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Due to the arid environment and subsequent excellent preservation on the north coast of Peru, evidence obtained from macrobotanical remains here has been the primary sources of information on plant use. However, despite the richness of the macrobotanical record, the combination of arid conditions and the nature of many plants, such as potatoes and beans – which are consumed in their entirety – macrobotanical remains can only tell us so much. In this paper, we discuss some methodological issues...
Pyric Herbivory in Ancient North America (2019)
This is an abstract from the "HumAnE Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Fire is a powerful tool for hunting because fire effects have important consequences on habitat and forage for prey species. Using case studies from the northern Great Plains and the Southwest US, I explore how fire-use positively impacted prey abundances or location, resulting in higher encounter rates for particular hunting strategies. Specifically, these case...
Quantifying Earth Oven Fire-Cracked Rock: A View from the Langtry Rock Midden (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Eagle Nest Canyon, Texas: Papers in Honor of Jack and Wilmuth Skiles" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper highlights quantification data from the author’s thesis, including the methodology of 33 archaeological excavations in the Edwards Plateau and Lower Pecos Canyonlands in which fire-cracked rock (FCR) quantification attempts were made. My excavations at Langtry Rock Midden (41VV168) were...
Quantifying Energy Investment in Monuments (Ahu) on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) Using Structure from Motion Mapping (2018)
Pre-European contact Rapa Nui (Easter Island) society is well-known for its substantial investment in monumental architecture, including over 300 platforms (ahu) and almost 1000 statues (moai). Recent theoretical and empirical research on the island suggests that ahu and moai were focal points for competitive and cooperative signaling by relatively small-scale communities dispersed across on the island. Evaluation of this hypothesis, however, requires the measurement of the amount of energy...
Quantitative Paleodietary Reconstruction with Complex Foodwebs: An Isotopic Case Study from the Caribbean (2018)
Stable isotope analysis is one of the most effective tools for paleodietary reconstruction and has been widely applied to a vast array of archaeological contexts including the Caribbean region. This region, however, possesses a particularly complex isotopic ecology, including both a large number of isotopically variable food sources and a high degree of isotopic overlap between different food groups. As such, to date, most regional paleodietary studies have been limited to descriptive and...
Queer Feminist Science in Hawaiian Archaeology (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Future Is Fluid...and So Was the Past: Challenging the 'Normative' in Archaeological Interpretations" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Queer theory is an important tool for critically analyzing ideas about the past that are normalized and reproduced to the detriment of descendant populations. This approach is particularly relevant when investigating the social structures that governed daily life in the past....
Queer Imaginatives, Normative Narratives: Examining Archaeological Theory and Conceptions of Hunter-Gatherer-Fisher Labor and Social Identity (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Thinking with, through, and against Archaeology’s Politics of Knowledge" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeology’s role and capacity to present multiple narratives about the past situates the discipline as a locus for competing power dynamics: What stories about the past are prioritized? How are stories constructed? Which stories are utilized for crafting a generalizable theory about “human nature”? At the same...
Queering Colonization in Early Colonial Belize (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Future Is Fluid...and So Was the Past: Challenging the 'Normative' in Archaeological Interpretations" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological narratives of colonial contact have dramatically shifted from a focus on colonizer/colonized dichotomies to discussions about plurality, ethnogenesis, and hybridity. However, much of the work in Mesoamerica continues to define the practice of colonization through a...
The Question of Monumentality in the Sacred Spaces and Features of Ometepe Island, Nicaragua (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Problem of the Monument: Widening Perspectives on Monumentality in the Archaeology of the Isthmo-Colombian Area" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ometepe is the largest island in Lake Coçibolca (Lake Nicaragua), itself the largest body of freshwater between Lake Titicapa in South America and the Great Lakes of North America. Its topography is unique, composed of two volcanoes—one active (Concepción) and one ancient...
Questioning Social And Labor Relations In Contract Archaeology From A Feminist Autoethnography (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. I use an autoethnographic and feminist perspective to reflect on how the field practice of preventive archaeology has been developing in Colombia. I draw on experiences from my own work to question the naturalization of inequalities and violence present in everyday interactions during the implementation of development projects, involving different actors...
Quilts and Palimpsests: Intensive Agricultural Landscapes in the Llanos de Moxos (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Theorizing Prehistoric Large Low-Density Settlements beyond Urbanism and Other Conventional Classificatory Conventions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Llanos de Moxos (Moxos) in the Bolivian Amazon is a useful case study for questions of settlement pattern, agricultural intensification, and social organization, particularly in light of its ambiguous status as both Amazonian and Andean, and neither Andean nor...
Quintessential Queen of Kaanul: K’abel of Waka’ in the age of empire. (2017)
Classic Maya civilization witnessed the reigns of many great queens, but the greatest in the southern lowlands was Kaloomte’ K’abel of Waka’. She presided over the routes of conquest in western Peten during the seventh century wars of Yuknoom Ch’een the Great. During her lifetime she and her consort King K’inich Bahlam turned the power of the ancient Wite’ Naah Fire Shrine, it’s Moon Goddess, its Death God Akan, and its other gods to the conquest and subjugation of Tikal. She and her city knew...
Quintessentializing the Power of Place in the Ancient Andes (2017)
The co-extension of peoples, places, and things as interdependent social actors were fundamental to Andean spatial ontologies. For instance, the "multiflex" Paria Caca of the Huarochiri Manuscript was manifested as five eggs, five falcons, five brothers, and a great mountain that still bears his name. In this paper, I argue that quintessential locales in the ancient Andes were often places where wholes and parts, microcosmos and macrocosoms, interiors and exteriors, and complementary opposites...
Radar, LiDAR, Drones, and Donkeys: the Evolution of Archaeological Mapping Technologies in the South Central Andes (2017)
In this paper, we review our use of digital technologies to model archaeological landscapes over the past two decades in Peru and Bolivia. We focus on three scales of analysis in four thematic areas that leverage state of the art technology and GIS modeling as a means for understanding the archaeological record. Our scales run from the built environment of local sites and monuments to regional agricultural landscapes to subcontinental interaction spheres. We look thematically at modeling...
Radical Stratigraphy: A Century of Los Angeles Graffiti (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology Out-of-the-Box: Investigating the Edge of the Discipline" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For the past 100 years, an alternative written record has been tied to the underbelly of Los Angeles’ built environment. The urban infrastructure of railroads, bridges, storm drain tunnels, harbors, and paved rivers houses a vernacular history inscribed mostly on concrete with rocks, chalk, charcoal, pencil, and...
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,...
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....
(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...
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...
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...
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...