Republic of Costa Rica (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
801-825 (1,875 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Openness & Sensitivity: Practical Concerns in Taking Archaeological Data Online" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. "Bro-ing" is a market research practice pioneered by Nike and reported by Naomi Klein (2000:75) where designers bring prototypes to inner-city neighborhoods to gauge reactions to new styles and products. This practice also creates buzz that can be used to sell those products to the same communities. Open...
How Experimental Research in Forensic Archaeology Informs Archaeological Practice: Differentiating Perimortem Fracture From Postmortem Breakage (2018)
Often perceived as a highly specialized and peripheral subfield of archaeology, forensic archaeology contributes to our understanding of not only forensic anthropology and forensic science, but also traditional archaeological practice. Forensic archaeologists’ extensive knowledge of postmortem taphonomic effects on material objects has led to more precise interpretations of postmortem interval, environmental (including scavenger-induced) scattering and alteration of human remains, and site...
How Indigenous Museology and Archaeology Can Contribute to the Well-Being of the Comcaac Community (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Ideas, Ethical Ideals, and Museum Practice in North American Archaeological Collections" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The history and everyday lives of the Comcaac (Seri) people are intrinsically linked to their ancestral landscape on the central coast of the Sonoran Desert and the Gulf of California. The community’s powerful and complex oral tradition, language, and the continuous occupancy of their originally...
How many, how few, how long: pre-Columbian population density and human impact in pre-Columbian Amazonia (2017)
Assessing the landscape impact of past settlement and subsistence systems in space and in time is essential to reconstructing pre-Columbian land use in the Amazon basin. In this paper we consider archaeological and landscape evidence for past land use by examining the strengths and limitations of archaeological radiocarbon evidence as a proxy for broad demographic patterns in pre-Columbian Amazonia.
How Unusual Is the Trajectory of Precolumbian Social Change in San Ramón, Costa Rica among the Trajectories of Chiefdom Development? A Comparison Exercise (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. Recent literature on comparative archaeology has pointed out the need for systematic comparisons of trajectories of social change that use primary quantitative data and standardized variables. This type of comparison has the potential to discover and explore the diversity and complexity in the...
Human Behavior and Environment: A Preliminary Zooarchaeological Investigation at the Alm Shelter Wyoming (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Alm Shelter in Wyoming lies in the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains, and its repeated use for 12,000 years provides a snapshot into human life throughout the Holocene. Moisture is a controlling factor in this (semi)arid environment. Mountains provided refuge and increased moisture access for humans, animals, and plants. This aridity also leads to...
Human Coprolite Diet Reconstruction Confirms Wetland Resource Use in the Coast of the Atacama Desert, 6580 cal. yr BP (2017)
It has been proposed that Chinchorro coastal people along the Atacama Desert in northern Chile had marginal access to plant food, a position refuted by recent scholars. The older perspective comes from bone chemistry analyses which showed a nearly exclusive reliance on marine animal resources. Newer analyses of mummy gut contents shows a substantial reliance on wetland plant resources, especially sedge rhizomes and seeds. Therefore, existing analyses present very different ideas of Chinchorro...
Human Ecodynamics in Central East Polynesia (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. Our understanding of Pacific paleoenvironments, how they changed with human arrival, and further transformations in the post-settlement period owes much to the research and insights of Steve Athens. This paper considers palaeoenvironmental records from central East Polynesian islands in relation to...
The Human Experience of Social Transformations 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. Archaeologists and other scholars have long studied the causes of collapse and other major social transformations and debated how they can be understood. This paper instead focuses on the human experience of living through those transformations, analyzing 18 transformation cases from the North Atlantic and the US Southwest....
Human Induced Percussion Technology: A Synthesis of Bone Modification as Archaeological Evidence (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Animal bone modification by humans has long been part of the archaeological record; however, debate continues as to whether this evidence alone is sufficient to interpret human activity. This is especially true if such evidence is used in support of archaeological sites older than 16 ka in the Americas. We synthesize data representing over three decades of...
Human Interment and Making Memory in Viking Age Iceland (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. Over 300 Viking Age (AD 871–1000) human interments are known from Iceland, many with accompanying dogs and horses. Though these interments are similar to those of elites in Scandinavia, inhumation burial in Iceland apparently served a different purpose — to demarcate boundaries in a landscape devoid of...
The Human Presence in the Americas during and before the Late Glacial Maximum under the Light of New Investigations at Chiquihuite Cave, the Older-Than-Clovis Site in Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The 2016-2017 excavations at Chiquihuite Cave (northeastern Zacatecas, Mexico) produced solid evidence in favor of a sustained human occupation of the Northern Mexican Highlands during and before the Late Glacial Maximum (LGM) (in process of publication at the time of the submission of this abstract); an occupation that lasted for thousands of years in the...
Human Responses to Holocene Aridization South of the Atacama Desert (31° to 32° S), the Meaning of Differences in Landscape Use (2017)
The geographical band between 31°-32° S, from the Pacific to the Andes, lies in the southernmost part of the Semi-Arid North of Chile, south of the Atacama Desert. Multidisciplinary research to the north and south of the Choapa River’s mouth is uneven, thereby in need of new data for understanding the relative intensity of the human traces across the landscape and the human interactions with environmental changes. Currently, the combined pollen records in the coast and highlands indicate arid...
Human Selection on Maize Size Traits. A contribution from the archaeological record of Tarapacá, chile, South Central Andes. (2017)
Maize from Andean region has a recognized complex history, involving ecological and human interaction. Today, while Andean maize show high morphological and low genotypic diversities, the process involved in its production and selection is unclear. In this work we ask how the morphological and genetic diversity of maize has varied through Formative Period to present time in Tarapacá Region, northern Chile? To answer this we analysed thirty morphological traits and eight microsatellites markers...
Human-Environment Interactions and the Hunter-Gatherers of Chachapoyas, Peru (2023)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Tropical Montane Cloud Forests" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although a growing bodies of scholarship address later cultural developments in such regions, Tropical Montane Cloud Forests (TMCF) are nevertheless perceived by many as environments marginal for human occupation, especially for hunter-gatherers. One such region, the Chachapoyas culture area in northern Peru, has to date been home to...
Human-Object Severance: Archaeological Interventions in Contemporary Material Flows and Massive Discard (2024)
This is an abstract from the "AD 1150 to the Present: Ancient Political Economy to Contemporary Materiality—Archaeological Anthropology in Honor of Jeanne E. Arnold" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. After decades of aspirational spending, and in houses brimming with tens to hundreds of thousands of objects, North Americans have amassed inventories of belongings that are extraordinary for their scale and complexity. In a process largely devoid of...
A Hundred Years of Human Migration in the Caribbean: Considering the Key Tipping Points of Cultural Transformation between AD1492 and AD1592 (2018)
This paper will review some of the ways in which unprecedented human migration and cultural encounter in the 15th and 16th century Caribbean is reflected in the transformative material exchanges made on Isla de Mona. Discoveries made during recent fieldwork on Isla de Mona will be used to illuminate and inform these thoughts by examining the dynamic ideological setting within which they are situated.
Hunter-gatherer home ranges in arid environments: exploring some of the differences and similarities (2017)
Deserts have traditionally been considered marginal environments, because survival depends on several factors. Some researchers have pointed to the importance of water for hunter-gatherers living in these environments, as well as the increased knowledge of the environment they lived in, and its resources, as well as the awareness and knowledge of neighbors on whom to call in lean times or with whom to interact and exchange partners and the knowledge of resources. Here we present two cases from...
Hurricanes as Agents of Cultural Change: Integrating Paleotempestology and the Archaeological Record (2018)
Hurricanes are major climatological events with significant impacts in tropical and extra-tropical regions worldwide. Despite this, little research has been undertaken on the effects of hurricanes and other intense storms on prehistoric societies. New evidence from the field of paleotempestology—the study of past hurricane activity using geological proxy techniques, such as lagoon sediments and speleothems—is shedding light on how hurricanes varied over the Holocene in terms of frequency,...
Hybrid Cultures: The Visibility of the European Invasion of Caribbean Honduras in the 16th Century (2017)
Archaeological excavations in Caribbean coast Honduras explored the site of Ticamaya, described in 16th-century Spanish documents as the seat of a leader of indigenous resistance. Yet despite testing confirmed deposits from the period covering initial conflict with the Spanish, roughly 1520-1536, these excavations produced no use of European goods until the late 18th century. Contemporary with Ticamaya, the site of Naco to the west hosted troops sent by Cortes, and at least one majolica vessel...
Hydrogen Isotopes in Archaeological Bone Collagen: Potential Combined Influence of Meteoric Water and Protein Intake (2018)
Hydrogen isotopes in archaeological bone collagen (i.e. δ2H-collagen) are poorly understood, but can potentially facilitate new understanding of the complex relationship between trophic level (i.e. animal protein consumption) and meteoric water controls on hydrogen isotopes in omnivorous humans. These concurrent influences on human δ2H-collagen values were examined in 11 North American archaeological sites. The δ2H-collagen values were compared to bone hydroxyapatite oxygen isotopes (i.e....
I Didn’t Get Here Because of My Trauma: I’m Here Because I’m Good at Archaeology (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Hood Archaeologies: Impacts of the School-to-Prison Pipeline on Archaeological Practice and Pedagogy" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The monoraciality of archaeology perpetuates systems where many European American archaeologists assume archaeologists who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) have arrived because of affirmative action. Our presence is considered the result of traumatic lives that led to...
The Ichnological Record of Footwear: Some Thoughts and Experiments (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Approaches to Archaeological Footwear" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human footprints have been found throughout the world. At White Sands (New Mexico) they hint at early human presence in the Americas, and during the summer of 2022 a new footprint site was reported from Utah. These sites are linked by their geological setting, dried lake beds and ancient playas, a common feature of the Americas. One question often...
Ichthyoarchaeological Analysis of ScMo-350 on Mo’orea, French Polynesia (2018)
ScMo-350 is located on Mo’orea Island, northwest of Tahiti in French Polynesia. Our ichthyoarchaeological analyses assess which fish taxa were utilized by the pre-contact Ma’ohi, and how those taxa may have changed over time. Our diachronic approach investigates fishing activities over a c. 1,000 year period, between AD 900-1800. We broadly divided this beach ridge site into four excavation blocks to aid in spatial analyses of the recovered artifacts. Fish specimens were heavily concentrated in...
Iconoclasm Island: New Research on the Destruction of Rapa Nui’s Statues (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Social Archaeologies and Islands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Monuments are a critical window into people’s values, beliefs, and social memories. The destruction of monuments is especially important since it can shed light on how these aspects of societies change over time. We describe new research aimed at understanding the destruction of moai (statues) on Rapa Nui (Easter Island). Our first goal is to build a...