Republic of El Salvador (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
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The Formative Period site of Altica in the Patlachique range poses many problems when designing an excavation strategy. Three millennia of erosion, and centuries of chisel plowing have eviscerated the site, removing any traces of architecture and in situ remains above the tepetate (local bedrock). As such, in the early stages of the Altica Project, the primary concern was the detection and identification of sub-surface remains inside intact bedrock-incised pits. In most archaeological sites, the...
Of Mummies and Guinea Pigs: An Analysis of Burial Contexts at Chiribaya Alta (2017)
In the Pre-Incan site of Chiribaya Alta, animals were often included in the graves of the deceased. Cuy, or Guinea pig, are amongst the most common type of animal found in these contexts, signaling the significance of these animals for the Chiribaya peoples in life and in death. Among traditional peoples in the Andes documented ethnohistorically and ethnographically, guinea pigs are consumed as food and are also used for divination and other religious practices. At Chiribaya Alta, a site in...
Oh Captain, My Captain: Transforming the Practice of Archaeology (2018)
For many Native American community members, becoming an archaeologist can be a difficult choice. This is especially true if you have witnessed the wanton destruction of your sacred sites, the disrespectful treatment of your ancestors by archaeologists and have been taught by your family and community to see archaeologists solely as grave diggers. My review of the archaeological literature and interaction with archaeologists during the 1990’s only supported this perspective, bringing doubt to my...
Old Dogs, New Tricks: Tracking Dog Management in the Ancient Maya World (2017)
This study examines the management of dogs as a resource and status symbol in ancient Mesoamerican society. One of the few New World domesticated animals, dogs provided communities with a steady source of meat. Artistic and ethnohistorical accounts suggest that dogs may also have been selectively bred to emphasize particular body shapes and hair types, including even absence of hair. These different breeds are described as playing different roles, as participants in specific ceremonies, as...
Olmec Households in the Context of Sociopolitical Transformation (2017)
The Olmec are among Mesoamerica’s earliest civilizations and as such they provide a good opportunity to investigate household change in the context of developing social inequalities. Over the past few decades archaeologists have gathered household data that show the ways they transformed and remain unchanged during periods of social evolutionary change. Artifact assemblages and subsistence patterns are examined and together provide valuable insights ...
Olmec Iron-Ore Mirrors from San Lorenzo, Veracruz / Los Espejos Olmecas de Mineral de Hierro de San Lorenzo, Veracruz (2024)
This is an abstract from the "And They Look into the Mirror for Answers: Mirror Analysis to Understand Its Holder" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the heyday of the Olmec capital of San Lorenzo (1400–1000 cal BC), iron-ore mirrors from nonlocal sources were traded from distant regions. The Central Valleys of Oaxaca have been hypothesized as one of the possible sources, if not the main one. Iron ore was then used by the Olmec to create drill...
Olmec of the Periphery: The Dawning of Creation in the Central Mexican Highlands During the Middle Formative (2017)
By 900 BCE, a middle formative Olmec influence projected into the central highlands of Mexico. This became apparent with the 1930’s discovery of the regional center of Chalcatzingo and its monumental architecture created in the Olmec style. Additionally, Olmec style symbolism appeared in the modern Mexican state of Guerrero with outstanding examples like the monumental architecture of Teopanticaunitlan and the cave paintings of Oxtotitlan and Juxtlajuaca. This paper will iconographically analyze...
Olmecs masks in the region of Arroyo Pesquero (2017)
In a detailed analysis of some figurines of the offering 4 of La Venta, we observed that some of them were carved wearing a mask. This is hardly visible because the representation of the mask is a realistic human face. It seems to have a close relationship with the stone masks found a few kilometers from La Venta, in the site of Arroyo Pesquero, Veracruz, a site of Olmec offering reported in 1969 by the archaeologist Manuel Torres where a lot of lithic material was discovered. Among these there...
The Ometochtli Complex and its Presence in the Offerings of the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan (2017)
In 1971, H.B. Nicholson classified the Mesoamerican pantheon of god’s by their symbolic elements and functions. One of the most important groups of this classification is the "Ometochtli Complex", which is exclusively constituted of gods related to the most significant alcoholic beverage in pre-Hispanic México, the octli or pulque. This drink is created through the fermentation of the agave juice. Thus, pulque gods are easily identifiable due to key elements present in their attire. At the...
On Taro, Tridacna, and Turtles: Using a Multiproxy Method to Explore Food, Fishing, and Agriculture on Pingelap, a Micronesian Atoll (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Food and Foodways: Emerging Trends and New Perspectives" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pingelap Atoll, located in Pohnpei State, Federated States of Micronesia, has been home to humans for approximately 1,700 years. At 1.8 km2 and 70 km from its nearest island neighbor, food procurement has traditionally relied on marine fishing and hunting as well as intensive management of the coral island...
On the Edge of the New World: Colonizing the Bahamas (2017)
The Bahama archipelago is the last place colonized in the New World, and the first encountered by Europeans. Previous efforts to explain the arrival of humans followed the stepping-stone model of expansion that began in the Orinoco River drainage of lowland Venezuela. Communities island-hopped through the Lesser Antilles, expanded into the Greater Antilles, and continued their northward migration through the southern Bahamas after crossing the last open water gap between Hispaniola and the Turks...
On The Frontier: Raxruha Viejo, a Late Classic Highland Exchange Center (2017)
In the Verapaz valleys, there were sites of the major exchange route used to transport jade and obsidian from the Maya highlands to the lowlands during the Classic period. The Late Classic site of Raxruha Viejo, located on the highland side of the boundary between the Classic Maya kingdoms and their Verapaz highland trading partners, has a unique architecture and material culture of highland Verapaz style but with significant lowland elements. Overall, its assemblage and architecture appear to...
On Urban Development and Cultural Heritage: A Perspective from Cholula, Puebla (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in Puebla/Tlaxcala Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The city of Cholula has been occupied for thousands of years. However, the Spanish conquest signified one of the most significant moments of social, political, and cultural change—in part due to the development of the colonial city of Puebla, which was created for Spaniards. Cholula, however, specifically San Andrés, was perceived as an indigenous...
One Tamale, Four Digestions (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Thinking about Eating: Theorizing Foodways in Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Drawing from long-established fields in anthropology (structuralist, semiotic, identity-oriented, subsistence-focused, human ecological, and many others), food scholars have actively developed hybrid perspectives and novel pursuits. Here, I focus on four: modeling foodways linguistically, theorizing gastropolitik, situating the...
One Thing Leads to Another: Causal Triggering among Archaeological Events (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Practical Approaches to Identifying Evolutionary Processes in the Archaeological Record" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A causal connection between archaeological events is frequently little more than a convenient assumption. The repeated occupation of a site, the occurrence in time and space of a ceramic ware, or the phases of settlement construction are all assumed to reflect some causal sequence, but it is far from...
One Tough Act to Follow: A Retrospective of the Archaeological Career of Lawrence L. Loendorf (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Art and Archaeology of the West: Papers in Honor of Lawrence L. Loendorf" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation summarizes the remarkable career of Lawrence L. Loendorf, who has conducted cutting edge archaeological research for nearly six decades. As his son, my life follows the arc of Larry’s research as an archaeologist from when it formally began in early 1960s through today. Consequently, I am...
Only Murders in the Cavespace? Considering Archaeological Assumptions about Human Interments (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Misinformation and Misrepresentation Part 1: Reconsidering “Human Sacrifice,” Religion, Slavery, Modernity, and Other European-Derived Concepts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As if by default, deposits of human remains in caves and cenotes in the southern Maya Lowlands dating to the Late and Terminal Classic periods have been interpreted by many archaeologists as sacrificial victims. The position seems predicated on...
Ontologies of water: intensities and magnitudes (2017)
Increasingly, the effects of global warming take the form of destructive movements of water, whether vanishing bodies of water that create desertification or floods that damage human habitations and take lives. The extensive archaeological record of the North Coast of Peru offers a place to study long-term human strategies for living with the dangerous and unpredictable movement of water. Despite frequent earthquakes, floods and torrential rains that re-shape land- and sea-scapes, humans...
Open Chests and Broken Hearts: New Perspectives on Human Heart Sacrifice in Mesoamerica (2021)
This is an abstract from the "New Perspectives on Ritual Violence and Related Human Body Treatments in Ancient Mesoamerica" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Beyond the general idea of benefiting society and placating the divine, the polyvalent symbols and meanings of ancient religious sacrifices can be interpreted properly only after combining different disciplinary lenses. In this paper, we scrutinize iconographic and ethnohistorical testimonies of...
Open Obsidian Geochemistry Visualization system for the Andes (2017)
Obsidian sourcing studies which provide valuable insights into archaeological mobility and interaction are enhanced by the availability of geochemical analyzers, and especially by the proliferation of portable X-ray fluorescence units. This year we are introducing an open source system for analysis of geochemical datasets available in web-based repository and based on R-Shiny, a browser based analysis and visualization system built on the R project. The Andean Geochemistry data archive, a new...
Open Space and Restricted Action: Analysis of Intra-site Networks of Movement at Wimba, in the Northeastern Peruvian Montane Forest (2017)
In an area that has been considered marginal both geographically and in the narrative of South American prehistory, new research shows extensive settlement, landscape modification, and interaction between inhabitants of the eastern slopes of the Andes and their neighbors. The site of Wimba, located in the Amazonas department, in the northeastern Peruvian montaña – the tropical montane forest between the highland Andes and lowland Amazonian rainforest – is one of the best known archaeological...
Opening Remarks to the Session and A Case Study of Tribal Involvement with Research into the Indian Division of the Civilian Conservation Corps (1933-1942) (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Collaborative and Community-Based Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The CCC and other federally sponsored work programs provided needed employment during the Great Depression and have been examined by scholars in a range of fields. Archaeologists have examined CCC projects as examples of early scientific excavations that trained many American archaeologists, setting the stage for Cultural Resource Management...
Organization of Late Classic Maya Polities in Rosario Valley, Mexico (2017)
This presentation focuses on intra and inter polity organization of the Late Classic (600-900AD) Maya polities in the Rosario Valley, Mexico. Past approaches have generally used civic-ceremonial architecture to investigate settlement hierarchy, here however, the focus is turned to interaction. This approach explores how the strength of interactions between settlements can be used to explore political hierarchy. To measure the strength of interactions, a formula borrowed from the law of gravity...
The origin of Indian corn and its relatives (1939)
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...
Origin of the Pitch Lake: An Amerindian Myth from Trinidad (2017)
Although Trinidad is referred to in various myths of the Warao and Arawak of the Orinoco delta and the Guiana coastal zone, only one mythical tradition is known which was documented among the Amerindians formerly living on the island. Explaining the origin of the major asphalt seepage known as the Pitch Lake in southwest Trinidad, this myth appears to be closely related to part of a mythological cycle related by the Lokóno (Arawak) of Guyana and northwest Suriname which narrates the...