Republic of Trinidad and Tobago (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
226-250 (1,426 Records)
The archeological study of human burials presents many special challenges. Deterioration begins or accelerates with the exposure to new environmental conditions after recovery. In many cases, the context has to be analyzed in situ by bioanthropologists to record information before the removal of the materials to the laboratory and storage area. Continuous participation of bioarchaeologists is also vital for subsequent analysis of the funerary context many months or years after the end of the...
The Challenges of Co-authoring a Background Chapter for an Open Textbook (2018)
As we move towards increasing open access to archaeological knowledge, textbooks are an integral part of that transition. Unfortunately, open access textbooks are not a well established form of knowledge dissemination amongst archaeologists and currently do not hold as much credibility as traditionally published works such as peer reviewed journals or printed textbooks. In hopes of contributing a chapter to an open access textbook, what are the keys to making such a background chapter...
Challenges of Using NGS to Detect T. cruzi in Human Remains from Pre-Columbian South America (2017)
The trypanosomatid parasites are responsible for devastating human disease worldwide. In the Americas, Trypanosoma cruzi is the causative agent of Chagas Disease (CD), the most epidemic zoonosis in Latin America today. The clinical manifestations of CD, however, have been recognized in archaeological human remains from South America as early as 9,000 years ago. We present preliminary results of a project that applies paleogenomic methods, including targeted enrichment and next-generation...
Charki and Red Currant Jam: Provisioning Extractive Industries in Republican Highland Peru (2017)
With the current boom in the archaeology of the colonial period in the central Andes, we risk losing sight of the potential for archaeological investigation of the colonial aftermath. Following important work further afield in the Southern Cone, I argue for the particular relevance archaeology could have in exploring trade liberalization, emancipation, and the new commodity booms of the 19th century. Drawing on the recent investigation of a series of Republican tambos (roadside inns) in the...
Chasing the Cure: The Archaeology of Alternative Health Practices at a Tuberculosis Sanatorium (2018)
Eighty years ago, Cragmor Sanatorium in Colorado Springs, Colorado was a celebrated asylum for wealthy tuberculars and one of the premier facilities in the West. In its heyday, Cragmor housed some of the wealthiest patients in the United States. In the 1950s, the sanatorium contracted with the Bureau of Indian Affairs to treat Navajo women with tuberculosis. Once it became part of the University of Colorado system in 1965, much of the original history was subsumed under the growing campus but a...
Chenopod data in two countries of South America: Advances in knowledge about the use of Chenopodium in Argentina and Chile from Early Holocene (9000-11000 BP) to Historical Times (250 BP). (2017)
Argentina and Chile are the most austral American countries where Chenopodium species are recovered in several archaeological contexts. In both countries from the north to central and south, various issues are addressed from these findings such as hunter-gatherers subsistence strategies and chenopod grain morphological changes. Multi-proxy methods are used based on pollen, macro and micro botanical remains analyses, and isotopic data. However scarce botanical evidence has carried an uneven depth...
The Chicama Valley Archaeological Project (1989-2000) Revisited (2017)
Between 1989 and 2000, the Chicama Valley Archaeological Project, lead by Glenn S. Russell, Banks Leonard and Christopher Attarian, conducted archaeological survey and excavations in the lower Chicama Valley. This presentation will focus on a broad summary of settlement pattern change with reference to key excavation data that informs interpretation of the survey data. A focus will be how sociopolitical complexity developed in the context of control of irrigation systems. Approximately 25% of...
The Chicama Valley in Time and Space (2017)
The Chicama is one of the largest valleys of the Peruvian coast, was part of the "heartland" of Moche culture, and a frontier between different cultural and linguistic regions at the time of Spanish arrival. This paper will review past and recent research in the valley and and their problems and potentials. Particular attention will be paid to landscape archaeology and the history of irrigation systems and land use through time, themes to be addressed in the other papers of the session.
Childhood Diets and Residential Mobility in the Late Intermediate Period, Colca Valley, Peru: A Study of Carbon and Oxygen Isotope Ratios from Dental Apatite (2017)
Around AD 1300 in the Colca Valley of southern Peru, an increasing proportion of elite individuals began to mark themselves as ethnically distinct by elongating the heads of children. This permanent act had far-reaching effects on the livelihoods of modified individuals, especially females, who exhibit more diversified diets in adulthood and experienced lower rates of cranial trauma. The present study complements prior stable isotopic analysis of bone collagen by examining carbon and oxygen...
Children at the Heart of Buen Suceso (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Finding Community in the Past and Present through the 2022 PARCC Field School at Buen Suceso, Ecuador" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Children in antiquity provide bioarchaeologists with a window into the past as they embody the environment and culture around them (Halcrow and Tayles 2011). Due to subadults’ sensitivity to biocultural factors, they are excellent indicators of the health and nutrition of a society...
Children of the Atacama Desert: The complex interactions between breastfeeding, weaning and environmental stress in one of the world’s harshest environments. (2017)
Infant feeding practices and the weaning process have important implications for early life health and mortality patterns. In particular, the concept of weaning stress is often invoked as an explanation for increased infant or child mortality and morbidity. In this paper we evaluate the concept of weaning stress and the bioarchaeological methods used to interpret its presence. We highlight the intimate connection between stress and the weaning process in our own research in the northern Atacama...
The Chiquihuite Cave in Zacatecas, Mexico: Cultural Components, Lithic Industry and the Role of This Pleistocene Site in the Peopling of America (2018)
The high altitude Pleistocene site of Chiquihuite Cave, in the Central-Northern Mexican Highlands, is slowly turning into one of the most important players on the sensitive stage of the debates about the earliest human presence in North America. After the first three exploration seasons and before the imminent continuation of the excavations at this multi-component archaeological site, we can surely talk about several important Late Pleistocene, older-than-Clovis occupational phases. Dozens of...
The Chonos archipelago: from hunting-gathering to industrial productivity in the western Patagonian channels (43°50’ - 46°50’ S), Chile. (2017)
The Chonos archipelago is a series of islands and fjords in the northernmost part of western Patagonia, South America. It has been disconnected from continental landforms since glacial retreat, thus it is an ideal area for assessing the human use of maritime habitats. We analyze the spatial and temporal distribution of the archaeological record focusing on the emergence of human intense signatures in the last part of the late Holocene. The archaeological record (87 sites) includes open-air and...
Chronological Evidence of Material and Landscape Changes Associated with a Shift in Colonial Control at the Morne Patate Plantation, Dominica (2017)
Morne Patate Plantation in southern Dominica (occupied between the 1740s and 1950s) provides us with an opportunity to examine a setting that underwent major changes in social organization and economic engagements associated with the shift in colonial control of the island from the French to the British in 1763. This paper presents an overview of the chronology of the archaeological contexts at the site and changes in settlement organization. This material record provides evidence for discrete...
A Chronometric Study of the Peopling of the Americas (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Constructing Chronologies II: The Big Picture with Bayes and Beyond" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The initial peopling of the Americas marks a major event in the expansion of modern humans across the planet. Questions associated with this dispersal remain, however, largely unanswered, with the previously accepted model, “Clovis-first,” effectively refuted. Considering that timing is fundamental in the study of human...
Circular Worlds: Comparison and Reflections on the Earthen Architecture of Lowland South American Circular Villages (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Dedication, Collaboration, and Vision, Part I: Papers in Honor of Tom D. Dillehay" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As a mentor, Tom Dillehay has formed and influenced me and archaeologists from the southern cone of South America on a variety of themes, including the peopling of America, plant domestication, and the arrival of monuments. In particular, Dillehay had a significant impact on how we think about the uses,...
Classroom to Camp: Implementation and Assessment of Archaeology K12 Curriculum at a Girl Scouts Camp in Southeastern Utah (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. Project Archaeology is a heritage education organization dedicated to teaching scientific and historical inquiry, cultural understanding, and the importance of protecting our nation’s rich cultural resources. It is a diverse network of educators that make archaeology education accessible to students and teachers nationwide through...
Climate Change and Culture in Late Pre-Columbian Amazonia (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Global Perspectives on Climate-Human Population Dynamics During the Late Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Climate change has been linked to the reorganisation of past societies in different parts of the globe. However, until recently, the lack of archaeological and palaeoclimate data for the Amazon had prevented an evaluation of the relationship between climate change and cultural change in the largest...
Climate Change and Moche Politics: A View from the Northern Chicama Valley, Peru (2017)
In this paper I will discuss the different lines of evidence pertaining to detecting El Niño and La Niña events at the site of Licapa II and surrounding Northern Chicama Valley. Flood deposits, dune encroachments episodes, malacological data, canal destruction and rebuilding events, and radiocarbon evidence are used as proxies to help understand the intensity and timing of ENSO events. I compare evidence from Licapa II to other sites inside and outside the Chicama Valley to highlight the...
Climate Change and Polyculture Agroforestry Systems: Examples from Amazonian Dark Earths (2018)
In this presentation, we discuss pre-Columbian Amazonian Dark Earth (ADE) polyculture agroforestry systems and its implications for management and conservation efforts on Amazonian sustainable futures under current threat from climate change and development. We present and compare new multi-proxy paleoclimate, palaeoecological and archaeobotanical data from two mid to late Holocene records of land use history of ADE in Santarem (Lower Amazon) and the Itenez Forest Reserve (SW Amazonia). Our data...
Climate Change in Coastal Ecuador (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Innovations in Ecuadorian Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Climate change is negatively impacting cultural heritage and archaeological sites worldwide. The site of Balsamaragua, which signifies 2,500 years of human occupation on the coast, is rapidly deteriorating, having lost 10 m of shoreline since 2009. Increased awareness and documentation at the site can help us glean valuable information about...
Climate Change, Capacity-Building and Local Engagement: Report on the 2018 Arctic Viking Field School, Vatnahverfi, South Greenland (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Accelerating Environmental Change Threats to Cultural Heritage: Serious Challenges, Promising Responses" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Eastern Arctic is currently observed to be undergoing significant environmental change as a direct consequence of global warming. For archaeologists working in Greenland, this means the rapid and complete loss of cultural remains due to changing soil conditions. As annual...
Climate Change, Economies of Scale, and Population Growth in Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherer Societies: A Case Study from Southwestern Wyoming (2018)
Increasing energy consumption returns, or economies of scale, have been illustrated similarly for modern urban societies and ancient complex societies. However, the relationship between underlying scaling relationships and the development and decline of population and social complexity over the long-term are yet to be investigated. This poster addresses their role in hunter-gatherer societies. Using formal mathematical models from macroeconomics, we examine the long-term variability of economies...
Close to Home: Public and Institutional Archaeology in the University Setting (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the fall of 2021, a group of 13 students, a graduate teaching assistant, and two professors continued the years-long excavations and credit-offered course of the Harvard Yard Archaeology Project, which takes place amongst one of the busiest tourist attractions and academic centers of Boston. A primary goal of the 2021 field season was to further...
Clouds for Water, Forest for Healing: Prehispanic Cultural Dynamics in the Cloud Forests of the Northern Andes (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. The cloud forests along the eastern and western foothills of the northern Andes have received little attention in the overall archaeology of South America. These regions of broken geography and dense forests have historically been considered culturally poor, with little impact on the sociocultural transformations of the Andean and...