Commonwealth of Dominica (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
351-375 (1,623 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In July of 1995, the Soufrière Hills volcano began a series of eruptions that would fundamentally alter the communities and landscapes of the small Caribbean island of Montserrat. By the turn of the millennium, two-thirds of the island had been abandoned or destroyed, and a comparable proportion of the population had relocated abroad. This paper presents the...
Contemporary Views on Clovis Learning and Colonization (2018)
The timing of the earliest colonization of North America is debatable, but what is not at issue is the point of origin of the early colonists: Humans entered the continent from Beringia and then made their way south along or near the Pacific Coast and/or through a corridor than ran between the Cordilleran and Laurentide ice sheets in western North America. At some point they abandoned their arctic-based tool complex for one more adapted to an entirely different environment. The dispersal of that...
Contested Landscapes in the Caribbean: Revisiting Colonial Representations of Indigenous Political Hierarchy, Borders and Movement (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Contested Landscapes: The Archaeology of Politics, Borders, and Movement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. What we know today of the Indigenous inhabitants of the Caribbean is the result of a process of cultural interpretation and representation originating from the colonial enterprise. For the island of Haytí, later renamed as Hispaniola by Columbus, the first Spanish chroniclers identified a set of indigenous...
Contesting Dispossession. Marronage´s Mobility and the Emergence of a Landscape, 17th and 18th Century, Colombia. (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Contested Landscapes: The Archaeology of Politics, Borders, and Movement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Access to land is still a problem in Latin America and the Caribbean (as well as other places, mostly located in the global South). In that context, the landscapes and our analysis of them are directly crossed by power relations, conflict, the creation of borders, contestation of hierarchies, etc. The current...
Continuidad y cambio: un estudio comparativo e interpretativo de los espacios domésticos de Mawchu Llacta (2017)
Una de las más grandes reformas llevadas a cabo durante el Virreinato en el Perú fue la Reducción General de Indios, que consistió en el traslado y reubicación de las poblaciones indígenas. Este proceso de cambios no solo se enfocó en la generación de una nueva forma de asentamientos humanos, sino que también afectaron con toda una estructura social, que a su vez repercutió en el modo de vida y bagaje cultural materializado en la distribución, uso y representación de espacios, es este el caso de...
The Continuing Archaeological Investigations on the Northeast Coast of San Salvador Island, Bahamas (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in the Archaeology of the Bahama Archipelago" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Youngstown State University archaeologists have conducted research on San Salvador Island since 1995, initially under the direction of Gary Fry and, later, of Thomas Delvaux and Matt O’Mansky. This research has focused on three sites on the east side of the island: the North Storr’s Lake site (SS-4), the Fresh Lake site (SS-7), and...
Continuity and Change in Chiriquí Period Village Organization (2018)
Chiriquí Period (700-1500 CE) archaeological sites have been the subject of systematic scientific research for more than 50 years. However, archaeologists are only recently beginning to define and understand regional and temporal variations in artistic styles, settlement patterns, and village organization. In this paper, I summarize emerging patterns in village placement, cemetery organization, and the construction of public space. Continuities in the elements of constructed spaces, such as the...
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...
Contributions of Richard G. Cooke, PhD, MBE, to the Study of Isthmo-Colombian Iconography (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Unraveling the Mysteries of the Isthmo-Colombian Area’s Past: A Symposium in Honor of Archaeologist Richard Cooke and His Contributions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Richard Cooke's pioneering studies in zooarchaeology of the Neotropics have redefined the way that archaeologists, art historians, ethnohistorians, and ethnographers utilize data from faunal remains, not only in the reconstruction of past environments,...
Contributions of the Proyecto Santa Maria (PSM) to the Prehistory of Central Pacific Panama and Beyond (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Unraveling the Mysteries of the Isthmo-Colombian Area’s Past: A Symposium in Honor of Archaeologist Richard Cooke and His Contributions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The PSM was a multidisciplinary project in Central Pacific Panama with the major fieldwork carried out during the years 1981 through 1986. The goals of the proposed research were to identify the relationships between settlement types and subsistence...
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...
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...
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...
“The Cottage,” a Small Viking Age Dwelling in North Iceland (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Small Dwellings on the Viking Frontier: New Research from Kotið, North Iceland" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster serves as an introduction and overview to a poster session on the archaeology of Kotið (“The Cottage”), a small dwelling established during the initial Viking Age settlement of Iceland in the late ninth century. Kotið represents a previously unknown and uninvestigated site type in the early Viking...
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...
Crafting and Trading along the Banks of the Telica: Artisan Communities and Regional Interaction in Eastern Honduras and Beyond (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Postclassic Mesoamerica: The View from the Southern Frontier" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper focuses on the regional role that two artisan communities, Chichicaste and Dos Quebradas, played as producers of pottery and obsidian blades within regional exchange networks. Chichicaste pottery has been recovered from many Honduran sites as well as from El Salvador and northern Nicaragua. The wide distribution of...
Crafting Process and Usage of "Axe-God" Jade Pendants in Pre-Columbian Costa Rica (2018)
The "axe-god" jade pendants form the majority of Costa Rican jade artifacts. These pendants were valued for their "celt like shape" and did not function as real axes. Interestingly, some pendants do have abrasions on their axe edges. Because of that, it has been proposed that prior to being reworked into a corporal accessory, some of these pendants had been used as real axes or other tools. The "axe-god" pendants consist of two parts; the superior part with decoration of human or animals, and...