Republic of Panama (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
201-225 (2,509 Records)
The archaeological site of Pampa de las Llamas-Moxeke in the Casma Valley, Peru is an architectural complex comprising two opposing large platform mounds united by a sequence of aligned rectangular platforms and structures. The site was studied mainly in the 20th Century by various investigators; the most recent of whom carried out intensive excavations in the 1980s aiming to produce exact dates and explain the function of the settlement. This previous work suggested that the complex dates to...
Assessing Destruction Risk of Cultural Resources: Primary and Secondary Impacts of Climate Change on the Archaeological Record (2018)
Coastal archaeological and historic sites increasingly face primary impacts of climate change, including sea level rise, flooding, and erosion. As cultural sites are subjected to destructive processes, action is generally limited to mitigation and salvage of immediately threatened significant sites, while their destruction by the resettlement of affected communities has been given little attention. This secondary impact of climate change threatens sites outside of the immediate zone of flooding...
Assessing Food-Based Trade and Mobility in the Chincha Valley (Peru) Using Portable X-Ray Fluorescence Spectrometry (2018)
Peru is commonly known for having the largest empire in pre-Columbian America, but comparatively little is known about the subsistence practices of the pre-Inca communities that existed in the inland valley of Chincha during the Late Intermediate Period (AD 1000-1476). The Chinchas formed a powerful socio-economic entity within the Chincha Kingdom in part of the southern region of Peru nearest to the Pacific Ocean. Our research tests the hypothesis that individuals relied more heavily on a...
Assessing Impacts of Late Holocene Environmental Variability on the Demography of Prehispanic Societies in Northern Chile (18°-29°S) (2018)
Agricultural communities began to spread over much of the Atacama Desert (18°-29°S) at 3.5 ka BP, triggering unprecedented levels of population growth. In inland areas and particularly along desert oases, this phenomenon featured increasing complexity in food-production systems and sedentary lifestyles with population aggregating in architecturally complex villages. Whereas, littoral populations maintained marine foraging and fishing strategies with limited inland food-resources. Both lifestyles...
Assessing Knowledge of Native American Tribes and Their Heritage: An interactive Poster (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The practice of American archaeology, and the knowledge it produces, have impacts on the social, economic, and political policies and laws which affect Native American Tribes and Native American community members. Non-Native cultural heritage and resource managers, academic researchers, and museum staff who work with Tribal heritage often lack basic knowledge...
Assessing prehistoric herding strategies through stable isotope analysis: a case study from the Dry Puna of Argentina (2017)
The relationship between human groups and animal populations in the past can be studied through stable isotope analysis of zooarchaeological remains. More specifically, the isotopic analysis of domestic animals’ tissues can help us to investigate herd composition, diet and mobility strategies employed by herders in the past. However, before these methods can be applied to resolve such questions, variation in isotopic composition and its causes must be addressed and explored by a modern reference...
Assessing Shellfish Discard for Discerning between Field Processing or Residential Relocation in the Subtropical Pacific Coast of South America (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Human Behavioral Ecology at the Coastal Margins: Global Perspectives on Coastal & Maritime Adaptations" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Variability in site structure and shellfish assemblages from hunter-gatherer sites in the Pacific coast of Los Vilos (31°50 ’S, South America) has been attributed to changes in field processing decisions across the Holocene. However, these changes have not been evaluated considering...
Assessing Systemic Stress from Archaeological Hormones Recovered from Hair of Human Sacrifices at Huanchaquito Las Llamas, Peru (~1450 CE) (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Excavations at the Peruvian northern coastal site of Huanchaquito-Las Llamas (HLL) revealed the largest mass human sacrifice event in the Americas, with more than 400 sacrificed children, women, and camelids governed under the Chimú State. Dated to the Chimú’s imperial decline (circa 1450 CE), preliminary genetic analyses indicate that these children were...
Assessing the Chronological Variation Within the Western Stemmed Tradition (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Current Perspectives on the Western Stemmed Tradition-Clovis Debate in the Far West" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Western Stemmed Tradition (WST) projectile points exhibit considerable morphological variability, which may reflect difference in function, ethnolinguistic affiliation, resharpening/rejuvenation, or age. These ideas represent hypotheses that remain to be tested, and rejecting one or more of them will...
Assessing the Population History of the Atacama Desert using 3D Geometric Morphometric Methods (2017)
Many scholarly debates in South American archaeology have centered on the discovery and cranial morphology of the earliest inhabitants known as Paleoamericans that predate 8,000 years BP. Although it was initially hypothesized that cranial differences between Paleoamericans and later populations may reflect distinct biological populations or migration patterns that occurred after the initial colonization of South America, recent genetic data show biological continuity throughout the Holocene in...
Assessing the Taphonomic Alterations of 29 Human Anatomical Specimens Confiscated in Louisiana (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Anatomical specimens used for teaching frequently become available for sale online. In one Louisiana case, authorities confiscated 29 human anatomical specimens. These specimens are used to highlight the breadth of information that can be gathered from such isolated human remains. Anatomical specimens are easily identified by the techniques used to prepare...
Assessing Threats to Coastal Sites: A Trial Run on St Croix, USVI (2018)
The International Association for Caribbean Archaeology's Endangered Sites Task Force is concerned about the threat to coastal sites by rising sea levels. In March 2017, a small team of Mercer University non-archaeology students participated in a project on ST Croix, USVI, to determine how local populations could best provide measurable information to professional archaeologists and cultural resource managers. The five-day project assessed ten sites assigned by the USVI Territorial...
Astronomical Meanings in Hearths from the Middle Preceramic villages of Paloma and the Late Preceramic site of Buena Vista in Central, Coastal Perú (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Illuminated Communities: The Role of the Hearth at the Beginning of Andean Civilization" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Hearths from over 50 domestic structures at the stratified Middle Archaic fishing villages of Paloma, Chilca Valley, Peru, were found within circles of house poles. Domestic structures were burned and abandoned, sometimes with an old male burned on top. Burials in the last occupation were placed with...
At the Dusk of Chavín: Social, Economic, Political, and Ideological Implications as Viewed from a Fishing Settlement in the North Coast of Peru (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Peering into the Night: Transition, Sociopolitical Organization, and Economic Dynamics after the Dusk of Chavín in the North Central Andes" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent progress in the refinement of absolute dates recovered at the ceremonial and pilgrimage center of Chavín de Huántar helps to reconsider the regional effects of the Chavín Sphere of Interaction in the north coast of Peru. These new data suggest...
At the Intersection: Destabilizing White Creole Masculinity at the 18th-Century Little Bay Plantation, Montserrat, West Indies (2017)
Guided by contemporary humoral theory, 18th-century Europeans believed climate and bodily humors to be mutually influential and correlated in their effect on human temperament, appearance, and behavior. Resettlement to a new climate was understood to create humoral imbalances fundamentally affecting an individual’s character and even physical appearance including skin color. Subject to the effects of tropical climate British settlers to the West Indies thus transformed were viewed as...
Attaining Goals Together: Collaborative Heritage Resource Stewardship and the Forest Service (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me: What Have We Learned Over the Past 40 Years and How Do We Address Future Challenges" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Passage of federal environmental laws during the 1960’s forced otherwise autonomous bureaucracies to accept professions into their ranks that previously had no place. Public lands agencies like the Forest Service were required to employ archaeologists once the National Historic...
Attempt of Modelization of the First Settlements in America at Pleistocene Based on the New Archaeological Sequences in Piaui (Brazil) (2017)
The research our teams are conducting in the parc of Capivara in Brazil since 2008 lead to reveal 6 new Pleistocene archaeological sequences . The sites are all located within a 20 km area and stem from different sedimentary and topographic environments including: open air, rock shelter, cave at the bottom of cuesta or in karst. Each of the sites shows different sedimentary sequences, including different archeological horizons and different typo-technical compositions. The dating that we have...
Authentication of Museum-Curated Tsantsas Utilizing Next Generation Sequencing Technology (2017)
The Shuar, native to Northern Peru and Southern Ecuador, prepared shrunken heads to serve as trophies following battle, in response to their cultural beliefs. Authentic shrunken heads (tsantsas) were prepared in a precise manner and exhibit key morphological characteristics. Forgeries, including primates and inauthentic human preparations, were marketed to tourists and private collectors to profit from the "savage" image surrounding the Shuar. Inauthentic shrunken heads were prepared in a...
Authorship and Practice in Guatemalan Archaeology through an Intersectional Lens (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. This intersectional study explores gender and nationality in the production and dissemination of knowledge in Guatemalan archaeology. We examine publication trends in the memoirs of Guatemala’s annual archaeology symposium between 1990 and 2019. As the country’s main venue of dissemination of archaeological...
Automatic Identification of Shipwrecks Using Digital Elevation Data and Deep Learning (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The objective of this project was to create a deep learning model that uses digital elevation data to automatically identify shipwrecks. The model uses a convolutional neural network architecture and has a F1 score of 0.92. Deep learning modeling based on remotely sensed imagery is a rapidly expanding area of research within the field of computer science, but...
Aventura’s Households from Commoners to Elites (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Households at Aventura: Life and Community Longevity at an Ancient Maya City" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Household archaeology provides a powerful lens to understand people, their daily lives, and the myriad social, political, economic, and environmental relations that link people, households, and communities to broader societies. For its first decade of research, the Aventura Archaeology Project conducted a study...
Ayllu There in the Upper Marañón? Founding Ancestors and Political Dynamics in the Rapayán Region of Ancash/Huánuco during the LIP (2018)
Andean scholars generally conceive the ayllu as representing a group of people who consider themselves to be related by common descent and who collectively possess and exploit resources (land and water). In many regions of the Andes during late pre-Hispanic times, ayllu members retraced their common origin and kinship ties through the celebration of a mummified founding ancestor. Ayllus could either be small or large and often the smaller units were hierarchically integrated into the larger...
"Back to the Soil": Community Archaeology and Heritage Tourism in Eleuthera, Bahamas (2016)
Over the past several decades there has been a great deal of archaeological excavation and analysis of both U.S. and Caribbean plantations. However, many of these research projects are designed to address archaeological research questions rather than some of the pressing problems faced by descendant communities concerning their heritage. In 1994, UNESCO launched their “Slave Route” project, with the aim of “contributing to a better understanding of the causes, forms of operation, issues and...
Bag-Loading Tradition for Building Precincts in Los Batanes, Sama, Peru (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The use of shicras – Quechua for plant fiber net-bags made to contain and carry building materials/construction fill – has being traced to the Archaic Period on the Central and North Coast of Peru. These bags contained rocks and other materials to prevent the collapse of wall foundations and to prevent collapse during earthquakes. However, there are no...
"Bai Kui", the True Garden; "Ava-Ti", the White Population: Horticultural Intensification in Lowland South America (2017)
The "true garden" or "Bai Kui" of the Kashinawá, Pano language speakers in the state of Acre, Brazil, is described here as an example of the original horticulture which occupied the arc of dry forests in southeastern Amazon. Improved forms of manioc, peanuts, and peppers evolved during 9,000 years of cultivation and were exchanged with farmers on the Pacific Coast to improve garden diversity in an ancient and far-flung cultural interaction sphere. The connectivity required for long-distance...