Netherlands Antilles (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
1,001-1,025 (2,735 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The difficulty of inferring health from skeletal remains is an enduring problem in bioarchaeology. The concept of "frailty" has emerged as a convenient tool for relating observed skeletal lesions to human health and mortality, yet the biases inherent in archaeological samples have left the concept undertheorized. It remains unclear whether frailty should be...
Framing Intent, Power, and Agency in Eastern Honduras (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Advances and New Perspectives in the Isthmo-Colombian Area" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Throughout their history, the polities in eastern Honduras existed along a frontier, interacting with larger, powerful groups from a different cultural tradition to the west and with more closely related people to the south. During the period between 500 and 1200 CE, eastern Honduran groups adopted several significant elements...
The French Scientific Mission to South America (1903): the controversies and material legacy of the first extensive excavations in Tiahuanaco, Bolivia (2017)
In the context of a pluridisciplinary mission organized by the French government in Chile, Argentina, Peru and Bolivia in 1903, archaeological excavations were conducted in the monumental site of Tiahuanaco by the naturalist Georges Courty. During his 3-month stay, he conducted extensive fieldwork in the Akapana mound, the Sunken Temple, the Kalasasaya, and the Chunchukala and Putuni structures. The material corpus unearthed is estimated to consist in over 1400 artifacts, later divided between...
From "Nation" to "Indio" and "Español": Transitions in Indigenous Culture in the Missions of San Antonio (2018)
The Spanish colonial advance into Texas during the late 17th century resulted in the establishment of several missions to house members of dozens of indigenous groups and a handful of presidios to protect the missions from raiding bands of Comanches and Apaches. The Padres that were in charge of the missions enforced systematic policies and procedures to affect change in the identity of the resident indigenous nations. The policies and procedures specifically targeted religious believes,...
From Beads to Biographies: a Microwear Study of Late Pre-Colonial Ornaments from the Dominican Republic (2017)
Bodily ornaments are found throughout the Greater Antilles and have been generally regarded as items belonging to high-status individuals. Many studies have focused on their iconographic designs, meaning, and exchange among so-called "Taíno" societies (AD 1200-1500). However, much of the biography of stone and shell ornaments is poorly known, as raw materials, technologies of production, systems of attachment, and modes of deposition have not received comparable attention. This is partially...
From Carnage to Credentials: An Amerindian Archaeologist’s Journey from Child Laborer to Professor Emeritus (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Hood Archaeologies: Impacts of the School-to-Prison Pipeline on Archaeological Practice and Pedagogy" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. After nine months my mother “broke her water” on 18 June of 1956. Because my father was away, my mother walked the two hours from Stockton through agricultural fields to the hospital in Frenchcamp where I was born. Despite my father’s herculean efforts, we were caught in a seemingly...
From Cattails to Maize: An Archaeobotanical Discussion on the Relationship between Human Groups and Plants during the Archaic and Formative Period (ca. 4000–2000 BP) in the Atacama Desert (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the Atacama Desert, northern Chile, human groups settled during the Archaic and Formative periods (ca. 4000–2000 BP) in the Tiliviche and Aragon sites, located between the coast and the hinterlands. We analyzed and identified the macrobotanical and microbotanical remains from the sites of Tiliviche-1 and Aragón-1 to evaluate the ontologies among the...
From Clovis to Dalton: Key Differences in Hafted Biface Resharpening (2018)
In order to further understand Paleoindian lithic technological organization, we examined blade and haft elements of Clovis, Gainey, and Dalton hafted bifaces. Samples inspected were from across the Midwest, the Southeast, and the Northeast. Due to the rarity of these hafted bifaces, images of individual bifaces were used to take traditional linear measurements on the hafted bifaces in this study. Results indicate key differences in retouch and resharpening patterns throughout the Paleoindian...
From Coast to Coast: Recent Research in Southern Caribbean and Osa Peninsula, Greater Chiriquí Region (2018)
I present new data of investigations conducted in two almost unexplored zones on both coasts (Pacific and Caribbean) of the Greater Chiriquí Region. An exploratory survey, and test pit excavations of selected sites in the southern coast of Caribbean Costa Rica, allowed recording materials similar to those found on the Pacific coast. This reaffirms the proposed extension of related groups on both sides of the Talamanca mountain range. I provide comments about the relationships maintained between...
From Cooking to Smelting, the Social Technology of Pyrotechnology of Earth Ovens (2018)
The effects of earth ovens on societies is a topic that has not been consider much, mainly because the limitation of archaeological findings. Because our research has been mainly concentrated in floodplains environments, we have been successful in recovering a large sample that allows to propose explanations on the variability of them, and the relationship that features have in understanding some basic aspects of the social characteristic of the societies that created them. As a study case, we...
From Discrete Frontiers to Cross-Cutting Religious Networks: Religious Monuments and Cultural Syncretism in the Peruvian North Coast and Highland, Ninth to Eleventh Centuries AD (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Them and Us: Transmission and Cultural Dynamism in the North of Peru between AD 250 and 950: A Vision since the Recent Northern Investigations" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Colonialist perspectives of territorial expansion envision the political entities as spatially defined by discrete frontier boundaries. Under this approach, the distribution of objects a given cultural style parallels the area of influence of the...
“From Enslavement to Empowerment” and What Comes After: Plantation Futures on a Palimpsestic Landscape (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Deepening Archaeology's Engagement with Black Studies" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The idea of the landscape as a palimpsest, where traces of a former version can be read under the present one, came out of Paleolithic archaeology, where thousands of years of human activity must be read through low-density artifact scatters. In 2013’s “Plantation Futures,” Black geographer Katherine McKittrick describes the...
From Frog to Bat: The Extraordinary Bestiary of the Pre-Columbians from the Caribbean (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Intangible Dimensions of Food in the Caribbean Ancient and Recent Past" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Zooarchaeological studies bring information on the history of the vertebrate faunas during the last 30000 years and especially on their relationships with human activities since 5000 years in the Lesser Antilles. In such an oceanic island environment, the Pre-Columbians have mainly exploited animals from the...
From Heartland to Province: Assessing Inca Political Economy through Material Culture Signatures (2018)
Archaeological studies of Inca hegemony often focus on the intensity or degree of "Incanization," or assimilation to Inca material culture. These studies particularly rely upon well-preserved and highly visible remains, especially well-fired polychrome ceramics and monumental architecture. While Inca scholars have begun to analyze Inca hegemony in theoretically sophisticated ways that reveal how material culture legitimizes imperial rule, these approaches present several weaknesses: (1) sampling...
From Hunting to Herding in the Lake Titicaca Basin: A Preliminary Investigation of Faunal Assemblages, 9.0–3.5 ka (2024)
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. As the sole large-bodied animal domesticate in South America, camelids constituted a central component in Andean socio-economies and were pivotal for the expansion of early complex societies. The timing and nature of domestication, as well as the subsequent spread of husbandry practices,...
From Kotosh to Pacopampa: Sixty-Years of Japanese Investigations on the Andean Formative (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Legacies of Archaeologists in the Andes: Second Symposium, the Institutionalization and Internationalization of Andean Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From the excavations at Kotosh during the 1960’s, the University of Tokyo school of Andean Archaeology has consistently carried out large-scale archaeological researches focusing mainly on the Formative Period of the central Andes. All the archaeologists...
From Los Tapiales to Cuncaicha: Terminal Pleistocene humans in America’s high-elevation western mountains (2017)
Among Ruth Gruhn’s remarkable archaeological accomplishments has been the investigation of the first truly high-elevation Paleoindian sites discovered in the Americas. The open-air camps of Los Tapiales and La Piedra del Coyote in the Guatemalan highlands, located respectively at 3150 and 3300 meters above sea level, contained fluted Fishtail projectile points and rich, diverse tool and flake assemblages. Importantly, both sites were securely dated to ~12,500 cal BP, indicating early use of...
From Margin to Center: Bias and Discrimination in Archaeology (2019)
This is an abstract from the "What Have You Done For Us Lately?: Discrimination, Harassment, and Chilly Climate in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. That archaeology is welcoming to only a narrow subset of society -- that is, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, white men -- and far less so to most of us is an open secret. #MeToo stories; the blinding whiteness of the academy, the field, and the museum; and the prohibitive costs of many...
From Mayarí to “Protoagricola”: A Discussion on the Creation of Archaeological Cultures in Cuban and Dominican Archaeology (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Coloring Outside the Lines: Re-situating Understandings of the Lifeways of Earliest Peoples of the Circum-Caribbean" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The diversity, complexity, and transformation of early settlers of the Caribbean are some of the main foci in current Caribbean archaeology. Since the 1960s, the presence of ceramics in some of these early contexts in Cuba and Hispaniola have generated new classifications...
From Medieval Wool Tunics to Bone Powder: Rapid Degradation of Norse Middens in Southwest Greenland (2018)
This presentation is one of the products of a series of ongoing inter-connected, international, interdisciplinary fieldwork projects coordinated by the North Atlantic Biocultural Organization (NABO) research cooperative since 2005 in Greenland. The projects drew upon more than a century of prior field research, where four generations of archaeologists described and assessed organic preservation conditions at their sites in several regions of the Norse Eastern Settlement. This created a unique...
From Mountain Worship to Guarding the Sacred Lakes: Surveys of Cerro Canoncillo, Cerro Prieto Espinal, and Cerro Santonte (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Bridging Time, Space, and Species: Over 20 Years of Archaeological Insights from the Cañoncillo Complex, Jequetepeque Valley, Peru, Part 2" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. At the heart of the community, Cerro Cañoncillo and its lakes formed enduring sacred spaces across the landscape. In this paper, we explore in greater depth how the ceremonial centers of the region interrelated spatially and symbolically with...
From Mud to Brick, or the Transformative Possibilities of Assembling Architecture (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper considers the often-overlooked practice of building, in order to rethink the role of architecture as a mere container of sociality, a proxy for domestic stability or the precondition of social complexity. By focusing on the building of a wall in the site of Ramaditas, a 2,000-year-old site in the Atacama Desert, this work seeks to question...
From Near and Far: Application of Archaeometric Techniques to Characterize Regional and Long-Distance Interaction at the Formative Period Center of Atalla, Peru (2018)
This paper investigates the role of interregional interaction in the development of social complexity in the Central Andes during the Late Initial (c.1100-800 BC) and Early Horizon (c.800-200 BC) periods at the archaeological site of Atalla, a regional ceremonial center located in highlands of Huancavelica, Peru. Methodologically, this research integrates radiocarbon dating with stylistic, technical, and geochemical analyses of a range of materials to examine exchange and interaction on multiple...
From Pozuelo to Paracas: An Approach to the Processes of Formation and Social Complexity in Early Societies in the Chincha Valley (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Thinking Big in the Andes: Papers in Honor of Charles Stanish" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Paracas, believed to be the oldest complex society on the southern coast of Peru, occupied the Chincha Valley during part of the Formative Period (400–200 BCE). Although there is evidence of the Paracas occupation throughout the Chincha Valley, little is known about the formation of Paracas within the valley. Relatively...
From Prison to Tourism: Historical Evolution and Population of Presidio de la Princesa. (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Primary Sources and the Design of Research Projects" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Presidio de la Princesa is one of the oldest prisons in the city of San Juan, Puerto Rico, currently housing the headquarters of the Puerto Rico Tourism Board. This paper presents an analysis of blueprints and historical documents to chronologically delineate changes to the spatial distribution and activity areas while it served as a...