Republic of Nicaragua (Country) (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Proebsting.

This is an abstract from the "Advancing Public Perceptions of Sustainability through Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past thirty years, landscape archaeology has been used to study Thomas Jefferson’s retreat home and plantation located in Bedford County, Virginia. A goal of this work has been to cultivate a deeper understanding of the individuals who lived and labored on Poplar Forest plantation as well as how their households...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Abby Baka. K. Blake Vernon. Madeline Mackie. Jerry Spangler. Alexandra Greenwald.

This is an abstract from the "American Foragers: Human-Environmental Interactions across the Continents" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Pleistocene-Holocene transition (PHT) archaeological record on the Colorado Plateau is notably sparse, especially when compared to the surrounding Great Basin, Rocky Mountain, and Plains regions. Whether this dearth is due to low human populations in the region during the PHT, or due to insufficient fieldwork...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aspen Kemmerlin.

This is an abstract from the "Pedagogy in the Undergraduate Archaeology Classroom" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent trends in archaeological pedagogy include the adoption of active learning models as well as courses that incorporate community and public archaeology frameworks. These shifts have primarily been centered on archaeological field schools and on-campus excavations. In contrast, despite the growing concern over legacy and orphaned...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yajaira Núñez-Cortés. Francisco Corrales-Ulloa.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Central Pacific region is one of the least explored areas of Costa Rican archaeology. Recent research conducted at Lomas Entierros and Sardinal sites allow us to contribute to the understanding of the history of occupation in the area, but also to consider the emergence, occupation and abandonment of prominent political centers inhabited during AD...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Abtosway.

The Central American elaborate metate is a perplexing group of ground stone artifacts. Their function continues to be the subject of debate, with interpretations ranging from hallucinogenic and food preparation to ritual seating. It is difficult to deny, however, the substantial labor investment represented and likely symbolic significance. X-Ray fluorescence spectroscopy has proven an invaluable tool in the non-destructive geochemical sourcing of archaeological obsidian, providing insights into...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stacy Drake.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Maya Landscapes in Northwestern Belize, Part I" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Studies of ancient Maya mortuary patterns have asserted that Maya burials do not adhere to a singular mortuary pattern (Ashmore and Geller 2005, Fitzsimmons 2009, Geller 2004, Ruz Lhuillier 1965, Welsh 1988). However, many of these same studies also suggest that a review of data specific to certain contexts (inter-site, time period,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kim Ruf.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Using Costa Rican precolumbian jade, jadeite, and greenstone artifacts from the collections of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography, this study aims to amplify and widen the range of research carried out on the Isthmo-Colombian Area. It particularly seeks to examine and discuss the role of those objects as indicators of rank and prestige as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Myrtle Shock. Laura Furquim. Jennifer Watling. Eduardo Neves.

In the Brazilian Amazon, mid-Holocene maize (Zea mays) grains have been found in archaeological deposits of the Monte Castelo shell mound. The morphological differences are pronounced between these and grains from both modern maize races of the Amazon and those found beginning around 1,500 years ago at other sites in the region. Our research explores the history, from 3900 BP, and use of this extinct maize. The presence of cultivars rich in carbohydrates in the Amazon has traditionally been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Camila Alday.

This is an abstract from the "Textile Tools and Technologies as Evidence for the Fiber Arts in Precolumbian Societies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research aims to study the earliest fabric artifacts made by marine hunter-gatherers who inhabited the Peru-Chile desert coast. Thanks to the aridity of this area, I use a remarkable amount of well-preserved plant-fiber materials, most belonging to the world’s oldest Chinchorro mummies buried...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Blennerhassett.

Chicha was consumed in large quantities during social gatherings and feasting events at a number of ceremonial locales including hinterland sites, in the Jequetepeque River Valley, Peru, during the Late Moche. Face-neck jars were used in the brewing and serving of corn beer and depict supernaturals and elite lords with elaborate headdresses and earspools. This research showed the degree to which face-neck jars were standardized in manufacture and design and how this may have contributed to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Hoopes.

The history of archaeology is replete with assertions about lost tribes, sunken continents, and ancient aliens in the context of failed hypotheses, deliberate hoaxes, and intentional frauds. Williams chronicled these, in the process helping others hone skills in critical thinking. New technologies proliferate spurious explanations of the past that archaeologists must continually address. As the Talmud says, "It is not your responsibility to finish the work of perfecting the world, but you are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paula Molloy.

In his 1991 classic, Fantastic Archaeology: The Wild Side of North American Archaeology, Stephen Williams set out to document the ways in which fraud has masqueraded as truth in North American prehistory. More than just a catalog of the improbable and unfalsifiable, Fantastic Archaeology also served as gateway to scientific archaeology for many in the general public. Smitten with a "weird tale," many in the Cambridge, MA area found their way to Prof. Williams’ Harvard University course upon...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Juliet Wiersema.

Throughout the late Spanish colonial period, the Dagua River in Colombia’s Cauca Valley was a multi-cultural backwater. Its shores were inhabited by mestizos, mulattos, slaves, and free slaves, with a minority of Indians and Spaniards. While this area was mined for gold and offered one of few routes to the Pacific from Colombia’s interior, the Dagua River region was largely cut off from global trade and colonial currents due to its geographical remoteness. 50 days distant from Cartagena and 14...

DOCUMENT Citation Only María Albeck. Maria Amalia Zaburlin. Jose Luis Tolaba. Diego Martin Basso. Maria Elena Tejerina.

Pueblo Viejo de Tucute is the southernmost prehispanic (Late Intermediate Period) settlement with altiplanic roots so far recorded. It has nearly 600 dwellings installed in the mountain range southwest from Casabindo in the Puna de Jujuy, an altiplano like highland. The site is unique in the area, with particular architectonic features that differ from contemporaneous sites (Puna de Jujuy, Quebrada de Humahuaca, Valle Calchaquí). The houses are round, well built in cut stone with a diameter that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam Benfer.

Before 1492, the human communities that inhabited the shores of Lake Cocibolca in Central America engaged in dynamic interactions and exchange networks, traveling across the land and canoeing or rafting on the lake and rivers to trade goods and communicate with their neighbors. Evidencing this travel network, archaeological studies have documented an abundance of ceramics and carved stone that the past inhabitants of the Lake Cocibolca region produced and traded widely during the later...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Natasha Fernandez-Preston.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The purpose of this research is to trace food practices in the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico for the last century (1919-2018) and relate them to the processes of colonial racial capitalism. Since the mid-twentieth century, Puerto Rico went from being a mostly agricultural archipelago to an archipelago where there is barely any agriculture and that imports...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Myra Jean Tuggle.

This is an abstract from the "Research and CRM Are Not Mutually Exclusive: J. Stephen Athens—Forty Years and Counting" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Above the 400 foot sea cliff at Kealakekua Bay on the leeward Kona coast of Hawai‘i are the remnants of extensive pre-Contact Hawaiian agricultural infrastructure. Inventory survey and data recovery on 100-plus acres at the top of the sea cliff provided an opportunity to examine a relatively large...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Boyd Dixon. Michael Dega.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Feasting and gift-giving in the ethnography, history, and archaeology of native peoples in Southeast Asia and its islands in the Western Pacific are often given primacy in accounts of academic fieldwork. Some ethnohistoric accounts on the pre-Contact and Spanish Colonial Chamorro people indigenous to Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands of Micronesia also...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Whitney Goodwin.

This is an abstract from the "Ceramics and Archaeological Sciences 2024" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. At the site of Selin Farm (AD 300–1000) in northeastern Honduras, recent research revealed repeated episodes of large-scale feasting occurring over a period of nearly a thousand years leading up to major shifts in local social and political organization (Goodwin 2019; Reeder-Myers et al. 2021). Shell midden mounds at the site contain large...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Geoffrey McCafferty.

This is an abstract from the "Tales of the Feathered Serpent: Refining Our Understanding of an Enigmatic Mesoamerican Being" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Polychrome pottery from the Greater Nicoya region of Central America prominently features ‘feathery serpents’ that have been associated with the Mixteca-Puebla tradition of greater Mesoamerica. A closer look at the variety of ‘feathery serpents’ has discriminated between more Borgia-like images...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Palus.

This is an abstract from the "In Search of Solutions: Exploring Pathways to Repatriation for NAGPRA Practitioners (Part III)" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Federal agencies and repositories holding federal collections have been bound to curation standards often developed without consideration for nontangible values and needs and a legacy of collecting practices intended to preserve the past yet uninformed by the interests and concerns of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Corey Bowen. John Janusek.

A regimented canon of ceramic production emerged at the site of Tiwanaku in the 5th-6th century AD, coinciding with the transformation of the site from a local ritual center to a regional political authority. The highly standardized range of forms and painted imagery it produced presents great potential for an extensive analysis of both complete and fragmented Tiwanaku-style vessels. To date, most analyses of Tiwanaku ceramic vessels have categorically centered on form in order to facilitate...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emilie LeBrell. Geoffrey G. McCafferty. Sharisse D. McCafferty.

This is an abstract from the "Mesoamerican Figurines in Context. New Insights on Tridimensional Representations from Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Female figurines of the Greater Nicoya region feature a 2000-year history of thematic continuity. During the Formative and Classic periods (locally Tempisque and Bagaces periods), figurines were often red-slipped, nude females in a seated, kneeling or standing position with hands on hips;...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sonia Alconini.

Samaipata was one of the largest centers of the Southeastern Inka frontier. Multifunctional in nature, it was an important advance point toward the tropical lowlands. Despite the intrusions of the Guaraní-Chiriguanos, this region witnessed complex processes of settlement reorganization. This was particularly the case of the fertile valley of Mairana, an important breadbasket of this frontier outpost. Occupied by the Mojocoya and Gray Ware archaeological cultures, their inhabitants produced...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tracy Martens.

In 2008, Chris Carter of the Australian National University (ANU) and Calogero Santoro of Universidad de Tarapacá de Arica (UTA) excavated at Caleta Vitor, located at the coastal mouth of Quebrada Chaca in northern Chile. The site was occupied from at least 13,000 BP through to the Spanish invasion and came to world attention when it was featured on ABC Catalyst (ABC iView , 2009). This research project is aimed at identifying and establishing the provenience of the well preserved textiles and...