Republic of Trinidad and Tobago (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
51-75 (1,723 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches in Zooarchaeology: Addressing Big Questions with Ancient Animals" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Absolute dating in archaeology is dominated by radiocarbon dating, a method that is frequently conducted on zooarchaeological material, creating a large and diverse global dataset that is readily accessible. Though radiocarbon dates are certainly valuable on their own, their value extends...
Analyzing Afro-Caribbean Ware from Fort Amsterdam (SE094) and Battery Rotterdam (SE129) on St. Eustatius, Caribbean Netherlands (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Exploring Globalization and Colonialism through Archaeology and Bioarchaeology: An NSF REU Sponsored Site on the Caribbean’s Golden Rock (Sint Eustatius)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In June 2018, excavations were conducted at Fort Amsterdam, a military fortification, on the leeward side of St. Eustatius, along the Caribbean coast. Many different types of ceramics were found during the investigations, including...
Anarchy in the Trenches: Perspectives on 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. In many ways, Buen Suceso is a unique archaeological site. Not only is it a multicomponent site, with evidence for occupation throughout almost the entirety of the ~2,200-year Valdivia sequence and specialized use by the much later Manteño culture, but it exhibits an occupational...
Ancient Andean Scalarity (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Beyond the Round House: Spatial Logic and Settlement Organization across the Late Andean Highlands" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Scholars of the Andes often assume that the social units they study—residence, community, and region—are monotonically scaled, nested from smaller to larger. This suggests universal correspondences between the analytical and observational objects through which social units are known; hence...
Ancient DNA Studies in Tropical Environments: A Study into the Genetics of the Pre-Columbian Indigenous Population of Puerto Rico (2017)
Studies into ancient DNA have advanced significantly in the last few years, but these have largely been absent in tropical environments. In the Caribbean, a number of questions still pertain as to the bioarchaeology of the indigenous pre-Columbian populations and the exact origin of these early inhabitants. Focusing on the skeletal remains of a late Saladoid population from Punta Candelero site (AD 640-1200), three correlated and simultaneous studies have been coordinated with the aim to...
Ancient Landscapes of Amazonia: A Study of Pre-Colonial Processes and Contemporary Use at Macurany, Brazil (2018)
We analyze settlement organization and landscape modification at Macurany, a pre-Colonial terra preta site on the Middle Amazon River in Parintins, Brazil, within local and regional contexts. Pre-colonial land modifications dot the contemporary landscapes of Amazonia. Many such landscape features, such as anthrosols, elevated platforms, mounds, ramps, and riverine ports, are used today by contemporary inhabitants of Amazonia. New data gathered at Macurany reveals that ancient Amerindians altered...
The Ancient Maya Settlement of Waybil, Belize: Middle-Level and Hinterland Settlement Investigations (2018)
The Classic Maya, with their towering jungle temples and sprawling cities have been the focus of archaeological studies since the mid-1800s. Although numerous investigations have fostered considerable insights, important questions remain regarding the circumstances in which these settlements originated, interacted, developed, and were ultimately abandoned. The organization of Maya settlements is best conceptualized as a continuum consisting of three basic, but variable types, including:...
Ancient networks of the Caribbean: Interaction and Exchange across the Historical Divide (2017)
In this paper, we present multiple lines of evidence for the existence of interwoven and dynamic ancient networks in the Caribbean. This region is characterized by a long and unique history of social relationships between communities and peoples at various temporal and spatial scales. Through time, Caribbean networks of human mobility and the exchange of goods and ideas were shaped by expanding and contracting group territories, fission and fusion of local communities, and variable degrees of...
Ancient Population History in the Palenque Region: The Problem of the Selection of Population Proxies (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Ancient Mesoamerican Population History: Demography, Social Complexity, and Change" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Proyecto Regional Palenque (PREP) has recorded a total of 653 sites within an area of 650 km2. Regional population ranges from 28,000 to 32,000 inhabitants. Mapping efforts and household excavations undertaken as part of the Proyecto Especial Palenque during the seasons of 1992–1994 identified 1,480...
Ancient woods used in a ritual context at Chenque I cemetery (Pampean region, Argentina) (2017)
Empirical evidence of ancient ritual practices is not often found in many archaeological sites. This complex ideological aspect of past human societies has usually been reported in association with the presence of monuments such as sculptures, tombs, funeral mounds, temples and shrines and also with particular artefacts used during ceremonies and rituals such as ceramic, stone or metal vessels, musical instruments and so on. Archaeobotanical evidence could contribute enormously to the study of...
"... and his wife Sally": The Binford Legacy and Uncredited Work in Archaeology (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Sins of Our Ancestors (and of Ourselves): Confronting Archaeological Legacies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Often mentioned as an afterthought in sentences about her more famous husband, Sally R. Binford has long been a topic of discussion for those interested in 20th century female archaeologists. Her foundational work in the early endeavors of the ‘New Archaeology’ set the stage for an academic revolution,...
An Andean Mountain Shrine: The Case of Balconcillo de Avillay, Huarochiri (Lima, Peru) (2017)
One of the characteristics of ritual practices in the Andean Society is the presence of shrines in top of mountains related to local deities. These shrines formed part of ancient cultural landscapes that involved settlements, farmlands, cemeteries, and even complex road systems. Most of these ritual spaces are not regularly present in the archaeological record, yet they are frequently mentioned in etno-historical accounts. This study presents a preliminary analysis of a shrine located in the...
Andean Population Dynamics Revealed by Genome-wide Data from the High Elevation Cuncaicha Rock Shelter (2017)
Present-day Andean human populations harbor a relatively high genetic diversity but a minimal population structure and differentiation among them. Moreover, mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and Y chromosome studies on pre-contact human remains suggest that both modern and ancient Andean populations derive from a single ancestral origin. However, nuclear ancient DNA (aDNA) data from the Andes in particular and South America in general are still too scarce to fully address questions on genetic continuity...
The Angel of History and the Paradise of Progress in the Scholarship of Peter Roe (2017)
In honor of the innovative contribution by Peter Roe to the ethno-archaeological research on Amazonia, my paper will focus on the indigenous knowledge forms which invert our own logics about material objects. Roe’s early willingness to allow indigenous thought to impact our scientific interpretations was well ahead of its time. Today, we on the ethnographic side of Amazonian scholarship, have little difficulty speaking in terms of the "social life of things." Yet, even beyond, the legitimacy...
Animal Imagery and the Mythic Level of Jama-Coaque Figural Style (2017)
The mythological and iconographic analyses of Peter G. Roe have made seminal contributions to our understanding of Amerindian cosmology and religious thought in South America, both in the ethnographic present and in the prehispanic past. His unitary mythic model set forth in the Cosmic Zygote (1982) and explored in subsequent publications has convincingly demonstrated that this quintessentially Amazonian model has "deep-time" attributes that shed interpretive light on iconographic...
Animism and Agency in the Amazonian Landscape: A Consideration of the Ontological Turn Utilizing Perspectives from Modern Runa Communities (2018)
Modern kichwa-speaking Runa peoples inhabit much of Ecuador’s Upper Amazon. Ethnographic study focusing on Runa communities of both the Pastaza and Napo Rivers indicate these groups share many of the views, collectively known as Amazonian Perspectivism, that characterize numerous lowland cultural groups. This paper will detail some of the ways in which Runa persons perceive and interact with their environment, focusing on relations with socially salient plants and animals thought to be persons,...
Annotated Bibliography: Distant Early Warning (DEW) System, Alaska (2008)
An annotated bibliography of the Distant Early Warning (DEW) System. The DEW Line was an integrated chain of early warning radar and communication stations constructed between 1953 and 1957 from northwestern Alaska across northern Canada. The DEW System remained in use throughout the mid to late 1980s. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was replaced with the North Warning System (NWS).
Another Indigenous Feminist on Settler Colonialism in Archaeology (2018)
This paper addresses the ongoing phenomenon of settler colonialism that permeates even the best intentioned "decolonizing" efforts. This paper gives the same credence to Indigenous and non-Western laws, stories, and epistemologies; practices what Sara Ahmed (2014) calls "citational rebellion;" and putts substantial weight into the lived experiences of Indigenous peoples in order to argue that when white archaeologists capitalize on Indigenous, Black, or People of Colour’s (BIPOC) things, bodies,...
Anthropocene Amazonia, Beyond the Buzzword: Centennial-Scale Anthropogenic Influences on Southern Amazonian Forests, 1000-2000 CE (2018)
The Anthropocene is defined here as the time when human-induced alterations of the environment become a driver of regional and global climate. The Amazon has very deep histories of human alterations of forest systems, but settled occupations that dramatically altered forest structure in regional systems of Late Holocene age, particularly following the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), ca. 900-1300 CE. Global population loss in the Old World, beginning in the 13th century, and the demographic...
Anthropogenic Landscapes of Amazonia: A Spatial Analysis of Landscape Modification and Settlement Organization at Macurany, Brazil (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. I analyze anthropogenic landscape modification at Macurany, a pre-colonial terra preta site on the Middle Amazon River in Parintins, Brazil, in order to gain insight into settlement formation and organization. Settlement patterns and artificial landscapes are the result of human action, technological innovation and ingenuity. Understanding anthropogenic...
Anthropology is Elemental: Teaching Children Using a Four-Field Approach (2018)
Public outreach and education are essential for the future of archaeology. While many organizations are actively involved in informing the public on the value of archaeological knowledge and the importance of preservation, the majority of in-depth education on archaeology and anthropology as a whole remains at the university level. Anthropology is Elemental is an education and outreach program that teaches four-field anthropological concepts to elementary school students through a...
Anthropology Underwater: Landscape archaeology above and below water in the Great Lakes (2018)
Submerged prehistoric landscapes have unique traits which make them invaluable to archaeologists – increased preservation of organic remains, Pompeii-like snap shots in time, and data that either do not exist on land or are deeply buried. These attributes make the few challenges that remain for conducting archaeology underwater more than worth the effort. Early human occupation in the Great Lakes has been difficult to investigate as acidic soils and dynamic water levels left many archaeological...
Anticipating Ruptures: Living with Uncertainty and Undertaking Repair (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Failure" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Drawing on archaeological research on the longue durée of ancestral Lenca society in Honduras, we argue that centuries of resilience provided the tools people needed to understand and respond to periodic interruptions in the normal progress of seasons, lives, and relationships, “failures” of specific forms of social relations most dramatically visible as...
The Antiquity and Persistence of Traditional Health Beliefs and Practices in the Northern Andes (2017)
This paper presents findings of a new European Community funded research project: "Indigenous Concepts of Health and Healing in Andean Populations". The study population are indigenous Quechua peoples in northern Andean Ecuador. The project examines ethnic Andeans’ understanding of their world and how health, illness and healing are understood within it. Current practices of traditional medicine (TM) have evolved within complex historical contexts into new forms which can reveal the nature of...
Análisis geoespacial de la distribución de sitios arqueológicos en la Sub-Región Diquís, Región Gran Chiriquí (2018)
La Sub-región Diquís de la Región Gran Chiriquí posee a la fecha un total de 1.595 registros de sitios arqueológicos documentados en la Base de Datos Orígenes del Museo Nacional de Costa Rica. El presente trabajo expone los resultados logrados al aplicar un análisis geoespacial diseñado para conocer la distribución de dichos depósitos arqueológicos, en un contexto fisiográfico modelado para tal efecto mediante sistemas de información geográfica (SIG), que permite aproximarse a las...