Republic of Panama (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
1,051-1,075 (3,210 Records)
This is an abstract from the "NSF REU Site: Exploring Globalization through Archaeology 2019–2020 Session, St. Eustatius, Dutch Caribbean" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. To uncover details of past people’s day to day life, bioarchaeologists have attempted to reconstruct possible activity patterns by examining changes that occur at musculoskeletal markers, called entheseal sites (ES). While there is general agreement about the overall effect of...
Evaluating the Radiocarbon Record of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands (2018)
The Lower Pecos Canyonlands archaeological region in southwest Texas and northern Mexico at the eastern limit of the Chihuahuan Desert is best known for the excellent organic preservation and polychrome pictographs found in dry limestone rockshelters. Radiocarbon dates from the Lower Pecos Canyonlands (LPC) can be used to address broad research questions pertaining to economic strategies (e.g., earth oven plant baking and bison hunting), and settlement patterns, as well as narrower topics such...
Evaluating Wari Impact on Regional Trade Networks: Patterns of Obsidian Exchange in Cusco, Peru before and during the Middle Horizon (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Middle Horizon (600-1000 CE) in the Central Andes was a time of important changes due to the expansion of the Wari and Tiwanaku states. Many scholars have argued that these polities, the Wari in particular, had a major economic impact on local communities, including the disruption of regional exchange networks and the reorientation of long-distance trade...
Every Day Hath a Night: Nightlife and Religion in the Wari Empire, Peru (2019)
This is an abstract from the "After Dark: The Nocturnal Urban Landscape & Lightscape of Ancient Cities" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. What was daily life like after sundown in the ancient city of Wari, Peru? What events took place and who was involved in them? In this paper, activities of the night and the sacred rituals that occurred in the ancient capital of the Wari Empire are explored from evidence that denotes the advanced practice of...
Everyday Objects and the Lived Experience: Inhabiting Gufuskálar, a Late Medieval Icelandic Fishing Station (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SANNA v2.2: Case Studies in the Social Archaeology of the North and North Atlantic" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Early Icelandic fishing stations are understood primarily through the shifting role of fishing within the Icelandic economy and the importance of fish provisioning within the North Atlantic. Thus, less focus has been placed on studying the lived experiences and domestic lives of people who worked at and...
Evidence for Forest Clearance and Food Production in Lapita and Post-Lapita Fiji (2018)
Investigations at the site of Qaraqara have sought to determine the antiquity of forest clearance and food production in Fiji. Located over 25 km inland from the coast, archaeological excavation has indicated that the site was used for habitation and cultivation, producing a ceramic-rich deposit that extends to a depth of 250 cm. Geoarchaeological analyses of sediment cores from Qaraqara reached 500 cmbs, and document the formation of stable soils by 3000 BP, during the Lapita period. Plant...
Evidence of diet and food consumption from Chavin de Huantar during the Middle and Late Andean Formative (1200 – 550 BCE) (2017)
Excavations carried out at the Wacheqsa sector at Chavín de Huantar identified archaeological contexts from the Middle Formative (1200 – 900 cal BCE) and Late Formative (900 – 550 Cal BCE). In this paper we present preliminary results of starch analysis carried on in culinary equipment (ceramics) retrieved from domestic occupations from the Middle and Late Formative periods and a large midden, originated from the discard of feasting remains during the Late Formative period. Microbotanical...
Evidence of Exchange in Precolumbian Ceramics from Isla Colon, Bocas del Toro, Panama (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Materials in Movement in the Isthmo-Colombian Area" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Isla Colon, the largest island in the Bocas del Toro archipelago on Panama’s northwest coast, has a unique density of archaeological features in the region. Sitio Drago, the largest site yet found on the island, includes ceremonial and settlement mounds and a diverse and sizable assemblage of subsistence remains and cultural materials....
Evidence of Pre-Columbian Polyculture and Agroforestry in the Eastern Amazon (2018)
The scale of pre-Columbian impact on Amazonia is one of the most debated topics in archaeology and paleoecology. To address this issue, an interdisciplinary approach combining archaeological soil profiles and lake sediment cores from the lower Tapajos are used to investigate climate-human-ecosystem interactions over the past 8,000 years. Pollen and phytolith data indicate the presence of polyculture crops including Ipomea, Manihot, Zea mays, and Cucurbita. The presence of Theobroma,...
Evidence of Seaweed Use by Coastal Communities of the Atacama Desert Coast, South America (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeophycology: New (Ethno)Archaeological Approaches to Understand the Contribution of Seaweed to the Subsistence and Social Life of Coastal Populations" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Seaweeds have been part of the daily life of coastal populations worldwide. Despite the wide range of species and human uses, seaweeds have been under-researched in the human sciences and historical ecology compared to other marine...
The Evolution of Domestication in Cassava Unraveled through Historical Genomics and Archaeobotany (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Frontiers of Plant Domestication" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cassava (‘manioc' or ‘yuca' regionally) is a staple food for 800 million people worldwide. It was domesticated in the southwestern Amazon ~7,000 years ago, and archaeobotanical evidence suggests that it dispersed widely, including through Central America, shortly thereafter. In the present day, it is most widely grown in Brazil and throughout sub-Saharan...
The Evolution of Plant Resource Diversity in Precolonial Puerto Rico with Direct Implications for the Rest of the Greater Antilles (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Coloring Outside the Lines: Re-situating Understandings of the Lifeways of Earliest Peoples of the Circum-Caribbean" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Except for Jamaica, the earliest human occupations in the Greater Antilles date to ca. 6000 cal yr BP. Contrary to older ideas, the view taking shape now is that survival strategies incorporated a range of plant domesticates along with wild resources obtained through...
An Examination of Ancestry: Exploring the Peopling of the Americas Through Paleoindian Cranial Indices in Comparison with the Howells Collection (2017)
The original peopling of the Americas has puzzled researchers for decades. While some evidence points to a single wave of migration, still other data suggest two or more waves. Their reasonable estimated arrival dates range from 14,500 to over 20,000y.b.p., although some scholars push back their arrival even farther. Drawing from archaeology, genetics, historical linguistics, and physical anthropology, the peopling of the Americas debate encompasses research from a wide range of experts. In this...
An Examination of Commingled Atlantoaxial Joints by Deviation Analysis (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Continued Advances in Method and Theory for Commingled Remains" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study builds on previous research that incorporated deviation analyses into sorting commingled human remains. This presentation will analyze a relatively untested joint surface, the atlantoaxial joint, to exclude potential commingled joint pairs. Virtual models were created at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville...
Examining Archaeology, Society, and the Promise of Integrating ‘Big’ Data from Archaeological and non-Archaeological Sources. (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Vision in the Age of Big Data" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In order for digitally published data to be useful it has to be useable, and in the case of big-data, interoperable with other data sources. This paper explores one way in which this can be accomplished through an examination of how archaeological site densities across the eastern and midwestern United States relate to social factors such as...
Examining Inter-regional Interaction in the Tiwanaku State (C.E. 500-1100) using 87Sr/86Sr Analysis of Building Material from a Provincial Ceremonial Center (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent approaches to inter-regional interaction emphasizing the study of heterogenous identities in peripheral contexts advance scholarly debate about sociopolitical organization in the archaic Andean state of Tiwanaku (C.E. 500-1100). The present study employs 87Sr/86Sr analysis to determine the source region of four archaeological ichu grass (Stipa ichu)...
Examining the Impacts of Non-human Animals on Sequences of Agricultural Change (2018)
Historical sequences of agricultural change are influenced by several key factors. While much attention has been paid to the political context of agricultural production, as well as environmental changes brought about by certain techniques, less has been paid to the active manipulation of productive environments by non-human animals. Within the context of some recent theoretical advances in archaeology and ecology, it has become apparent that animals - intentionally or unintentionally introduced...
Examining the Religious Dynamics of the Columbian Exchange: Islands of Belief and Conversion (2017)
The major moments of cultural exchange in global accounts of encounter have happened across the oceans and therefore island communities have often been first to experience contact and shape the nature of this encounter. This is certainly the case in the Caribbean where the island Taino were the first to encounter Europeans in the New World. The archaeology of Mona Island provides insights into both the origins of indigenous Taíno identities and religious communities, and the processes of...
Examining the Trade-Off between Food Acquisition and Violence Avoidance: Population-Level Effects and Variability in Risk-Preference (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Life Is Risky: Human Behavioral Ecological Approaches to Variable Outcomes " session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Resource procurement and the avoidance of interpersonal violence are critical features of human survival strategies. Yet these features are often competing, requiring individuals to make trade-offs in order to maximize fitness. Recent decades of research have shown violence to be a pervasive, albeit variable,...
Excavating and Interpreting Ancestral Action – Stories from the Subsurface of Orokolo Bay, Papua New Guinea (2018)
Orokolo Bay is a rapidly changing geomorphic and cultural landscape in which the ancestral past is constantly being interpreted and negotiated. This paper examines the importance of subsurface archaeological and geomorphological features for the various communities of Orokolo Bay as they maintain and re-construct cosmological and migration narratives. Everyday activities of gardening and digging at antecedent village locations bring Orokolo Bay locals into regular engagement with buried ceramics...
Excavation and Survey in the Argentine Andes: Preliminary Field Report of the First IFR Field School in Uspallata, Mendoza (2017)
The first field school in the Uspallata valley, Mendoza, took place in 2016 and was organized by the Institute for Field Research (IFR). Its goals were to clarify the use of the landscape over the last two thousand years by people with an economy that incorporated hunting, gathering, small-scale agriculture, and possibility llama herding. Research was near one of Mendoza’s best known archaeological sites, Cerro Tunduqueral. This site’s dense rock art has been known for decades, but little is...
Excavations at the City of the Jaguar (2018)
The Mosquitia ecosystem of NE Honduras is a critical region for understanding past patterns of socio-political development and interaction between Mesoamerica and Central America. Caches of ground stone and other objects have long been noted for the region but have never before been systematically examined. Here we report on the recent partial excavation and consolidation of one of these deposits from the newly documented city of the Jaguar, Gracias a Dios, Honduras, constituting a deposit of...
Exchange Competition in Coastal Ecuador during the Late Integration Period (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Political Economies on the Andean Coast" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Exchange relationships were fundamental for the rise of political complexity in ancient coastal Ecuador. Prior to the Spanish conquest, three regional polities compete to dominate long-distance exchange systems in the coast. But, while most of the literature focuses on the Manteños, given to the rich chronicle data, few studies have emphasized on...
Exhibit Development Through Partnerships with American Indian Tribes and Museums (2018)
Decisions regarding the use of museum collections in exhibits that interpret the history and culture of American Indians have often been made by non-natives, without the input of the people the exhibits are about. History Colorado was recently presented with a situation that allowed the museum to do the opposite. The Ute Indian Museum is one of History Colorado’s community properties and is one, if not the only, state-owned museum dedicated to an American Indian group-the Ute people. In 2013,...
Expanding Archaeological Research in Mývatnssveit: Conservation, Politics, and Modernity (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Celebrating Anna Kerttula's Contributions to Northern Research" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological research in the Mývatn region of northern Iceland contributed the first regional-scale interdisciplinary archaeological program to Icelandic archaeology (e.g. Lucas 2009, McGovern et al. 2007). Until recently the regional project focused chiefly on the settlement period (beginning in the late 9th century)...