Co-operative Republic of Guyana (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
351-375 (892 Records)
Although domestic Andean camelids are native from the highlands they have been largely present in the Peruvian coast since the end of Early Horizon (near 200 BC). This presence stresses the symbolic, ritual importance and economic values of camelids. In 2011 an impressive human and animal sacrificial context dating from the Chimú period was found in Huanchaquito near Chan Chan on the northern coast. At least 130 children and 200 camelids were uncovered during the successive excavations that took...
Heritage and Territoriality: Past, Present, and Future Perceptions among the Tacana, Tsimane, and Mosetén in Bolivia (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Politics of Heritage Values: How Archaeologists Deal with Place, Social Memories, Identities, and Socioeconomics" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Preliminary results of the collaborative methodologies applied in two years of intense fieldwork in the Bolivian Amazon will be presented, and we will reflect on the different roles played by archaeological and sacred sites in the Tsimane, Mosetén, and Tacana indigenous...
Heritage Conversations with Dos Mangas (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. Archaeological investigations in Dos Mangas began in 2006, and continued with excavation of a Valdivia village site, Buen Suceso, in 2009, 2017, 2019, and 2022. Those and subsequent excavations have combined archaeological inquiry with community engagement activities such as...
High C4 plants consumption from the Late Intermediate period in Cuzco region. (2017)
Maize was one of the important crops for Inca political economics as a ritual and a staple food. In previous study of sacrificed children mummies found at Mt. Llullaillaco, the individuals particularly consumed C4 resources (such as maize, amaranth and domestic animals raised with C4 plants) in ritual activities. Contrary, the dietary compositions of Machu Picchu skeletons have shown diversity. The individuals from Mt. Llullaillaco and Machu Picchu were most probably immigrated from different...
Hinterland Domestic Economies: A Summary of Recent Investigations at the San Lorenzo Settlement Cluster (2018)
This paper summarizes recent archaeological investigations at the San Lorenzo settlement cluster in the Mopan River Valley of Western Belize. Current research at this ancient hinterland settlement is concerned with better understanding household economic organization and integration during the Late and Terminal Classic (A.D. 670-890) occupations of this site. Households are fundamental units of economic organization in both past and present societies. The examination of ancient household...
A Historical Perspective on the Nature of Precolonial Settlements in the Middle Xingu River Basin (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology in the Xingu River Basin: Long-Term Histories, Current Threats, and Future Perspectives" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In order to understand the processes that generated the rich, complex, and diverse cultural and environmental history present in Amazonia, and specifically along the Xingu River basin, it is crucial that we generate information on when, where, and how small-scale foraging societies...
A History of Knowledge of the Amazonian Dark Earths (2018)
The anthropogenic origin of the Amazonian dark earths (Terra Pretas) has been a methodologically assured fact for 70 years. Especially during the last 30 years, Terra Preta have been scientifically investigated with increasing intensity and in an ever-widening context. Currently, the dominant concept guiding research is the idea of binding atmospheric carbon which artificially produced dark earths. The large-scale production of terra preta is said to be an efficient instrument to combat global...
A History of Landscape Transformation and Environmental Change across the Ascope Irrigation System of the Chicama Valley. (2017)
The sequence of landscape transformation across the area of the Ascope Canal System in the Chicama Valley involved both natural and anthropogenic events and processes that unfolded in nonlinear ways. We argue that early events were crucial in determining transformations later in the sequence. In the arid environment of the North Coast, water availability plays a key role in landscape histories. This paper highlights evidence for El Niño events, water management, and changing ecologies for the...
Holocene Geology and Paleoenvironmental History of the lower Chicama River Valley and Coast (2017)
This paper focuses on reconstructing the Holocene paleoenvironmental history of the lower Chicama River valley and coastal system, which has provided diverse natural resources for the Preceramic cultures at Huaca Prieta and Paredones. The archaeological site of Huaca Prieta is situated on the southern tip of a Pleistocene terrace along the shore, ~3 km north of the Chicama River mouth and floodplain system. Paredones is located 0.6 km to the north on the eastern edge of the terrace. Here we...
Holocene Human Adaptations on the Pacific Coast of Central America (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Human Behavioral Ecology at the Coastal Margins: Global Perspectives on Coastal & Maritime Adaptations" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Holocene human adaptations to the Pacific coast of southern Mesoamerica and Central America are documented at a number of locations from southern Mexico to Panama. Evidence comes from Archaic-Period shell mounds, Early Formative sites at the edge of dry land behind the mangrove...
The House that Built Me: local and non-local among the Lurin Yauyos during the Inka Empire (2017)
Most scholarship on the shifts in local lifeways during the Late Horizon strictly focused on changes in the availability to new and limited-access goods by local elites (D’Altroy 2001; Hastorf 1990; 2003). In these models, local leaders became immersed in reciprocal and status-granting relationships with the Inka through gifts and exclusive artifacts. Materiality played a pivotal role in the relationship between the Inka and their subjects. However, it is less clear how local ethnicity was...
Household dynamics and the reproduction of early village societies in Northwest Argentina (200BC-AD 350). (2017)
Long term evolutionary narratives on South Andean pre-Columbian history have stressed lineal processes of complexity intensification, defined by big changes on subsistence strategies, from small and egalitarian hunter gatherer groups to complex multicommunitarian chiefdoms. These changes were thought to influence or even determine the structure of household and consequently daily life of people. Nevertheless recent household archaeology studies have demonstrated that the reproduction of...
Houses of Colonial Chiefly Authority: Local Elites in the Social Order of Mawchu Llacta, a Colonial Reducción Town in the Southern Highlands of Peru (2017)
As a result of the Toledan Reforms in the Viceroyalty of Peru during the late fifteenth century, new settlements known as reducciones were established to centralize indigenous populations. Such is the case of Mawchu Llacta, originally Espinar de Tute, in the Caylloma Province, Arequipa. The introduction of these sweeping reforms brought a series of major changes to the social order. External agents were established as the new bearers of power and local elites took on a secondary status. However,...
How Advances in Archaeobotany Benefit Us All: Perspectives from Zooarchaeology, Bioarchaeology, and Isotope Research (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Fryxell Symposium in Honor of Dolores Piperno" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The origin of agriculture in the American tropics drastically altered human societies and their environmental settings. Through the domestication of various plants for subsistence, medicine, and technological purposes, human populations grew and expanded at an unprecedented rate across the landscape from the Middle Holocene onward, spreading...
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 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...
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 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...
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...
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...
Identification of Mitochondrial Haplogroups in Native Mexican and Mestizo Populations (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Ancient DNA in Service of Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Currently in Mexico there are around 68 ethnic groups, grouped into 11 linguistic families, representing 15% of the Mexican population. The mitogenome (mtDNA) has allowed us to make inferences about the history of and relationships between these populations. However, the evaluation of the mitochondrial genetic structure in the Mexican population has...
Identifying Past Vegetation Dynamics in Xingu Indigenous Territory Using Soil Phytolith Analysis (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology in the Xingu River Basin: Long-Term Histories, Current Threats, and Future Perspectives" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents the preliminary hypotheses of a soil sampling programme aimed at mapping precolumbian and historic vegetation dynamics in the Xingu Indigenous Territory (TIX), Brazil. Research carried out with the Kuikuro during the last three decades has resulted in the archaeology...