Barbados (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
1,126-1,150 (1,367 Records)
The Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) cultural resource responsibilities expand beyond the landscape, to the artifacts recovered from archaeological sites, and the associated records. These "gatherings" under the Antiquities Act and "archaeological resources" under the Archaeological Resources Protection Act (ARPA) were collected in the public interest to be preserved in museums for future generations. Some of these collections may also be sacred and sensitive to descendant communities, and the...
Shamans, Jaguars, Owls, Cosmograms, and Zygotes: Matapalo and the Origins of Late Valdivia Stone Plaques (2017)
The material record of Ecuador’s Early Formative Valdivia culture has long been approached from the perspective of a New World, particularly an Amazonian, shamanism incorporating foundational features of animistic ontology. More recently enigmatic stone plaques from Northern Manabí Province have been included in the non-secular repertoire of later Valdivia phases; however, their temporal and spatial associations remained poorly known. Investigations in the Coaque Valley clearly establish their...
Sharing Curation Expertise and Space for Digital Archaeological Data (2018)
Archaeologists are busy all the time. Often stretching to meet a variety of professional obligations. CRM and government agency archaeologists are among the most stretched given the different directions that pull upon their professional lives. Scholarly pursuits; administrative, bureaucratic, regulatory, and public outreach responsibilities related to physical sites and collections, easily fill or over-fill their schedules. Now the care and curation of digital data adds to the piling up of...
Shell Fishhooks on C. chorus Mussel Shell (7500 to 4500 Years BP) from the Atacama Desert Coast (Chile) (2018)
Fishing was a crucial aspect in the lifeway of ancient coastal societies. Along the Pacific Coast, the appearance of shell fishhooks has been interpreted as part of different contexts of growing population, economic specialization, and social complexity, among others. Along the coast of the Atacama Desert (18° to 26° Lat. South), fishhooks on Choromytilus chorus shells (mussel) appear in archaeological sites located along 1.6 thousand kilometers of coast with dates around 7500 years BP. Around...
Shell Midden Zooarchaeology and Paleoecology of Guaimoreto Lagoon, Northeast Honduras (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent research documents resource use and ecological change at the Selin Farm site, a group of around 30 well-stratified house and shell mounds occupied AD 300 – 1000 near the Guaimoreto Lagoon on the northeast coast of Honduras. A 4.5 m high shell mound with excellent preservation of vertebrate and invertebrate remains provides a full view of landscape...
A Shell Mound in a Rockshelter? Geoarchaeological Analysis of Shell-bearing Facies at Maximiano Rockshelter, Iporanga County, São Paulo State, SE Brazil (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Maximiano archaeological site consists of a limestone rockshelter embedded in the Brazilian tropical Atlantic Forest of SE Brazil. Excavated in the late 1970s by an amateur archaeologist, this 40 × 5 × 3 m rockshelter setting contains lithics, bone artifacts, and faunal and human remains dating between ~11,712 and 6796 cal yr BP. Located in a region...
Shifting the paradigm of coastal archaeology in Latin America (2017)
How might knowledge of past fisheries contribute to the future sustainability of modern coastal societies? Small-scale coastal fisheries provide a crucial source of food and livelihood to millions of people living in South America. Such coastal economies are founded on long-established knowledge that is deeply rooted in the past. Whilst marine conservation, dwindling fish stocks and environmental sustainability have driven the research agenda in recent years, government and international...
Shipwrecked Heritage of the Old and New World: Owning and Owning up to the ‘Midas Touch’ of the Colonial Past (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeological past rarely maps perfectly to the borders of current nation states, leaving stakeholder groups to constantly renegotiate boundaries. Located in international water and hosting assemblages from a variety of transitory groups, shipwrecks of the ‘Columbian Exchange’ have prompted Spain’s former colonies to re-order ownership boundaries by...
Shock and Awe: An Insider's View of the "Stanford Phenomenon" (2018)
In the early 1970s Clifford Evans created a "Paleoindian Program" at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Clovis was well-established in the literature, but its origins and antecedents were mysterious. Dennis Stanford had just received his PhD on Thule culture studies in Barrow, Alaska, but his real love was Paleoindians. After arriving at the SI he picked up the mantle of the Institution’s pioneering Paleoindian researcher, Frank Roberts, and instituted large-scale projects at...
Shrines, Pilgrims, Pilgrimages in the Caribbean? (2018)
There is some suggestion in the literature, most explicitly developed by Espenshade (2014) for Puerto Rico, that major enclosures, particularly with rock art, at some point in their life cycle could be considered shrines or special religious places that increasingly attracted visitors or pilgrims from non-local on- and off-island locations. Pilgrimage rounds are well-established components of religious systems both past and current in various parts of world, including the incorporation of a...
SIBA: Stone Interchanges within the Bahama Archipelago (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in the Archaeology of the Bahama Archipelago" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents results from Project SIBA, an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project that aims to: 1) characterise the regional social networks that bound the Lucayan archipelago to the wider Caribbean region, and; 2) provide an understanding of the creation and maintenance of indigenous exchange networks. The...
SIBA: The Research Potential of Bahamian/TCI Museum Collections (2018)
Project SIBA (Stone Interchanges in the Bahamas Archipelago) brings together the largest corpus of Bahamian/TCI stone artefacts ever assembled - over 300 artefacts from eight international museums, including the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian and the National Museum of Natural History. In an entirely limestone environment like the Bahamas/TCI, all hard stone had to be imported: our objective is to determine the source of these exotics. Integrating studies that combine the...
Sicán Sociopolitical Organization in Lambayeque, Peru: Ceramic Compositional and Distributional Perspective (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We report the results of a recent chemical compositional analysis (INAA) of ceramic samples from multiple Middle Sicán (ca. 1000 CE) sites in the Lambayeque region on the north coast of Peru that offer important insights on the Middle Sicán sociopolitical and territorial organization. The analysis is an integral part of our cross-disciplinary testing of the...
The Signaling and Inheritance of Cooperation: Artificial Cranial Modification among Altiplano Foragers (2017)
We report on the recent archaeological discovery of a 7000-year-old population of hunter-gatherer burials and discuss the key insights they offer into how hunter-gatherer societies may have maintained cooperative structure against evolutionary odds. Sixteen human burials interred at the site of Soro Mik'aya Patjxa in the Andean Altiplano of Peru consistently exhibit intentional artificial cranial modification (ACM)—the irreversible shaping of human crania during infancy. Our analysis of cranial...
Silver Production and Inka Expansion in the South Central Andes (2017)
Silver was an important component of the Andean prestige economy with bestowal and display of silver and silver-alloyed objects constituting a vital tool of Inka statecraft. The quest for mineral wealth was thus a motivating factor for Inka conquest of the South Central Andes. Nonetheless, the impacts of imperial incorporation on the organization and technology of metal production differed across this region of the empire. Focusing on the purification of silver ores, we present two case studies...
Simulating Organic Projectile Point Damage on Bison Pelves (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A Bison latifrons pelvis was discovered eroding out of shoreline sediment at American Falls Reservoir in Idaho in 1953. The ischium section had a unique groove and hole with a depth of 35 mm and 10 mm in diameter. The pelvis was X-rayed in 1961 for indicators of the origin of the damage and this could not be ascertained. An experiment was developed to...
Single-Use Heritage: An Archaeological Approach to Plastic Wastescapes as Places of (Ecological) Shame (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In recent years, archaeologists have been increasingly interested in ‘places of shame’, i.e. places related to past traumatic, painful, or regrettable human actions. In this paper we argue this concept can be expanded to incorporate sites with negative ecological impact. In particular, the interpretation of places of single-use plastic waste accumulation as...
Site Clustering Parallels Initial Domestication in Eastern North America (2018)
Dense human settlements often emerge following a shift to agricultural economies, yet researchers still debate the underlying cause of this pattern. One driver may be what is known in ecology as an Allee effect, a positive relationship between population density and per capita utility. Allee effects may emerge with economies of scale such as those created by some forms of intensified food acquisition and production. Thus, in an Allee-like setting, individuals belonging to larger groups enjoy the...
"Site" (LN-101), Long Island, Bahamas: Beads, baking, and burials, but brief occupations? (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in the Archaeology of the Bahama Archipelago" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. LN-101 is a multi-component Lucayan site located on the windward coast of Long Island in The Bahamas. The site is situated along sand dunes directly on the beach and is characterized by the presence of earth ovens, evidence of bead manufacture, and associated human burials, with a notable absence of dense midden deposits or features...
Site-seeing: Aeriality, Archaeological Survey and Objectivity in Coastal Peru (2017)
Far from being mana from the future, aerial imagery has been integral to both the practical and conceptual dimensions of archaeological survey almost from its inception. In this presentation, I argue that aerial photography captured via private and state-funded reconnaissance in the 1930’s and 40’s played a transformational role in the emergence of regional approaches in Peru’s desert coast in the mid 20th century. I discuss how the use of aerial imagery has both enabled and constrained the...
Situating Mobility: Local and Regional Connectivities in and beyond the Gulf of Fonseca (AD 800–1520) (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Postclassic Mesoamerica: The View from the Southern Frontier" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In precolonial times, the social landscapes of Central America underwent numerous changes. While the impetus for those social changes are still under investigation, they are well documented, both on local and regional scales, in Greater Nicoya between the Bagaces and the Sapoá periods. In the Gulf of Fonseca, to the north,...
Skeletons in the Closet: Ethical, Moral, Pedagogical, and Intellectual Issues in Managing Unprovenanced Osteological Legacy Collections (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Legacy collections of human remains at teaching institutions present a unique set of ethical issues. They frequently are the result of decades of unknown sourcing. Even when purchased from medical supply companies, ethical standards over time shift, raising new issues. Hidden away, many institutions know that they hold these collections, yet they may not...
Slavery in the Dutch Caribbean: A Case for the Use of Qualitative Data in Sensitive Archaeological Contexts (2018)
Qualitative data are often overlooked in archaeological research in favour of quantitative data which can provide statistical results. However, there are many contexts where qualitative data (such as oral historical accounts) can provide valuable information on meaning and personal significance. This is beneficial in projects addressing topics such as inequality and colonialism. The author therefore presents qualitative data from her doctoral thesis in order to demonstrate the importance of this...
Small-Scale Agriculture and Localized Food Processing: Overview of a Post-Emancipation Communal Sugar (and Mango) Processing Platform on Providencia Island, Colombia (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sugar production was integral to European colonization during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but the archaeology of sugar has almost exclusively focused on industrial-level, surplus, and profit centered production at large plantations. This has resulted in a lack of data related to small-scale productive activities centered on localized sales and...
Social and Cultural Influences on Weaning Practices (2017)
Much of the research done on weaning practices among ancient societies is directed toward biological aspects of the weaning process. Some researchers have, for example, attempted to identify a ‘natural’ weaning age determined by human primate origins. Surveys of weaning age among modern and ethnohistoric populations, however, demonstrate that weaning age is highly variable across diverse economies and categories of social organization. This pattern (or lack of pattern) suggests that a range of...