Republic of El Salvador (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
2,376-2,400 (2,860 Records)
The Early to Late Postclassic Period transition brought substantial changes to the political and economic organization of many regions of Mesoamerica. For the networked polities of highland Chiapas, these changes included substantial decreases in population at existing monumental centers; the establishment of new political centers in several principal highland valleys, and the establishment of an expansionary Chiapanec state in the Central Depression, centered on the city of Chiapa de Corzo....
Shifting Patterns of Obsidian Procurement within a Distant Consumer Region (2024)
This is an abstract from the "El principio del fin, el inicio del principio: Arqueología de la transición del Formativo al Clásico en Los Tuxtlas, Veracruz, México" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. By the Formative period, prehispanic societies in southern Veracruz primarily relied on obsidian for numerous daily activities. However, as the geological sources of obsidian that were exploited occur in central Mexico and the Guatemalan and Honduran...
Shifting Practices: Materiality and Mortuary Ritual at Early Classic Charco Redondo (2017)
This paper explores the relationships between the people, objects and practices that created an Early Classic communal mortuary space at the site of Charco Redondo in the lower Río Verde Valley of Oaxaca. The Early Classic follows the collapse of the first Rio Viejo polity, and significant differences in mortuary practices may signify a transformation in how power and authority were constituted. While communal internment continued, burials were generally undisturbed by later internments and...
Shifting the paradigm of coastal archaeology in Latin America (2017)
How might knowledge of past fisheries contribute to the future sustainability of modern coastal societies? Small-scale coastal fisheries provide a crucial source of food and livelihood to millions of people living in South America. Such coastal economies are founded on long-established knowledge that is deeply rooted in the past. Whilst marine conservation, dwindling fish stocks and environmental sustainability have driven the research agenda in recent years, government and international...
The Shipwreck of the French Fleet in Las Aves de Sotavento, Venezuela: A Seventeenth-Century Maritime Disaster (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Underwater and Coastal Archaeology in Latin America" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation underlines the importance of Venezuela’s underwater cultural heritage through continued research into the shipwreck of French King Louis XIV’s fleet, which struck reefs in the Las Aves de Sotavento, in Las Aves Archipelago, Venezuela, the night of May 11, 1678. The fleet consisted of 30 vessels. At least 12 ships...
Shipwrecked Heritage of the Old and New World: Owning and Owning up to the ‘Midas Touch’ of the Colonial Past (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeological past rarely maps perfectly to the borders of current nation states, leaving stakeholder groups to constantly renegotiate boundaries. Located in international water and hosting assemblages from a variety of transitory groups, shipwrecks of the ‘Columbian Exchange’ have prompted Spain’s former colonies to re-order ownership boundaries by...
Shock and Awe: An Insider's View of the "Stanford Phenomenon" (2018)
In the early 1970s Clifford Evans created a "Paleoindian Program" at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Clovis was well-established in the literature, but its origins and antecedents were mysterious. Dennis Stanford had just received his PhD on Thule culture studies in Barrow, Alaska, but his real love was Paleoindians. After arriving at the SI he picked up the mantle of the Institution’s pioneering Paleoindian researcher, Frank Roberts, and instituted large-scale projects at...
Shrines, Pilgrims, Pilgrimages in the Caribbean? (2018)
There is some suggestion in the literature, most explicitly developed by Espenshade (2014) for Puerto Rico, that major enclosures, particularly with rock art, at some point in their life cycle could be considered shrines or special religious places that increasingly attracted visitors or pilgrims from non-local on- and off-island locations. Pilgrimage rounds are well-established components of religious systems both past and current in various parts of world, including the incorporation of a...
SIBA: Stone Interchanges within the Bahama Archipelago (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in the Archaeology of the Bahama Archipelago" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents results from Project SIBA, an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project that aims to: 1) characterise the regional social networks that bound the Lucayan archipelago to the wider Caribbean region, and; 2) provide an understanding of the creation and maintenance of indigenous exchange networks. The...
SIBA: The Research Potential of Bahamian/TCI Museum Collections (2018)
Project SIBA (Stone Interchanges in the Bahamas Archipelago) brings together the largest corpus of Bahamian/TCI stone artefacts ever assembled - over 300 artefacts from eight international museums, including the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian and the National Museum of Natural History. In an entirely limestone environment like the Bahamas/TCI, all hard stone had to be imported: our objective is to determine the source of these exotics. Integrating studies that combine the...
Sicán Sociopolitical Organization in Lambayeque, Peru: Ceramic Compositional and Distributional Perspective (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We report the results of a recent chemical compositional analysis (INAA) of ceramic samples from multiple Middle Sicán (ca. 1000 CE) sites in the Lambayeque region on the north coast of Peru that offer important insights on the Middle Sicán sociopolitical and territorial organization. The analysis is an integral part of our cross-disciplinary testing of the...
The Sierra Sur in 3D: Benefits of Photogrammetry and 3D Printing for Archaeological Research in Remote Regions (2017)
Researchers working in the Sierra Sur region of Oaxaca, Mexico are often documenting sites that have not yet been studied by western scholars. 3D modeling (via photogrammetry) and 3D printing is a quick and low cost way we can begin sharing this new information with other scholars and the public, while simultaneously enhancing the documentation of archaeological landscapes and artifacts. In the 2016 field season of Proyecto Arqueológico de Quiechapa (PAQuie), we pilot tested the use of low cost...
The Sighing, Bleeding, Feasting Soul: Speech Scrolls in Mesoamerica (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Speech scrolls are common elements of Mesoamerican codices and their frequent use and incorporation into a wide array of human and anthropomorphic entities highlights the need for a formal study of these elements of iconography. The use of speech scrolls is not ubiquitous simply because of their function as a marker of speech in service of a larger motif or...
The Signaling and Inheritance of Cooperation: Artificial Cranial Modification among Altiplano Foragers (2017)
We report on the recent archaeological discovery of a 7000-year-old population of hunter-gatherer burials and discuss the key insights they offer into how hunter-gatherer societies may have maintained cooperative structure against evolutionary odds. Sixteen human burials interred at the site of Soro Mik'aya Patjxa in the Andean Altiplano of Peru consistently exhibit intentional artificial cranial modification (ACM)—the irreversible shaping of human crania during infancy. Our analysis of cranial...
¿Siluetas o excéntricos? (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Ceremonial Lithics of Mesoamerica: New Understandings of Technology, Distribution, and Symbolism of Eccentrics and Ritual Caches in the Maya World and Beyond" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A partir del estudio del proceso de elaboración de siluetas o excéntricos bifaciales y monofaciales teotihuacanos de las fases Tlamimilolpa y Xolalpan, elaborados en el yacimiento de obsidiana verde de La Sierra de Las Navajas,...
Silver Production and Inka Expansion in the South Central Andes (2017)
Silver was an important component of the Andean prestige economy with bestowal and display of silver and silver-alloyed objects constituting a vital tool of Inka statecraft. The quest for mineral wealth was thus a motivating factor for Inka conquest of the South Central Andes. Nonetheless, the impacts of imperial incorporation on the organization and technology of metal production differed across this region of the empire. Focusing on the purification of silver ores, we present two case studies...
A Simple Model of Long-term Population Expansion and Recession (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Global Perspectives on Human Population Dynamics, Innovation, and Ecosystem Change" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the last 12,000 years human populations have expanded and transformed critical earth systems. Yet, a key unresolved question in the environmental and social sciences remains: Why did human populations grow and, sometimes, decline in the first place? Our research builds on 20 years of intense...
Simulating Organic Projectile Point Damage on Bison Pelves (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A Bison latifrons pelvis was discovered eroding out of shoreline sediment at American Falls Reservoir in Idaho in 1953. The ischium section had a unique groove and hole with a depth of 35 mm and 10 mm in diameter. The pelvis was X-rayed in 1961 for indicators of the origin of the damage and this could not be ascertained. An experiment was developed to...
Single-Use Heritage: An Archaeological Approach to Plastic Wastescapes as Places of (Ecological) Shame (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In recent years, archaeologists have been increasingly interested in ‘places of shame’, i.e. places related to past traumatic, painful, or regrettable human actions. In this paper we argue this concept can be expanded to incorporate sites with negative ecological impact. In particular, the interpretation of places of single-use plastic waste accumulation as...
The "Sistema 7 Venado", a Little-known Ceremonial Center at Monte Albán, Oaxaca: A Study of Its Architectural and Ritual Implications (2018)
For the past eight years, the French team from the CeRAP (Paris-Sorbonne University and the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris) has carried out research at the Mesoamerican site of 7 Venado, which extends over 4 ha lying 400 m south of the South Platform of Monte Albán. Directed by Christian Duverger and Aliénor Letouzé, with the support of the INAH, the project has been able to date the site, whose chronology spans 800 BC to AD 300, and has also studied its spatial...
Sistemas de almacenamiento en un puerto prehispánico: consideraciones generales (2017)
Un sitio con características portuarias, en el cual se da una dinámica de un flujo constante de bienes, personas, información, etc., no sólo necesita captar y distribuir, sino también cerciorarse de la preservación de dichos bienes. En este panorama, los sistemas de almacenamiento son eje fundamental, ya que preservan los bienes hasta el momento en que son requeridos por el usuario final, lo que implica que los sistemas de almacenamiento deben estar organizados y estructurados para coincidir con...
Site Clustering Parallels Initial Domestication in Eastern North America (2018)
Dense human settlements often emerge following a shift to agricultural economies, yet researchers still debate the underlying cause of this pattern. One driver may be what is known in ecology as an Allee effect, a positive relationship between population density and per capita utility. Allee effects may emerge with economies of scale such as those created by some forms of intensified food acquisition and production. Thus, in an Allee-like setting, individuals belonging to larger groups enjoy the...
Site Map Validation and Quantifying Linkages between Multispectral and Lidar Remote Sensing for Settlement Pattern Mapping (2017)
Fifteen years of field survey and image processing of commercial satellite optical data have contributed to robust site maps of San Bartolo and Xultun, among other PROSABA sites in northeastern Peten. The recent acquisition of lidar-derived DSM and DTM data through PACUNAM has made new types of analyses possible, including the validation and enhancement of the site maps. We present recent mapping discoveries in the PROSABA region and research into the validation and extrapolation of settlement...
"Site" (LN-101), Long Island, Bahamas: Beads, baking, and burials, but brief occupations? (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in the Archaeology of the Bahama Archipelago" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. LN-101 is a multi-component Lucayan site located on the windward coast of Long Island in The Bahamas. The site is situated along sand dunes directly on the beach and is characterized by the presence of earth ovens, evidence of bead manufacture, and associated human burials, with a notable absence of dense midden deposits or features...
Site-seeing: Aeriality, Archaeological Survey and Objectivity in Coastal Peru (2017)
Far from being mana from the future, aerial imagery has been integral to both the practical and conceptual dimensions of archaeological survey almost from its inception. In this presentation, I argue that aerial photography captured via private and state-funded reconnaissance in the 1930’s and 40’s played a transformational role in the emergence of regional approaches in Peru’s desert coast in the mid 20th century. I discuss how the use of aerial imagery has both enabled and constrained the...