Republic of Panama (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
2,401-2,425 (3,210 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We analyzed 73 human bone/tooth samples from the following archaeological sites of the Lambayeque Valley, North Peru: Huaca Rajada, Huaca Zarpán, Huaca Santa Rosa, Huaca El Pueblo, Huaca El Chorro, Huaca El Triunfo, Huaca Saltur and Huaca Ventarrón. The associated material culture indicates that this sample encompasses a deep and continuous time transect going...
Raiders of the Lost Arca: An Early Foraging Landscape in Cabo Rojo/Lajas, Southwestern Puerto Rico (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. Recent fieldwork in the intertidal zone of southwestern Puerto Rico has revealed a landscape of over 40 heretofore undocumented shell mounds (some as large as 4,200 m2 and as tall as 10 m above the surrounding tidal plain) formed by millennia of targeted human foraging...
Raised Field Nutrient Cycling: Implications for Hydrologic Controls and Landesque Capital (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Barbacoan World: Recognizing and Preserving the Unique Indigenous Cultural Developments of the Northern Andes" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Beginning around AD 600, the Barbacoan speaking peoples of the northern Ecuadorian highlands began building alternating ridge and canal raised field systems. One of the leading hypothesized functions of these raised fields is their role in nutrient cycling. In this scenario,...
The Ramada Mortuary Tradition: At the Crossroads of Nasca and Wari in the Vitor Valley, Southern Peru (2018)
In this paper, we discuss the mortuary tradition affiliated with the Ramada communities that inhabited the Vitor Valley of Southern Peru around 550 CE. Our field excavations in 2012 and 2015 revealed a long-standing tradition of mortuary treatment that persisted even after the arrival of the Wari in the area. While many components of this tradition appear to have originated locally, other components closely parallel Nazca populations, including patterns of trauma, funerary ritual and the...
Rancherías: Historical Archaeology of Early Colonial Campsites on Margarita and Coche Islands, Venezuela (2017)
Little is known from the present-day archaeological perspective of early colonial realities of Margarita and Coche islands located in north-eastern Venezuela, in the state of Nueva Esparta. Moreover, the island of Coche has never been surveyed archaeologically. This paper discusses the preliminary results of systematic archaeological surveys of Coche and the southern coast of Margarita Island, carried out within the frame of the Nexus 1492 ERC research project coordinated by Leiden University....
Raw Material Sourcing of Two Terminal Pleistocene Sites in Southern Peru (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. I present a raw materials analysis from two terminal Pleistocene-aged sites in southern Peru: Quebrada Jaguay 280 (QJ-280) and Cuncaicha. Each site’s debitage assemblage contains multiple lithic raw material types, including obsidian, chalcedony, petrified wood, jasper, and andesite. While the obsidian has been sourced to the highland Alca volcanic field, no...
(Re)constructing the Social Structure of Society at Cerro Tortolita through Its Ceramic Assemblage (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Developments through Time on the South Coast of Peru: In Memory of Patrick Carmichael" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this study I use the ceramic assemblage at Cerro Tortolita as a means of addressing issues related to social differentiation. Cerro Tortolita is an Early Intermediate period site occupied from about AD 250–450 in the Upper Ica Valley on the south coast of Peru. It includes a large ceremonial...
(Re)Creating Monumental Space: The everyday use of plaza space at Aventura, Belize from the Terminal Classic to Late Postclassic (2017)
During the comprehensive survey of the Maya city of Aventura, Belize, the Aventura Archaeology Project (AAP) identified 29 structures located within the confines of the site’s largest monumental plaza, the A Plaza. While Maya plazas tend to be open places for ritual performance and/or market exchange, the structures in Aventura’s A Plaza, constructed with "seemingly" no regard to the orientation and layout of the site’s other monumental architecture, suggests the possibility of an alternative...
Re-Contextualizing Pre-Columbian Gold and Resin Artifacts from Panama in the National Museum of the American Indian (2018)
Until recent years the study of Pre-Columbian gold and resin objects from Panama was slow to progress due to the relative scarcity of archaeological projects excavating these materials. While the original contexts of many museum objects have been lost, the collection of Panamanian gold and resin in the National Museum of the American Indian was re-evaluated for its potential to answer key questions about the ancient craftspeople of this region. To ensure accurate provenience information was...
Re-Evaluating the Case for America’s First Cities: evidence from the Norte Chico region of Peru (2017)
The Late Archaic Period (3000-1800 B.C.) was a time of dramatic cultural transformations in the Central Andes. At the beginning of the 3rd millennium B.C., at least 30 large, sedentary agricultural settlements with monumental architecture appeared between the Huaura and Fortaleza river valleys in a region known locally as the "Norte Chico" ("Little North"). Given the quantity, size, and complexity of monumental architecture at these sites, as well as the unique settlement patterns, some have...
Re-evaluating the Earliest Evidence for Wild Potato Use in South-Central Chile (2018)
The earliest evidence of wild potato use anywhere in the world comes from Monte Verde (southern Chile), where tuber fragments were recovered from hearths that directly date to 14,500 cal B.P. Those tubers were tentatively assigned to a wild potato species (Solanum maglia) based on their starch granule morphology, which, according to Ugent et al., could be distinguished from the granule morphology of the domesticated potato (S. tuberosum). Recently, that identification has been called into...
Re-tying a Wayu: Connecting a Cranial Mask in the Smithsonian to Its Community of Origin in Huarochirí, Peru (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Arqueología colaborativa en los Andes: Casos de estudios y reflexiones" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. To prehispanic Andeans in central Peru, donning a facial-bone mask, a wayu, reanimated the dead and honored ancestral victories. Following these masks’ description in the c. 1608 Quechua-language manuscript of Huarochirí, scholars presume Spanish priests destroyed them to extirpate the “idolatry” of ancestor worship....
Real Alto and the Origins of Valdivia (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent geomorphological analysis of shoreline deposits in Manabí and Santa Elena provinces (Ecuador) provides evidence of significant mid-Holocene marine transgression. Newly obtained radiocarbon dates from relict coastal features places these changes to the Valdivia Phase (4400 to 1500 cal BC). Arguments for and against this phenomenon are reviewed with...
Real Roads and Imaginary Borders: Exploring Northern and Central Andean Cultural Trajectories and Interactions from the Perspective of the Ceja de Selva during the First Millenium BCE (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Cuando los senderos divergen: Reconsiderando las interacciones entre los Andes Septentrionales y los Andes Centrales durante el 1ro y 2do milenio AEC / When Paths Diverge: Reconsidering Interactions between the Northern and Central Andes, First–Second Millennium BCE" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The border between Peru and Ecuador has often been viewed heuristically as a boundary between the cultures of the Northern...
Really ugly Nasca pots of ancient Peru, and why they are important. (2017)
Polychrome ceramics of the Nasca culture (south coast of Peru, c. 100 BC - AD 600) are world renowned as one of the most colorful and artistically complex creations of the ancient Americas. Up to ten distinct colors depicting fabulous supernatural creatures adorn unique vessel forms with eggshell thin walls fixed in perfect oxidizing firings. Such masterpieces fill art books and spawn enthusiastic but fanciful speculations about Nasca society and its artisans. This paper rounds out the view of...
Reassessing Wari Power in the Central Andes: Local Agency, Trade, and Competition in the Cusco Region (2018)
The Wari state of the Central Andes has traditionally been interpreted as an expansive polity that incorporated numerous provinces during the Middle Horizon (A.D. 600-1000). Most research has focused on the large Wari installations built in several regions of Peru, leading many scholars to conclude that Wari administrators established direct imperial control over these areas. More recently, scholars have started to adopt a complementary bottom-up approach to study changes experienced at the...
Reassessment of Population Density in Late Precolumbian Central Caribbean Panama (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Advances and New Perspectives in the Isthmo-Colombian Area" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Using radiometric and settlement survey data from an area with 100% survey coverage in the rain-forested lowlands of the Caribbean watershed of Colón, Panama, we present the results of an analysis of site distribution and 14C dates to calculate population density. The archaeological data is compared with previous population...
Recent Advances on Multidisciplinary Research at Castillo de Huarmey (2017)
The Peruvian site of Castillo de Huarmey located on the desert coast some 300 kms north of Lima and 4 kms east of the Pacific Ocean, is widely known for the 2012-13 discovery of the Middle Horizon imperial mausoleum with the first undisturbed Wari high elite women’s multiple burial. The tomb, which concealed 64 individuals was accompanied by an abundance of valuable grave goods such as gold and silver jewelry, fine pottery, religious paraphernalia, and textile production materials and tools....
Recent Archaeological Research in Gorgona Island, Colombia (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research, framed within the problematic environmental archaeology, aims to see the environments used by pre-Hispanic settlers from the analysis of plant and animal remains. Zooarchaeological analyses of invertebrates describe a rocky, sandy, mixed intertidal environment typical of the Pacific Ocean. In the case of vertebrates, a lizard element...
Recent Investigations at the 18th Century Fort Frederik Archaeological Site and Cemetery, St. Croix, US Virgin Islands (2018)
In 2010, a tropical storm disturbed human remains and archaeological deposits at the Fort Frederik Archaeological Site, a multicomponent site consisting of dense 18th-19th century midden deposits associated with Fort Frederik, a two-story fortification (est. 1760) dating to the colonial development of St. Croix, then a part of the Danish West Indies. Subsequent investigations, including a geophysical survey, subsurface testing, and osteological analysis, have identified a cemetery within the...
Recent Investigations at Western Raiatea (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Hinterlands in Polynesia" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The island of Raiatea in the Leeward Society Islands of French Polynesia is viewed as a central place for the initial colonization of East Polynesia and the dispersal of pre-contact voyaging populations to distantly located islands of the Pacific Ocean. This history is embedded in the oral traditions of Pacific Island peoples and supported by...
Recent Investigations in Rock Art Dating in Several Cuban Caves (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Technique and Interpretation in the Archaeology of Rock Art" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cuba has many karst caves with pictographs, but there has been uncertainty about who created the rock art. The prehistoric population, historic indigenous groups pushed to the margins by the Spanish, and maroons or escaped African slaves are all possibilities. Cuban archaeologists have debated for decades which groups were...
Recent Investigations in the Upper Xingu Basin (2018)
In the southern Amazon, two decades of rapid agro-pastoral development, extreme drought, and forest fires in the "arc of deforestation" threaten to precipitate an ecological oscillation of southern transitional forests from an eco-region dominated by closed tropical forest to one of open savanna and woodlands. Collaborative research conducted with the Kuikuro indigenous community in the Xingu River headwaters, involving archaeology, soil science, paleoecology, remote sensing, geospatial...
Recent Research in Copacabana, Bolivia, the Intinkala Sector (2018)
Copacabana has been a pilgrimage destination and a site of extraordinary reverence from Formative times to the present. Together with the Islands of the Sun and Moon, it formerly comprised one the most sacred ceremonial complexes in the Inca Empire. Recent archaeological research in Copacabana has focused on the Intinkala sector located just east of the modern basilica. The principal aim of the first season was to ascertain the nature of Inca engagement with this powerful locale as evidenced...
Recent UAV Data Collection and Integration with Traditional Archaeological Methodologies (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. UAV data collection has become increasingly common in North American archaeology. This presentation will give an overview of the state of the art in UAV data collection, technologies, and processing methodologies. All fronts in UAV data collection are progressing at an ever increasing pace, making staying up-to-date almost impossible for most archaeologists....