Republic of El Salvador (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
351-375 (2,860 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Navigating Ethical and Legal Quandaries in Modern Archaeological Curation" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In early 2017 a human skull was left outside the front door of the Blackwater Draw Museum in Portales, New Mexico. No one saw it arrive; it was simply there when the museum opened that morning. Facilities that curate or display archaeological materials encounter situations such as this more frequently than one...
Buried in the Sand: Investigations at Ucheliungs Cave, Palau, Micronesia (2017)
Remote Oceania was one of the last major regions colonized by humans prehistorically. While there has been an increasing amount of archaeological and genetic research in the region in recent years, many parts are sorely un- or understudied. This is particularly true of Micronesia, where many questions remain as to how and when these early inhabitants settled and adapted to the area. The Palauan archipelago, which comprises hundreds of smaller uplifted limestone "Rock Islands," hosts identified...
Buried Soils and Human-Environment Interactions within the Three Rivers Region of Northwest Belize (2023)
This is an abstract from the "2023 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Timothy Beach Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper reports on recent excavations from the Birds of Paradise wetland field complex where we studied an ancient ancillary structure situated among wetland fields along the lower Rio Bravo of northwest Belize. Here we synthesize previous studies from this broader wetland field complex that includes...
Butterfly Imagery among the Classic Period Zapotecs of the Valley of Oaxaca (2017)
This paper explores the meaning of butterfly imagery among Classic period Zapotecs of the Valley of Oaxaca. Images of butterflies, or parts of their anatomy, sometimes appear on effigy vessels found in tombs. The effigy vessels represent rulers, or other individuals of high social-standing, as jaguars, owls or the Fire Serpent. I argue that rulers of Zapotec urban centers were perceived to have a number of specific naguales or alter-egos that constitute the moral basis of political power. The...
The Butterfly-Solar Complex in West Mexico: Information Transmittal and Design Structure (2017)
During the Classic period, butterfly motifs encountered throughout Mesoamerica are indicative of diverse kinds of interaction with the city of Teotihuacan. Highly standardized stuccoed and painted ceramics from the lacustrine region of Michoacán, West Mexico, were used as the principal medium to project a major iconographic theme: the Butterfly-Solar Complex, which was very likely related to a Teotihuacan solar militaristic ideology. Symbolic meanings were encoded in symmetrical panels which...
The Buttermilk Creek Ranch Sites 41BL1431 and 41WM1498: Examining Land-Use at Two Prehistoric Lithic Resource Areas in Bell and Williamson Counties, Texas (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Buttermilk Creek Ranch (BCR) is located within the upper Buttermilk Creek Valley in Bell and Williamson Counties, Texas. Across this landscape, valley incision dissects chert-bearing limestones of the Lower Cretaceous Edwards Group exposing extensive outcrops of tool quality stone. In direct proximity to BCR, are the well-known multi-component sites...
Caches, Burials, and Vases, Oh My: Ritual Deposits in an Elite Courtyard at the Ancient Maya Site of Pacbitun, Belize (2018)
Recent investigations in a large, enclosed courtyard on the southwest corner of the ancient Maya site of Pacbitun, Belize, revealed evidence of successive emplacements of ritually important deposits. Initial analysis of the ceramic material suggests that the entire courtyard plaza has only one or two floors, with construction and use only during the Late to Terminal Classic period (600 – 900 CE). Five caches and two cyst graves were related directly to the plaza floor. The caches consisted...
Calibrating Variation in Domestic Midden Assemblages Among Aztec Period Households in Western Morelos (2017)
Archaeologists and geographers calibrate the flow of commodities among households and settlements to infer patterns of production, consumption, economic function, and social class. Michael Smith and his colleagues developed sophisticated measurements of wealth and social class using residential architecture attributes and domestic artifact assemblage diversity from excavations at three Aztec Period sites in Morelos. Here, data from over 4,000 surface collection units in eight Aztec Period sites...
California Archaeological Site Stewardship Program (CASSP) (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Site Stewardship Matters: Comparing and Contrasting Site Stewardship Programs to Advance Our Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There are many ways to organize and administer site stewardship. We highlight some characteristics of California site stewardship and we discuss why they matter. CASSP is provided by Partners for Archaeological Site Stewardship, a private, nonprofit organization. Because CASSP is not a...
A Call for Contextualized Ancient DNA Research in Mexico: The Importance of Developing Ancient DNA Collaborations that Further Education and Technology Transfer and Infrastructure in Developing Countries: Perspectives from Mexico's Experiences (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Increasing the Accessibility of Ancient DNA within Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient DNA approaches have a long-standing history in bioanthropological and archaeological contexts in Mexico. However, we are starting to see a gap between these novel data and anthropologists; this could be the result of the mixture of the rapid advance of paleogenomics together with the lack of technological and...
Can Mammoth Killing be Distinguished from Mammoth Scavenging by Humans and Carnivores? (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The characteristics of human-killed and human-scavenged elephant carcasses differ in important ways. The bones of an elephant butchered immediately after humans killed it are identifiably distinct from bones taken from a "ripened" carcasses that was scavenged by humans. With newly killed carcasses, the butchering may be light to full, resulting in...
Can the Field School Be Improved? Lessons Learned through Education Research of an NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology Education: Building a Research Base" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For many undergraduate anthropology majors, participation in an archaeological field school is the entry point to a professional career in the discipline. Despite the importance of field schools, few scholars have investigated the learning outcomes students gain or lasting impacts, either negative or positive, from participation in...
Can We See Travelers in Rock Art? (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Role of Rock Art in Cultural Understanding: A Symposium in Honor of Polly Schaafsma" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Polly Schaafsma’s extraordinary body of rock art publications allows us to return repeatedly to the images to ask different questions as our knowledge expands. Rock art informs my studies of pre-European Native American murals and 3-dimensional human figures because murals are compositions on...
Canals, Sacbeob and Defining Space in Ditched Agricultural Fields in the Three Rivers Region, Northwestern Belize (2018)
In 2016 the Northwestern Belize Lidar Consortium acquired nearly 300 square km of LiDAR imagery that covers large areas of ancient Maya agricultural systems, including ditched and raised fields, reservoirs, terraces, and sacbeob. This new imagery allows us to map beneath the canopy and shows that over nearly 20 years without LiDAR we studied only a small spatial sample of these complex systems. We have tested these systems with multiple excavations, and used multiple proxies such as...
Captive Bodies, Captive Power: Reexamining the Role of the Captive in Ancient Maya Art (2017)
Stripped, humiliated, and often sacrificed, the captive in ancient Maya art acted as a potent symbol of defeat. Captives are a central theme of Maya art, appearing on media from painted vases to carved stone monuments. However, discussions of ancient Maya captives often focus on their captors: rulers, usually depicted as conquering warriors. "Captive Bodies, Captive Power" investigates, instead, the captives themselves. Treating the captive body as a cultural project that both modeled and...
Capturing the Fragrance of Ancient Copan Rituals: Floral Remains from Maya Tombs and Temples (2018)
Pollen analysis of Classic-period temple and tomb spaces in Copan’s Acropolis revealed a range of plants important to ancient Maya ritual practice. Some of these species were not represented in macroremains in ritual or household contexts. Scholars have described temple spaces as thick with the odor of burned offerings and copal, but added to this would also have been the fresh and heady fragrance of blooming buds and greenery, adding a fecund perfume to the areas of ritual supplication. These...
Cara Blanca Pool 6: Colonial Logging and the Evolving Landscape (2018)
Cara Blanca, in central Belize, consists of 25 pools that run east to west along the base of a limestone cliff. The Pre-Colombian significance of the pools has been studied by the Valley of Peace Archaeology Project, yet little attention has been paid to their Post-Contact influence on the local and regional landscape. This paper explores the role that Pool 6, a shallow lake centrally located in the line of lakes and cenotes, played in colonial logging operations around Cara Blanca. The 2014...
Caracterización química (MEB-EDS) y cristalográfica (DRX) de cerámica local del sitio arqueológico Santa Cruz Atizapán (2017)
En el sitio arqueológico de Santa Cruz Atizapán (con ocupación desde el Clásico tardío ca. 500-650 dc hasta el Epiclásico ca. 650-900 dc), han sido detectadas macroscópicamente una serie de pastas, que por sus atributos de textura, compacidad e inclusiones, fueron agrupadas en nueve conjuntos (Inclusiones café, blancas, naranjas, de varios colores, pseudo anaranjado delgado, fina, intermedia, burda y con mica). Lo anterior refleja una diversidad en los posibles centros de producción cerámica que...
Carbohydrate Revolution Conceived: Alston Thoms’s Legacy (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Hearths, Earth Ovens, and the Carbohydrate Revolution: Indigenous Subsistence Strategies and Cooking during the Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The North American Carbohydrate Revolution was conceived by a prolific researcher who spent decades in the Pacific Northwest, Northern Rockies, and South-Central North America exploring the data potential represented by...
The Carchi-Nariño’s mollusks shells aerophones of the Royal Museums of Art and History of Brussels. Analysis by CT scan. (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeological collection of the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels gathers more than 377 pre-Columbian objects from Ecuador. Among these are twenty wind musical instruments (flutes and ocarinas) in ceramic from the Carchi-Nariño culture. These objects, which joined the collections in the 1990s, had remained dormant in the museum’s storage...
CARI-Peru Past and Future (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. The Collasuyu Archaeological Research Institute (CARI-Peru) was co-founded by Chip Stanish in Puno, Peru. It remains an outstanding facility and hub for research in the region. This presentations discusses its evolution and reviews many of the important contributions to anthropological archaeology that have come from, and...
Caribbean Archaic Faunal Exploitation: Analysis of Museum Collections (2019)
This is an abstract from the "How to Conduct Museum Research and Recent Research Findings in Museum Collections: Posters in Honor of Terry Childs" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Yale Peabody Museum curates one of the world’s largest and most comprehensive archaeological collections from the greater Caribbean region. These collections were acquired during a multi-decade research program on the culture history of the region. While the focus of...
Caries from a Museum Skeletal Collections (2018)
Studying teeth in museum archaeological collections allows us to address questions about diet, health, and the environment. One common health indicator is the rate and frequencies of in pathological indicators such as carious lesions (cavities) within a population. Changes in the amount of caries over time in a population show the changes in diet which may reflect cultural or environmental changes. Through museum collections we are able to look at caries and asses the relationship between oral...
Caring for Ancestors and Their Belongings in Museum Settings (2024)
This is an abstract from the "In Search of Solutions: Exploring Pathways to Repatriation for NAGPRA Practitioners (Part III)" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In light of the newly proposed Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) regulation concerning “Duty of Care,” this talk hopes to assist you and your institution (regional or national) to navigate and implement best practices for the curation of historical/ethnographic,...
A Case for Early Outreach Designed to Recruit CRM Professionals at the High School and College Level (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Outreach and Education: Examples of Approaches and Strategies from the Pacific Northwest" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cultural resources management (CRM) is at a pivotal moment in its history. Increasing workloads and an insufficient stream of early professionals have created a labor crisis. We are not alone in identifying recruitment as one solution. With the goal of increasing the number of bachelor’s degrees we...