Co-operative Republic of Guyana (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
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The use of digital photogrammetry and 3D scanning as tools for archaeological heritage record, analysis and dissemination has increased markedly in recent years. Using these technologies a post-doctoral project is currently in progress at the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology (MAE) of São Paulo University, Brazil with the scope to document, record and analyse the animal stone figurines collection at the Museum. The objects are threefold: 1) to use photogrammetry and 3D scanner technologies to...
3D Imaging in Remote Areas, Rainforests, and Other Hostile Environments: Investigating Identity and Interaction in Eastern Honduras (2018)
Ancient eastern Honduran populations utilized foreign symbols in limited elite contexts, such as site planning and architecture, but most elements of material culture reflect clear connections to Lower Central America. Iconography seen in petroglyphs appears significantly different from that seen in other media, and may yield additional information and insights into identity formation and interactions within the region. For many reasons, these petroglyphs have not been extensively studied. While...
4,000 years of animal translocations: Mocha Island and its zooarchaeological record (2017)
Islands are territories that allow us to assess phenomena and processes in a way that is impossible to do in the mainland. One of these concerns the human interaction with animals that are usually considered as wild. The case of Mocha Island (Chile; South Pacific, 38,36°S) is remarkable because of its small size (50 km2), proximity to the mainland (30 km), three different and independent human occupation events, and an endemic terrestrial fauna constituted only by small reptiles, amphibians,...
611th Air Support Group Resources
Project metadata for resources within the 611th Air Support Group cultural heritage resources collection.
About Peopling and Rivers: Connections and Boundaries in the Early Peopling of Eastern South America (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Several papers have discussed the role of rivers in the process of knowledge, occupation, and dispersion of human groups in unfamiliar or inhabited landscapes. Most of the time the rivers are seen as displacement axes, facilitating the connection between distant points in a short time. However, at the same time as connecting elements, rivers can play the role...
Accelerating History and Bayesian Models: The Rapid Emergence of Agropastoralism and the Tiwanaku State in the Lake Titicaca Basin, South America (2017)
Long-term cultural change can be non-linear and punctuated by brief episodes of accelerating history. Such episodes, or emergent phenomena, have been described by a diverse set of theoretical approaches such as complexity theory, complex adaptive systems, panarchy, resilience theory, "eventful" sociology and archaeology, and the Annales School of History. These episodes can result in profound, lasting changes for large groups of people, but can happen too fast to be clearly documented without...
"Across the Agua to Managua" and Beyond: Getting Past Migration in Nicaraguan Prehistory (2018)
Despite being the largest country in Central America, Nicaragua’s archaeological record remains the least explored and most ignored. One consequence of this is that reconstructions of Nicaragua’s prehistory have tended to rely overmuch on rather sparse (and not necessarily reliable) ethnohistoric accounts in which migration from Mesoamerican homelands is heavily emphasized, generally to the detriment of other kinds of cultural phenomena, including indigenous developments that are not explicitly...
The Active Materiality of Obsidian (2019)
This is an abstract from the "2019 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of M. Steven Shackley" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. When Steve Shackley informed me that over 90% of obsidian samples from Puerto Escondido, Honduras, that he had analyzed came from an unidentified source, presumably nearby, he started a process of re-education that led me to a place where he may not be comfortable, but that I deeply appreciate. This involves a...
Adolf Bandelier’s 1892-1894 Expedition to the Central Coast of Peru (2017)
Adolf Francis Alphonse Bandelier (1840-1914) was an ethnologist and archaeologist best known for his work in the American Southwest. What is less well-known is Bandelier’s later years studying the ancient Andes, such as his 1892-1894 expedition on the central coast of Peru. Due to an unstable political environment, he moved his expedition to the Bolivian highlands and instead wrote about highland myths. Shortly thereafter, he passed away while pursuing historical sources in Seville, Spain to...
Advocacy for Archaeology: How Does a 35-Year Effort End Up in Failure and What to Do about It? (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Thirty-five years of very active advocacy of the importance of the archaeological record of Bermuda, England’s second and oldest continuing New World colony, has had little or no effect. Unlike many places in the world, which have embraced the scholarly significance of historical archaeology only within the past two decades, Bermuda continues to ignore...
Aeolian Geoforming at a Preceramic Mound in Coastal Peru (2017)
Los Morteros is a preceramic mound located on the North Coast of Peru composed of anthropogenic structures interlayered with aeolian deposits. A study combing multidisciplinary approaches and methodologies was used to evaluate the hypothesis of mound construction through intentional aeolian sand deposition via manipulation of strong winds across the desert environment. Wind velocities were measured across the site and in the surrounding valley. A complex wind model was created utilizing these...
African Archaeology and the Ancestral Maya World (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Essential Contributions from African to Global Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lidar mapping has revealed extensive ancestral settlement patterns signifying a low-density urban system. Maya archaeologists are tasked with interpreting how the ancestral Maya interacted and kept this system working for over 1,000 years (ca. 100 BCE–900 CE) in the southern Maya lowlands of Central America. It was a complex...
The Ahistorical Shell Middens at the Northern Tip of South America (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Dedication, Collaboration, and Vision, Part II: Papers in Honor of Tom D. Dillehay" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Subject to different historical forms of colonialism, the northern tip of South America is a politically marginalized area that is arguably the least understood from an archaeological perspective. While there is a basic understanding of ceramically defined periods, little is known about human interactions...
Aku-Aku (1958)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the EXARC Bibliography, originally compiled by Roeland Paardekooper, and updated. Most of these records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us using the...
(Almost) Making it in the Margins: Medieval Norse Adaptation to the Arctic Fjord Environments (2018)
The medieval Norse settlements in Greenland formed the westernmost frontier of Scandinavia, and the Old World, between ca. AD 980-1450. A Norse society of perhaps only some 2500 farmer-hunters settled two subarctic niches: the Eastern Settlement in South Greenland with ca. 550 sites and the smaller Western Settlement 500 km north in the inner parts of the Nuuk fjord region and with only some 90 sites. For still not completely understood reasons, the latter was completely abandoned by AD...
Alterations in South American Oral Health Through the Colonial Period: The Story of Ancient DNA Trapped Within Dental Calculus (2017)
Interpreting the evolutionary history of bacterial communities within the human body (microbiota) is key to understanding the origin of many modern diseases. The link between humans and their microbiota can also be exploited to examine and track the extent and severity of human adaptation to the environment and impacts on health. Here, we utilize a shotgun sequencing approach to examine ancient DNA preserved within dental calculus from a wide range of ancient South Americans (n=162)....
Amazonia as a Perpetual Elsewhere: The Possible and the Permissible in "Natural" Landscapes (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Amazonia is the consummate, perpetual, wild jungle. Despite a century of archaeological research pointing to rich, complex, and culturally diverse ancient societies, and twenty years of mounting geoarchaeological evidence for densely settled Precolumbian towns, many people still imagine Amazonia as a pristine, primordial forest. In this paper, I dig deep into...
Amazonian Palm and Tree Fruits Fed Residents during the Pleistocene–Holocene Transition (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Thirty years after its first excavations, Caverna da Pedra Pintada continues to be one of the only sites in the Brazilian Amazon that dates to the Pleistocene–Holocene transition (over 12,000 cal BP). As such, understanding this site is pivotal to the interpretation of early human occupations and transformations of the tropical forest. Archaeobotanical...
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 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 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...
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...