Republic of El Salvador (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
2,801-2,825 (2,864 Records)
Traditional archaeological practice involves horizontal mapping and excavations of ancient settlements and cemeteries, but bioarchaeological research of mortuary practices in the Chachapoyas region of northeastern Peru is stymied by the challenging vertical slopes, almost constant rain, and the placement of burial structures on seemingly impossible to reach ledges on exposed rock escarpments. Exploring and registering archaeological vestiges of these cliff cemeteries requires the combination of...
Where did the Sacrificial Subjects Live? An Oxygen Isotope Study of Individuals Sacrificed by the Aztecs during the Late Postclassic Period (2017)
We present preliminary interpretations of the residential patterns of Aztec sacrificial subjects from the Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan and the Templo R of Tlatelolco (present-day Mexico City) who died during the Late Postclassic period (A.D. 1400–1519). The study uses oxygen isotope analysis of bioapatite phosphate to assess whether these individuals lived in the Valley of Mexico during the last years of their lives or were brought in from distant Aztec provinces. Tissues analyzed also include...
Where Does the Responsibility Lie? The Long-Forgotten Federal Collections and the Repositories that House Them (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 federal government is responsible for a huge amount of archaeological collections in the United States, and yet not all of these collections are housed in federally compliant repositories, while many collections are not even known to exist by the agency. But whose problem is this—the...
Where Have All the Collections Gone? Mexican Archaeology in World Museums (2018)
In the second half of the nineteenth century, before the era of professional archaeology, those interested in the evidence of the past collected, and on an unprecedented scale. Most of these massive holdings have been since acquired by public museums around the world, where they have been co-mingled with other collections, and in the process, objects have been severed from their historic moorings. Focusing on Mexican collections, this talk looks back on a decade of work in museums and archives...
Where Have All the Women in Archaeology Gone: Gender (In)Equity in Tenure-Track / Tenured Academic Jobs (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Beyond Leaky Pipelines: Exploring Gender Inequalities in Archaeological Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent studies have shown that the proportion of female faculty members in anthropological archaeology—while still below the proportion of women receiving doctoral degrees in the discipline—has increased over time. Nevertheless, there has been little consideration of the types of tenure-track / tenured...
Where is Tak’alik Ab’aj Within the Fabric of Preclassic Interrelations? (2017)
Three decades of research at Tak’alik Ab’aj have repeatedly confirmed that this ancient site at the southwestern piedmont of Guatemala was an important link of the transcultural trade-network along the Pacific littoral of Mesoamerica. This presumes strong and functional interactions among the stronghold-players of this hanseatic system operating during a given timespan by means of a common shared concept proposed as "market of rituality", permeated in each case according their own local nature...
Where Is the Chief? A Reevaluation of the Concepts of Chiefdoms and Cacicazgos in Caribbean Archaeology (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Traditionally, the terms chiefdoms and cacicazgos have been used throughout the Caribbean as synonyms of stratified sociopolitical systems encountered by Europeans at the time of contact. However, recent data unearthed by the Archaeological Project of the Ceremonial Center of Tibes put into question the applicability of these categories based on generic...
Where My Ladies At? The Fight to Erase the Gender Gap in Publication (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Feminist scholars have observed the gender disparity in archaeological knowledge production since the 1980s. Since then, both broad, discipline-wide, and smaller regionally focused studies have repeatedly demonstrated the same pattern of male-dominated publication trends. The lack of diverse voices in archaeological research has implications for the questions...
Where the Land Meets the Sea: Preceramic Complexities on the North Coast of Peru (2017)
Interdisciplinary investigation of the large coastal mounds of Huaca Prieta and Paredones and their associated domestic settlements represent Preceramic human occupation as far back as ∼14000 cal BP. Research at these sites has documented a long Preceramic sequence from the activities of the first maritime/terrestrial foragers from the late Pleistocene to early Holocene to the construction of the mounds and the introduction and development of agriculture and monumentality from the middle to late...
Where We Are Five Years Later: A Reexamination of Gender Disparities in Publication Trends in North American Archaeological Journals (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This project builds on the work of Dr. Bardolph's 2014 gender research, where she analyzed gender publication trends across 11 major archaeological journals from 1995 to 2014, assessing disparities between men and women in their number of publications. Her research put statistical value on what many researchers had before found to be true—men had higher rates...
Who Are the Olmec in Eastern Guerrero? From Grafitti to Monuments in the Caves of Guerrero (2017)
The caves of Cauadzidziqui and Techan offer contrasting views of how Olmec style appears in eastern Guerrero. Cauadzidziqui presents large-scale paintings of individuals with Olmec style symbols and objects plastered over what is believed to be local late Archaic paintings—essentially graffiti placed in a sacred locale along a primary route between the highlands and coast. The Cave of the Governors presents 3 or possibly 4 jaguar sculptures carved out of living rock, flanking the interior...
Who owns the cosmogram? Adaptations in ritual activity in the wake of political transformation at Dainzú, Oaxaca Valley of Mexico (2017)
Dainzú, located in the Oaxaca Valley of Mexico, has a long history of religious-ceremonial significance. In the Classic Period (A.D. 200 – 900), the site expanded significantly from its once small core into an urban settlement covering around 4 km2. Our mapping project reveals that the new site construction was carefully planned out to represent a "cosmogram", or spatial representation of the ancient Zapotec ritual calendar. After the decline of Monte Albán, Dainzú was slowly abandoned as people...
Who's Gonna Know? Resolving Personal Privacy While Respecting Cultural Edicts in Repatriation (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sovereign nations have cultural edicts that they expect of participants when it comes to matters of repatriation. This poster explores paths taken to manage cultural requests of practitioners in the repatriation process. We will provide scenarios experienced by ourselves and how we respectfully implement tribal cultural requests.
Whole Vessel Caches: A Comparison of Offerings at Cerro de la Virgen with lower Río Verde Valley Public Space Offerings (2017)
Previous archaeological excavations in the lower Río Verde Valley in Oaxaca, Mexico have provided evidence for communal ceremonies since the Late Formative (400-150 BCE). The Terminal Formative (150 BCE-250 CE) period saw a continuation of communal ceremonies at hinterland sites along with the emergence of the region’s first polity, Río Viejo. The maintenance of these practices in the hinterland during the increasing urbanization occurring at Río Viejo suggests their importance in community...
Whose Land? Governance of Land Tenure, Property, and Inequality in the Maya Lowlands (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Property Regimes" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The role that governance and property regimes play in the everyday life of citizens is something we grapple with, actively or passively, every day. In the archaeological record, these topics often prove challenging to evaluate without written records. However, using robust survey data from settlements and civic-ceremonial/administrative architecture...
Who’s “Public”? Whose “Outreach”? (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Democratizing Heritage Creation: How-To and When" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Within CRM, completing public outreach as part of a mitigation program is common practice. Public outreach is an important mechanism to engage the public, but generally centers on archaeologists educating the mainstream public through books, fliers, signs, and videos. For the CDOT 550/160 Interchange Project, the consulting parties agreed...
Why did people begin to make rock art?: A study case from Central North of Chile (2017)
The origin of rock art has frequently asked from an evolutionary and cognitive perspective to understand the dawn of making images in the Paleolithic. But in many regions of the world the beginnings of rock art production occurred later. The Central North of Chile is one of these places. In this area, the practice of marking and chipping rocks surfaces started around 2.000 BCE in coherence with the transition from the Middle to the Late Holocene and the start of many transformations in the...
Why did they leave? The Wari Withdrawal from Moquegua (2017)
In Moquegua the monumental provincial center of Cerro Baúl was ritually abandoned circa 1050CE. It is at this time that Wari affiliated occupation of the sacred summit ended and production of imperial Wari goods ceased in the region. This evidence does not indicate that the empire collapsed at this time, but instead suggests when Wari officials chose to withdraw from this frontier region. Why did they leave? In this paper we discuss the changing population dynamics in Moquegua at 1050CE and how...
Why Is There Math in My Archaeology? The Modern Foundations of Quantitative Archaeology Written Decades Too Soon (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Coffee, Clever T-Shirts, and Papers in Honor of John S. Justeson" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Fifty years ago, what was arguably the most important paper ever written for modern work in quantitative archaeology was published in “American Antiquity.” Unfortunately for its author, and generations of archaeologists, few took notice of it at the time. With few citations, more than half of which have occurred in just...
Why Pacific Nicaragua Should Not Be Considered Mesoamerican during Prehistory (2017)
During Pre-Columbian times, it is well-known that the societies of Mesoamerica developed monumental architecture with a high level of complexity. During this same period, much if not all of lower Central America never achieved higher complexity other than that of chiefdom level. Honduras is the one major exception. While the societies of Nicaragua had similar gods and ceramics much of this can be explained through other means. The gods that were similar were "lesser" gods and not the main gods...
"Why those old fellas stopped using them?" Spiritual and ritual dimensions of stone-walled fish trap use amongst the Yanyuwa of northern Australia (2017)
Archaeological approaches to stone-walled tidal fish traps of Indigenous Australians focus on the technology and subsistence, with chronological development linked to demands of increased food production associated with demographic change and social intensification. For the Yanyuwa ‘Saltwater People’ of tropical northern Australia, old stone-walled fish traps found within the intertidal zone are associated with the creative acts of ancestral spirit beings. As such, these fish traps are imbued...
Why We Should Reassess How We Define Sensitive Archaeological Data and How We Share It (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. We all want to be published and want our archeological research to be relevant, useful, and available to other archeologists, but in this digital age, it may be too easy to share, and too easy for sensitive site location information to end up in places that could cause irreparable harm to the archeology that...
Why We Shouldn’t Wait until a Project is Proposed (2018)
Tribal officials suggest the National Historic Preservation Act should more appropriately be called the National Mitigation Act. For several years we worked to develop policy to direct more effort into identification of areas of cultural concern even before projects proposals were received. We advocated production of appositely designed projects to reduce the amount of adverse effects and mitigation. This effort included encouraging the use of the planning process to assemble data and add...
Will Summing of Radiocarbon Dates Unlock Scales of Socio-environmental Transformations? (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Constructing Chronologies II: The Big Picture with Bayes and Beyond" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Demography is a key factor in investigating the relationships between population levels, along with resource availability, environmental dynamics, social organization, and mobility. Prehistoric human activities and population levels can be modeled using summed probability distributions of calibrated radiocarbon dates...
William J. Folan and the Climate Fascination (2023)
This is an abstract from the "A Session in Memory of William J. Folan: Cities, Settlement, and Climate" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We recall the moment that William J. Folan was struck by the Climate Fascination. In 1978 he had a visiting professorship at the University of Texas at San Antonio and we were sharing an office. He suggested that JDG should do an article on Maya Lowlands climate change. JDG responded that Willie was the expert who...