Cayman Islands (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
851-875 (1,165 Records)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Property Regimes" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The tradition of resource-use prohibition known as rahui is found throughout the Pacific Islands. Rahui typically involves placing certain resources or areas of the land and sea under the protection of a central authority. For rahui to exist the concept of collective resource exploitation must also exist. This appears antithetical to the traditional...
Provisioned and Caught: Historic Perspectives on Diet in the Danish West Indies (2018)
Historic records indicate that during the late 18th and into the 19th century preserved North Atlantic fishes were shipped to the West Indies as a relatively cheap source of protein to feed enslaved persons and also the planter class. However, in historic zooarchaeological analyses of faunal assemblages from the Caribbean, the presence of these food remains is often not identified. Using two sites from the Danish West Indies, a case will be made for the use of fine-screen techniques to ensure...
Proyekto Paisahe Kultural di Kòrsou: The Environmental Legacy of Curaçao’s Cultural Landscapes (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2022, the Curaçao Cultural Landscape Project (CCLP) initiated a long-term field investigation on the ecological legacy of Indigenous and European colonial occupation of Curaçao, in the southern Caribbean. Drawing together multi-proxy records from human settlement, resource use, and environmental conditions over ca. 4500 years, this interdisciplinary...
Public Engagement through Maritime Landscapes (2018)
The future of American Archaeology lies in its ability to engage the public and demonstrate the field’s relevance to a broad range of communities. One way that maritime archaeology can contribute to this future is through identifying and interpreting maritime landscapes. A maritime landscape approach draws on the "lure of the sea" that attracts many people to shipwreck studies, but engages larger constituencies through place-based history. Geographic space is one of the things that all people...
Puerto Rican Cultural Heritage Under Threat by Climate Change (2017)
As a tropical, oceanic island in the northeastern Caribbean Sea, Puerto Rico is feeling the effects of climate change. Rising sea level, increased storminess, and unpredictable sudden weather events combine with heavy coastal occupation and little or no coherent development planning, to increase social vulnerability to coastal change. The burden of economic problems that the Island is suffering from also increases the complexities of working towards resiliency. Within this context, coastal...
Push and Pull, Part II: Modeling the Inland Exploration and Settlement of Fiji (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Geospatial Studies in the Archaeology of Oceania" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Previous GIS-based analyses (2017) by the authors have identified the ranges of several classes of terrestrial fauna that would inhabited the island of Viti Levu in prehistory. The ranges and habits of reptiles (giant tortoises, iguanas, and snakes), flightless birds (megapodes and giant pigeons), and bat and seabird colonies intersect in...
Putting a Face on History: Using Forensic Facial Reconstructions and Imagery in the Arch Street Project (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Bones and Burials in Philadelphia: The Arch Street Project’s Multidisciplinary Research" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper will discuss the application of forensic art and 3-D facial reconstruction (in clay) that was conducted on selected skull replicas made from the Arch Street salvage cemetery site. These reconstructions help to "put a face" on the people who lived in Philadelphia between the 18th to...
Putting a Man in the Machine: Experimental Archaeology and Computational Modeling (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Modeling Mobility across Waterbodies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In recent years, numerous studies have shown the importance of the links that existed between the various islands of the Caribbean archipelago in pre-Columbian times. The notion of connection has thus become the central paradigm of the approach of these island but not isolated societies. Thus, until now little addressed, the question of assessing the...
Pyric Herbivory in Ancient North America (2019)
This is an abstract from the "HumAnE Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Fire is a powerful tool for hunting because fire effects have important consequences on habitat and forage for prey species. Using case studies from the northern Great Plains and the Southwest US, I explore how fire-use positively impacted prey abundances or location, resulting in higher encounter rates for particular hunting strategies. Specifically, these case...
Quantifying Earth Oven Fire-Cracked Rock: A View from the Langtry Rock Midden (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Eagle Nest Canyon, Texas: Papers in Honor of Jack and Wilmuth Skiles" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper highlights quantification data from the author’s thesis, including the methodology of 33 archaeological excavations in the Edwards Plateau and Lower Pecos Canyonlands in which fire-cracked rock (FCR) quantification attempts were made. My excavations at Langtry Rock Midden (41VV168) were...
Quantifying Energy Investment in Monuments (Ahu) on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) Using Structure from Motion Mapping (2018)
Pre-European contact Rapa Nui (Easter Island) society is well-known for its substantial investment in monumental architecture, including over 300 platforms (ahu) and almost 1000 statues (moai). Recent theoretical and empirical research on the island suggests that ahu and moai were focal points for competitive and cooperative signaling by relatively small-scale communities dispersed across on the island. Evaluation of this hypothesis, however, requires the measurement of the amount of energy...
Quantitative Paleodietary Reconstruction with Complex Foodwebs: An Isotopic Case Study from the Caribbean (2018)
Stable isotope analysis is one of the most effective tools for paleodietary reconstruction and has been widely applied to a vast array of archaeological contexts including the Caribbean region. This region, however, possesses a particularly complex isotopic ecology, including both a large number of isotopically variable food sources and a high degree of isotopic overlap between different food groups. As such, to date, most regional paleodietary studies have been limited to descriptive and...
Queer Feminist Science in Hawaiian Archaeology (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Future Is Fluid...and So Was the Past: Challenging the 'Normative' in Archaeological Interpretations" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Queer theory is an important tool for critically analyzing ideas about the past that are normalized and reproduced to the detriment of descendant populations. This approach is particularly relevant when investigating the social structures that governed daily life in the past....
Queer Imaginatives, Normative Narratives: Examining Archaeological Theory and Conceptions of Hunter-Gatherer-Fisher Labor and Social Identity (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Thinking with, through, and against Archaeology’s Politics of Knowledge" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeology’s role and capacity to present multiple narratives about the past situates the discipline as a locus for competing power dynamics: What stories about the past are prioritized? How are stories constructed? Which stories are utilized for crafting a generalizable theory about “human nature”? At the same...
Queering Colonization in Early Colonial Belize (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Future Is Fluid...and So Was the Past: Challenging the 'Normative' in Archaeological Interpretations" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological narratives of colonial contact have dramatically shifted from a focus on colonizer/colonized dichotomies to discussions about plurality, ethnogenesis, and hybridity. However, much of the work in Mesoamerica continues to define the practice of colonization through a...
Radical Stratigraphy: A Century of Los Angeles Graffiti (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology Out-of-the-Box: Investigating the Edge of the Discipline" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For the past 100 years, an alternative written record has been tied to the underbelly of Los Angeles’ built environment. The urban infrastructure of railroads, bridges, storm drain tunnels, harbors, and paved rivers houses a vernacular history inscribed mostly on concrete with rocks, chalk, charcoal, pencil, and...
Raiders of the Lost Arca: An Early Foraging Landscape in Cabo Rojo/Lajas, Southwestern Puerto Rico (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Coloring Outside the Lines: Re-situating Understandings of the Lifeways of Earliest Peoples of the Circum-Caribbean" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent fieldwork in the intertidal zone of southwestern Puerto Rico has revealed a landscape of over 40 heretofore undocumented shell mounds (some as large as 4,200 m2 and as tall as 10 m above the surrounding tidal plain) formed by millennia of targeted human foraging...
Railroads and the Historic Resources to Understand their Significance (2021)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Transitioning from Commemoration to Analysis on the Transcontinental Railroad in Utah: Papers in Honor and Memory of Judge Michael Wei Kwan" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Archaeological research of a railroad, while not dissimilar to researching the history of a place, has unique aspects that make it challenging if one is not familiar with the subject. When envisioning a railroad, most people think of...
Rancherías: Historical Archaeology of Early Colonial Campsites on Margarita and Coche Islands, Venezuela (2017)
Little is known from the present-day archaeological perspective of early colonial realities of Margarita and Coche islands located in north-eastern Venezuela, in the state of Nueva Esparta. Moreover, the island of Coche has never been surveyed archaeologically. This paper discusses the preliminary results of systematic archaeological surveys of Coche and the southern coast of Margarita Island, carried out within the frame of the Nexus 1492 ERC research project coordinated by Leiden University....
Recent Investigations at the 18th Century Fort Frederik Archaeological Site and Cemetery, St. Croix, US Virgin Islands (2018)
In 2010, a tropical storm disturbed human remains and archaeological deposits at the Fort Frederik Archaeological Site, a multicomponent site consisting of dense 18th-19th century midden deposits associated with Fort Frederik, a two-story fortification (est. 1760) dating to the colonial development of St. Croix, then a part of the Danish West Indies. Subsequent investigations, including a geophysical survey, subsurface testing, and osteological analysis, have identified a cemetery within the...
Recent Investigations at Western Raiatea (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Hinterlands in Polynesia" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The island of Raiatea in the Leeward Society Islands of French Polynesia is viewed as a central place for the initial colonization of East Polynesia and the dispersal of pre-contact voyaging populations to distantly located islands of the Pacific Ocean. This history is embedded in the oral traditions of Pacific Island peoples and supported by...
Recent Investigations in Rock Art Dating in Several Cuban Caves (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Technique and Interpretation in the Archaeology of Rock Art" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cuba has many karst caves with pictographs, but there has been uncertainty about who created the rock art. The prehistoric population, historic indigenous groups pushed to the margins by the Spanish, and maroons or escaped African slaves are all possibilities. Cuban archaeologists have debated for decades which groups were...
Recent UAV Data Collection and Integration with Traditional Archaeological Methodologies (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. UAV data collection has become increasingly common in North American archaeology. This presentation will give an overview of the state of the art in UAV data collection, technologies, and processing methodologies. All fronts in UAV data collection are progressing at an ever increasing pace, making staying up-to-date almost impossible for most archaeologists....
Recognizing Debitage Diagnostic of Particular Reduction Technologies at Lithic Scatter Sites in the National Forests of Eastern and Central Oregon (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Debitage Analysis: Case Studies, Successes, and Cautionary Tales" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Pacific Northwest Region of the United States Forest Service is updating guidance for implementation of a 1984 Programmatic Memorandum of Agreement (PMOA) for management of lithic scatter sites in eastern and central Oregon National Forests. The guidance update emphasizes meaningful consultation with Native American...
Recognizing Redundant Data: Preventing Perseveration and Saving the Significant (2018)
What is so fascinating about heritage resources? What is it that sparks the imagination and instills a sense of place and wonder? What great lessons can we take away from the past? The most important roles of a federal archaeologist are to try to encourage public interest in questions like those, while preserving select sites with the greatest potential to provide the answers. However, compliance work for federal undertakings often focuses our attention and limited resources on the least...