Republic of Costa Rica (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
151-175 (1,875 Records)
The study of occupational stress markers was an attractive investigation field some years ago, due to the alleged possibility for the identification of ancient activities through skeletal changes. Nevertheless, a critical vision of the issue evidences that this relation is not so easy to establish, because bone biology is complex and also because different activities may produce similar changes. This does not mean that this type of studies should be abandoned. On the contrary, it is a call for...
Assessing Agricultural Intensification in Greater Chiriquí during the Aguas Buenas Period (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. The Aguas Buenas (roughly 300 BC–AD 900) was a period characterized by the growth of small villages and the development of identifiable settlement hierarchies in certain areas. This paper applies a variant of the site catchment analysis originally articulated by Steponaitis (1981) to evaluate the relationship between...
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 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 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...
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...
Avian Imagery on Preclumbian Ceramics from Pacific Nicaragua (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Centralizing Central America: New Evidence, Fresh Perspectives, and Working on New Paradigms" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Throughout human history people have been entranced by avians. Their ability to fly from earth to the sky, while displaying grace and beauty, as well as exhibiting a ferocity to protect their nests and hatchlings was revered. Birds were often seen as messengers between the sky and earth,...
"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...
Background and Initial Results from a NSF Study of Archaeology Ethics Training (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this poster, the authors introduce a project funded by the National Science Foundation to advance knowledge on the pervasiveness and effectiveness of ethics and responsible conduct of research training interventions in archaeology and other science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. Specifically, the project will examine the...
"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...
Balancing Public and Professional Interests in Archaeology from a State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) Perspective (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As the public increases its influence over how the discipline of archaeology defines its scientific and educational value, state-sponsored archaeological institutions, such as the State Historic Preservation Office, must continue to adapt to satisfy their professional and public audiences. In 2017, the Nebraska State Historic Preservation Office (NeSHPO)...
Banking on Stone Money: The Influence of Traditional "Currencies" on Blockchain Technology (2018)
Centuries ago in western Micronesia, Yapese islanders began traveling to the Palauan archipelago to carve their famous stone money from limestone, which they then transported back to use in a variety of social transactions. While commonly referred to as ‘money’, these disks were not currency in the strict sense, though their value is not dissimilar to other traditional and modern objects where worth is arbitrary based on both real and perceived attributes (e.g., size, shape, quality, pedigree,...
A Barrack, a Stone, and Families in Exile: A Case Study of Historic Obsidian Sourcing (2019)
This is an abstract from the "2019 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of M. Steven Shackley" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The sourcing of lithic raw material often challenges preconceived notions of the relationships between people, places, and objects for time periods prior to written records. But what of historic obsidian? What can sourcing reveal about the more recent past? This paper presents the case study of a most amazing historical...
Basement Curation: Adopting an Orphaned Collection from Montserrat (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Storeroom Taphonomies: Site Formation in the Archaeological Archive" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Galways Plantation collection, consisting of 28 boxes of artifacts excavated on Montserrat during the 1980s, was temporarily on loan in the United States when the Soufrière Hills Volcano erupted in July 1995. This catastrophic event led to the creation of an exclusion zone covering two-thirds of the island that...
Basic Mesoamerican stone-working: nodule smashing? (1980)
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