Republic of Costa Rica (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
1,626-1,650 (1,875 Records)
Juvenile mortality and morbidity is a sensitive marker of overall group health, as juvenile individuals are more susceptible to circulating endemic diseases and nutritional stress. Thus, reconstructing relative frailty of the juvenile population at Mawchu Llacta provides important data about daily life at this colonial site, in a relatively understudied transitional period of Peruvian history. In this paper, we present the results of preliminary skeletal analyses of burials excavated from the...
Strontium provenancing wooden artefacts from Pitch Lake, Trinidad (2017)
Several wooden artefacts were found at Pitch Lake, Trinidad, one of the world's largest asphalt 'lakes', and a recent dating programme has shown that they range from ca. AD 600 to 3000 BC. This paper reports on the investigation of their provenance through strontium isotope analysis, with the aim of establishing whether the artefacts were made locally or were imports from other regions of Trinidad or even beyond the island. A major challenge of working with wooden artefacts found in Pitch Lake...
Structurally Speaking; Architecture of El Rayo and the Greater Nicoya Region (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Reconstructing the Political Organization of Pre-Columbian Nicaragua" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Located on the shore of Lake Nicaragua, El Rayo is a unique archaeological site, enriched with a large material base and many examples of human burial practices. Dating from the Late Bagaces Period (500-800 CE) to the Sapoa Period (800-1300 CE), El Rayo’s stone architectural features cover both major timeframes,...
The Struggle to Maintain an African Cultural Identity: The Case of the Bahamas (2018)
Once the British Parliament abolished the trans-Atlantic trade in African captives the Bahamas became a primary locale for the re-settlement of these persons. Between 1811 and 1860 some 6,000 liberated Africans, as they were called, were re-settled in the Bahamas. These Africans served apprenticeship periods of six to sixteen years, at the end of which they were to be free. Archival documents and archaeological evidence suggest that these indentured Africans were able to maintain a stronger...
Struggling with Complex Decision-Making in Public Policy (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Attention to Detail: A Pragmatic Career of Research, Mentoring, and Service, Papers in Honor of Keith Kintigh" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) and other archaeological organizations struggled with a variety of public policy decisions and organizational policies that eventually resulted in major public laws on both the state and federal levels...
Student-Driven Case Studies of Private Collector Collaborations: From the San Luis Valley of Colorado to Portland, Oregon (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Because of private land and genuine human curiosity, members of the public often hold considerable archaeological knowledge and cultural resources that professionals in the field have historically overlooked. When these collectors are "responsible, responsive stewards", language set forth by the SAA Archaeologist-Collector Collaboration Interest Group, they...
Style vs. Function in Polynesian Fish Hook Shank Variation (2018)
Polynesian i’a makau, or fishhooks, may stand in for ceramics for the purpose of generating culture-historical units, facilitating relative dating of the three Hawaiian assemblages under scrutiny (Allen 1996). Artifact assemblages at Waiahukini, Makalei, and Pu’u Ali’i contained over 1000 intact or partial fishhooks and fragments of shaped pig bone representing unfinished manufacture. Allen’s (2015) conceptual style-function model of hook attributes necessitates a focus on stylistic shank...
Subsistence Economies at Morne Patate: A Zooarchaeological Analysis of a Colonial Plantation Landscape in Dominica (2017)
From the 17th through 20th centuries, the Caribbean region experienced unprecedented demographic and environmental change, with the rise and fall of sugar monoculture and the institution of chattel slavery. These transformations were a result of power imbalances at many scales, and the economic, ecological and social consequences of the migrations and interactions were significant and long-lasting. During the Colonial Period, enslaved communities developed diverse socio-ecological practices to...
Subsistence variations and landscape use of marine foragers in southern South America. New perspectives from an isotopic zooarchaeology (2017)
Predictions based on resource distribution and abundance throughout patches (i.e. patch choice model) are critical to model human-specific decisions. However, information about past abundance or distribution of preys is rare, and archaeological evaluations are normally based on modern ecological parameters. This procedure can face some problems since species distributions are likely to have fluctuated along time as a consequence of different environmental factors, or as the product of human...
Successes and Challenges of Documenting Traditional Cultural Properties/Places (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Documenting traditional cultural properties/places (TCPs) have become much more commonplace in the world of cultural resource management. Increasingly, more and more tribes and descendant communities across the United States have successfully identified, documented, and in some cases, nominated TCPs to the National Register of Historic Places. Although...
Supplies, Status, and Slavery: Contested Aesthetics at the Haciendas of Nasca (2017)
The coastal wine and brandy-producing estates owned by the Society of Jesus in Nasca held captive a large enslaved population in the 17th and 18th centuries. With a combined population of nearly 600 slaves of diverse sub-Saharan origins, San Joseph and San Xavier de la Nasca were the largest and most profitable of the Jesuit vineyards in the viceroyalty of Peru. These estates were also home to black freepersons and itinerant indigenous and mestizo wage laborers who engaged, exchanged goods,...
Survey and Mapping of Antimpampa, An Early Horizon Monumental Center in Southern Peru (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Globally, the earliest cultural ecumene are associated with monumental centers that spurred greater local and interregional interaction. Atimpampa, located in the Arequipa region of Peru, is one such monumental center that has remained largely unstudied. This poster presents the preliminary results of our 2020 archaeological survey at Antimpampa, which...
Surveyed with LiDAR: Identifying Lo’i Pondfields in Windward Kohala, Hawai’i Island (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Geospatial Studies in the Archaeology of Oceania" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This project is a demonstration of GIS methods for identifying irrigated agricultural complexes in the heavily vegetated drainage of Halawa Gulch, windward Kohala. Through use of GIS tools on a LiDAR data set I created slope interpolation and elevational profile graphs of potential agricultural sites. In some cases these could be verified...
Surveying the Utility of Field Schools in Preparing Students for Compliance Work (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology Education: Building a Research Base" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cultural Resource Management (CRM) professionals lament that they felt unprepared upon graduation for entering the field of compliance archaeology and recent graduates often complain that they are not qualified for CRM jobs as posted. This anecdotal information raises the question of whether field schools and undergraduate programs...
The Sustainability Lessons from the Archaeological Work of Lynne Goldstein: The Curious Environmental Stories of Aztalan, Fort Ross, and Michigan State University (2018)
Sustainability can be defined as meeting the needs of the present without depleting natural resources for the future. With such a time focused definition, there is no doubt that the meaning of sustainability changes over time and by culture. An examination of three of Lynne Goldstein’s field sites, Aztalan, Fort Ross, and Michigan State University, provides an opportunity to dissect our modern take on sustainability. At Aztalan, sustainability of Native American culture comes into question as...
Sustainable Heritage through Community Engagement and Education (2018)
In addressing the problem of burning libraries, this paper focuses on sustainable heritage through public awareness and civic engagement. Political rhetoric and limited first-hand experience has created a system whereby the impacts of climate change, coastal erosion, and rising sea levels are no longer a priority; and for students, it has become but a distant concern. This paper addresses these problems through education programs designed to (i) get students involved in the archaeology of...
Sustainable Visit to Rapa Nui: Global Perspectives (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Social Archaeologies and Islands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, I present some research results deriving from a collaborative and interdisciplinary research project called Sustainable Visits in Rapa Nui - Global perspectives. The use of visits refers to tourism, colonization and migrations in the long term perspective, visits with colonial connotations, and research visits and Rapanui migrations, all...
Swandro, Rousay, Orkney: Between Sea and Land (2018)
The site of Swandro is on the eroding coastal fringe of the island of Rousay, Orkney and has been the focus of field training for the next archaeological generation between the University of Bradford, Archaeological Institute UHI and Hunter College, CUNY since 2010. Such sites are a finite resource, endangered by coastal erosion exacerbated by the effects of climate change. The site straddles both the shore and the land and consists of a Neolithic Chambered Cairn and a later settlement dating...
Switching Perspectives: Ethnographic Analysis of Community Viewpoints Regarding In Situ Preservation of Archaeological Sites (2017)
The varied definitions of cultural heritage imply that archaeological sites and their landscapes are important for the shaping of local cultural identities. Nonetheless, many of these definitions are unclear about the relationship that communities can have with archaeological sites. Using place attachment theory and a knowledge-centered approach, I explore the cultural and historical knowledge that people have regarding their cultural heritage, their general perception of archaeology, their...
Swordfish Hunting as Prestige Signaling within Middle Holocene Fishing Communities of the Atacama Desert Coast? (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. Since around 8500 years BP, the archaeological record on the Southern Coast of the Atacama Desert shows evidence of growing population density and low residential mobility. A maritime specialization process is also evident by a rich set of specialized tools, and a pronounced increase...
Symbolic Conflict and Mobility in Village Formation (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper considers whether processes of symbolic conflict propel change in the spatiality of social groups from ethnographic and archaeological vantage points, particularly with respect to the mobility of agents positioned differently within and at the edges of nascent communities such as small villages. Of special interest is the interaction between...
Synthesis of Social-Ecological Change in the North Atlantic and US Southwest (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. Anna Kerttula had the vision and commitment to support an experiment: two interdisciplinary research teams working in dramatically different settings, striving to find valuable insights from cross-region, cross-case studies. One team from the North Atlantic islands (NABO) and another from the US Southwest (LTVTP) combined...
A Synthesis of Windward Oahu Archaeology (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Research and CRM Are Not Mutually Exclusive: J. Stephen Athens—Forty Years and Counting" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Steve Athens legacy has provided archaeologists working within a historic preservation context a reminder of the numerous opportunities available to conduct research within a cultural resource management setting. This paper argues that not only does historic preservation provide a plethora of funding...
A Systematic Approach to Quantifying Diversity in the Morphology and Spatial Distribution of Eastern Paleoindian Projectile Points (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Defining and Measuring Diversity in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For nearly 100 years, archaeologists have commented on the perceived morphological diversity in projectile points dating to the Paleoindian period in eastern North America, though the significance of this diversity and what explains it remain underexplored topics. Hesitancy to address these broader questions is, we argue, attributable to...
Taboo to Chew: Cultural Influences on Dog-Feeding (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Animal Bones to Human Behavior" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dog-feeding strategies employed by Indigenous North Americans vary across place and time. Human restrictions on prey animal parts given to dogs have been recorded in the ethnohistoric record. Dog feeding taboos are transcultural and often speak to ideas of a dog’s place among other animals and the influence dogs may have on the predator-prey relationship...