the Cauto Region (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Cuban-Canadian research project was developed during the last 10 years between scholars from the University of Winnipeg and the University of Havana, the University of Matanzas and The Cuban Institute for Anthropology in order to investigate problems and help build a more complex picture of migration and exchange within the Greater Antilles and between...