Republic of El Salvador (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
1,201-1,225 (2,860 Records)
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...
The History We Remember: Race, Law, and Understanding the Archaeological Landscape (2018)
Law works in ways to promote specific interests of those with power, often leading to racial and economic marginalization. Through an examination of 18th and early 19th century Virginia laws, I investigate the relationship between law and race. I explore how laws help shape racial categories and forms of structural racism, and promotes economic inequality. These historical economic and and racial inequalities impact how we understand archaeological landscapes and whether sites meet the criteria...
History, Archaeology, and the Lost Marines of Guadalcanal (2019)
This is an abstract from the "A Multidimensional Mission: Crossing Conflicts, Synthesizing Sites, and Adapting Approaches to Find Missing Personnel" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2016 Garcia & Associates conducted forensic archaeological investigations for the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) on Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands. Beginning on 7 August 1942 the Battle for Guadalcanal was the first major Allied offensive of World War II in...
Hold My Beer! Archaeological Evidence of Alcohol Consumption at the Former Umatilla Chemical Weapons Depot (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Umatilla Chemical Weapons Depot (UMCD), a U.S. Army installation located in Boardman Oregon, opened in 1941. The Depot stored a variety of military items, including conventional and chemical weapons. Up to twelve percent of the nation’s chemical weapons were stored at UMCD. After UMCD closed as an active Army installation the facility was transferred...
Holding Ground: Reconsidering the Sensitivity of Backdirt in the Context of NAGPRA (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Collaborative and Community Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. When the remains of Native ancestors, or sacred and ceremonial objects, are screened from backdirt or backfill, what implications does this have for the soil in which they rested? Backdirt is usually considered unimportant after screening, but should, perhaps, archaeologists more carefully consider the ethical implications of the ways that...
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...
Holocene Paleoenvironment and Demography of the New Guinea North Coast (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Pacific islands are often used as model cases of human-environment systems and the development of biocultural diversity. In comparison to the smaller islands of the southwestern Pacific, the prehistory of the north coast of New Guinea remains poorly understood, particularly prior to ~2000 BP. We draw together a variety of archaeological evidence collected...
Holocene Vegetation Changes and Fuel Use in the Honduran Highlands: The Anthracological Sequence of El Gigante Rockshelter (11,000–1000 BP) (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Holocene pollen sequences have highlighted several episodes of vegetation opening in Central America since the Archaic period, which have often been related to the dispersal of nomadic slash-and-burn agriculturalists from the Central Mexican Highlands. However, few archaeobotanical data from archaeological sites have been available to date to examine...
Hot, Cold, Above and Below: Enhanced Survey Methods in the Detection of Clandestine Graves (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Forensic Archaeology: Research & Practice" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ground-based methods of searching for clandestine graves and surface remains have been utilized by law enforcement and search and rescue personnel for years. When ground conditions and the technique of search are appropriate for the circumstances of the case, results are often successful. However, weather, terrain, acreage, foliage and efforts...
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...
Household Ecology and the Legacy of the Secondary Products Revolution in Yucatán (2016)
In this paper, we examine the changes in household ecology that resulted from the introduction of European domesticates to Yucatán after the Spanish invasion. New animals and plants were not adopted wholesale as a Euroagrarian suite in the sixteenth century. Instead, heterogeneous practices took root in highly altered demographic and environmental settings. Ecosystems were re-engineered as animals moved into new anthropogenic niches. We compare archaeological and ethnoarchaeological evidence 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,...
Houses of Power: Community Houses and Specialized Houses as Markers of Social Complexity in the Pre-Contact Society Island Chiefdoms (2017)
World-wide, communal houses and specialized houses represent hallmarks of social complexity. In pre-contact Society Island chiefdoms, social complexity was materially marked by architectural differences between elite and commoner residences. Yet perhaps more pronounced are architectural differences and varied spatial patterning between residential houses, communal houses, and specialized houses. This paper provides a spatio-temporal analysis of communal and specialized houses on the Maʻohi...
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 can archaeologists better engage the public, tribes, land managers, law enforcement officers and prosecutors regarding the importance and relevance of heritage protection? (2019)
This is an abstract from the "New Perspectives on Heritage Protection: Accomplishing Goals" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Planning for active engagement with land managers, law enforcement, tribes and the public during federal archaeological project development can lead to a more comprehensive, reciprocal appreciation of heritage and its protection. To include public engagement and interpretation into project work, especially NHPA Section 110,...
How do we keep "bro-ing" away from open access archaeology?: Open Access, Cultural Appropriation, and Archaeology (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Openness & Sensitivity: Practical Concerns in Taking Archaeological Data Online" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. "Bro-ing" is a market research practice pioneered by Nike and reported by Naomi Klein (2000:75) where designers bring prototypes to inner-city neighborhoods to gauge reactions to new styles and products. This practice also creates buzz that can be used to sell those products to the same communities. Open...
How does the organization of ceramic production change through time? An Ethnoarchaeological View (2016)
Changes in pottery through time and their organizational correlates are fundamental to archaeological inference. Such correlates rely upon theory based upon distilling various ethnographic cases filtered through a series of socio-economic and socio-political assumptions about the relationship of production to the society at large. This paper summarizes some of the results of a diachronic study of pottery production units in Ticul, Yucatán, from 1965 to 2008. The data show that the kin structure...
How Experimental Research in Forensic Archaeology Informs Archaeological Practice: Differentiating Perimortem Fracture From Postmortem Breakage (2018)
Often perceived as a highly specialized and peripheral subfield of archaeology, forensic archaeology contributes to our understanding of not only forensic anthropology and forensic science, but also traditional archaeological practice. Forensic archaeologists’ extensive knowledge of postmortem taphonomic effects on material objects has led to more precise interpretations of postmortem interval, environmental (including scavenger-induced) scattering and alteration of human remains, and site...
How Indigenous Museology and Archaeology Can Contribute to the Well-Being of the Comcaac Community (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Ideas, Ethical Ideals, and Museum Practice in North American Archaeological Collections" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The history and everyday lives of the Comcaac (Seri) people are intrinsically linked to their ancestral landscape on the central coast of the Sonoran Desert and the Gulf of California. The community’s powerful and complex oral tradition, language, and the continuous occupancy of their originally...
How Many Birds Does It Take to Make a Feathered Shield? The Resources and Techniques of Mexica Featherworkers (2017)
The Florentine Codex is an excellent source for understanding the manufacturing techniques used by Mexica featherworkers to make luxury items. It records many of the tools and steps necessary to tie feathers and produce multicolor mosaics. Historical information about the selection of the raw materials, their storage, preparation, and handling, however, is scarce. The meticulous study of two Mexica feathered shields has allowed us to understand, not only the materials used in their manufacture,...
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 Behavior and Environment: A Preliminary Zooarchaeological Investigation at the Alm Shelter Wyoming (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Alm Shelter in Wyoming lies in the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains, and its repeated use for 12,000 years provides a snapshot into human life throughout the Holocene. Moisture is a controlling factor in this (semi)arid environment. Mountains provided refuge and increased moisture access for humans, animals, and plants. This aridity also leads to...