Republic of Palau (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
226-250 (633 Records)
This paper takes site data from two recently excavated locales on Saipan and discusses the archaeology, physical anthropology, and bioarchaeology of the sites. The goal is to frame these within larger questions of origins, changes in the island's demography through time, and to assess several migration models for settlement of Saipan and the Northern Marianas.
Geographic Variability in the Onset and Intensification of Swidden Cultivation on Viti Levu, Fiji (2017)
At some point between initial colonization and first contact with Europeans, Fijian economies transformed from being dependent upon marine foraging to dependence upon intensive agriculture. The timing and spatial pattern of this transition has beguiled archaeologists because the archaeology of Post-Lapita, "Mid Sequence" archaeology has been so scantily preserved and recovered. We employed geoarchaeological coring of terrestrial soil and sedimentary sequences along a transect from near the coast...
Geometric morphometry versus traditional stone artefact typology in the Hoabinhian of northern Vietnam (2017)
Hoabinhian typologies dominate stone artifact analysis in discussions of late Pleistocene archaeology in mainland Southeast Asia. Although, the objective reality of the types in this system has been questioned, there has been little empirical work to test the usefulness of the commonly used types as discrete entities. We collect 3D scan models of 110 artifacts from Mau A, a recently excavated site in northern Vietnam, where the Hoabinhian was was first described. We derive semi-landmarks along...
Geomorphological Development and Implications for Human Settlement of Southern Yap, Western Caroline Islands (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human population dispersals across Remote Oceania were some of the most remarkable long-distance voyages in history. Recent collaborative research focused on the timing, drivers, and complexities of these voyages has led to an increased understanding of these movements, but many questions still remain unanswered. This is especially true for Yap, a group of...
Getting the Chronology Correct: Bayesian Chronological Analysis of Initial Ceramic Deposits in Island Southeast Asia (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Research and CRM Are Not Mutually Exclusive: J. Stephen Athens—Forty Years and Counting" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Throughout his career Steve Athens has been concerned with generating archaeological chronologies that, because of their precision and validity, add to our understanding of the past. Steve was never one to generate dates of dubious quality simply to produce a table in a report. In this spirit, and...
GIS and Remote Sensing Applications in the Search for World War II POW/MIAs in the Philippines (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over 81,500 U.S. servicemembers remain missing from America’s past conflicts extending to World War II (WWII). The great majority of this number, more than 72,000, relate to WWII alone. For the past several years, the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) has partnered with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) on the recovery of WWII personnel in...
Glass Beads along the Early Maritime Silk Route: A View from Southeast China (2023)
This is an abstract from the "The Current State of Archaeological Research across Southeast Asia" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From the fifth century BCE to the early centuries CE, glass beads played an important role as trade goods along the Maritime Silk Route, with large numbers found at coastal and inland sites in South, Southeast, and East Asia. Archaeology and compositional analysis have identified distinct glass recipes and likely...
A Glimpse of Rice Exploitation at Mojiaoshan Site, Liangzhu Culture: Archaeobotany and Rice Charring Experiment (2017)
Located at the Lower Yangtze River, China, Mojiaoshan Site is a 'palace' and center of Liangzhu Culture. On the edge of the Mojiaoshan platform, a waste accumulation of rice (H11) was found in recent years. Based on the archaeobotanic remains from this accumulation, this paper tries to preliminarily discuss the rice exploitation at Mojiaoshan Site. By conducting a charring experiment aiming to distinguish the rice broken before charring from rice broken after charring, the research tried to...
Globalization in Southeast Asia’s Early Age of Commerce and the Contributions of Maritime Archaeology (2017)
Globalization has become a central concern of anthropology, and recently scholars have debated its definition, origins, and social implications. For example, some contend that it is a process associated with modern times while others argue that the first long-lived networks involving regular, trans-regional trade emerged between East Asia and the Mediterranean around AD 1000, and even earlier with other regions. It has become increasingly evident, based on a growing corpus of data, that...
Gone fishing: Evidence for Wide-ranging Marine Exploitation in the Initial Settlement of Island Southeast Asia (2017)
"Fishing is much more than fish... It is the great occasion when we may return to the fine simplicity of our forefathers" (Herbert Hoover, 1963. Fishing for Fun-and to Wash Your Soul. Random House) In the vast oceans separating continental Sunda and Sahul are more than 17,000 islands that make up the Wallacean Archipelago. Lying to the east of Huxley’s Line, these islands are characterised by unbalanced and depauperate terrestrial faunas but support some of the world’s most bio-diverse marine...
Hawaiian Petroglyphs and Pictographs: Patterns and Interpretations from Hawai’i, Maui, Moloka’i, O’ahu, and Kaua’i (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Hawaiian Islands have a variety of rock art sites I have examined and photographed on five of the eight main islands over the past 50 years, with most of the research conducted more recently as summarized in this presentation. Some islands have only a few petroglyph locations, whereas the Big Island...
Health and nutritional stress in Pericolonial Ifugao, Philippines (2017)
The Ifugao of the highland Philippines responded to Spanish colonial incursions in adjacent lowland towns in the early 1600s by consolidating their political, social, and economic resources. This period saw the introduction of wet-rice agriculture and subsequent expansion of irrigated terraced agriculture in the region. These social and economic changes suggest an increased reliance on rice and a decreased dependence on a broad-spectrum diet. It is hypothesized that changes in diet and larger...
Health and Stress of Neolithic Yangshao Culture Skeletal Population from Wanggou Site, Zhengzhou (2017)
The Wanggou site, located in the Lower Yellow River valley, is a large Yangshao culture cemetery, dating to 7000-5000 BP. Two hundred and eleven skeletons were examined for variations from normal morphology, including non-metric traits, to characterized pathology of the Neolithic Age residents of Central China. This paper examined skeletal evidence of bone disease, trauma and musculo-skeletal stress markers (MSM) of ancient residents. A prevalence of spina bifida, spondylolysis, lumbarization,...
Heath and Stress of Ancient People on the Shanbei Loess Slope in China: The Social and Environmental Impact (2017)
This paper investigates the impact of social and environmental changes on the health of people living during the Warring States period (ca. 5th – 13th Century B.C.) on the Shanbei Loess Slope, a marginal area that connects the Guanzhong Plain and the Shanbei Plateau. Two human skeletal assemblages representing two different cultural settings, but with a longstanding history of conflict, were selected: (1) Zhaitouhe cemetery (n=73) (Xirong Culture, the minority) and (2) Shijiahe cemetery (n=33)...
Here we go again: a new series of AMS dates from the Kkho Wong Prachan Valley, central Thailand (2017)
A new series of AMS dates from the Khao Wong Prachan Valley (KWPV) in central Thailand addresses several key questions in the region, including the dating of the initial settlement of the valley, the duration of the pre-metal period, the first appearance of copper-base artifacts, the beginning of large-scale crucible-based copper smelting and production at the site of Non Pa Wai, the shift to a different copper production technology used at Nil Kham Haeng, and, the occupation span of the...
The Heterarchical Life and Spatial Analyses of Historical Buddhist Temples in the Chiang Saen Basin, Northern Thailand (2023)
This is an abstract from the "The Current State of Archaeological Research across Southeast Asia" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The concept of social heterarchy was first incorporated as an alternative approach to examining the sociopolitical organization of early settlements in the Southeast Asia region, particularly pre-state societies. However, applications of heterarchy are somewhat limited to archaeological research on social development,...
High Precision Mapping of Human Behavior in Ethnographic Contexts, a New Tool for Ethnoarchaeology (2017)
Ethnoarchaeological studies attempt to link human behavior to the material residues they produce for the purpose of developing archaeological method and theory. Traditional studies in spatial ethnoarchaeology, however, have focused on the mapping of material remains, but the spatial distribution of the behaviors that produced them, the thing that interests us most, has gone largely undocumented and for good reason. Until recently, it was not technically possible to map people in space in a way...
High-Precision Photogrammetry Mapping of the South Kohala Agricultural Field System, Hawai‘i Island (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Many archaeologists employ high-precision remote sensing to study surface remains at a landscape scale. Hawaiian archaeologists pioneered remote sensing using aerial photography in the Kohala peninsula of north Hawaiʻi Island, beginning in the 1960s, and it was the location for the first regional-scale application of lidar in Hawai‘i. In March 2022,...
The Highways and Byways of the Winds: Exploring Sailing Capability and Climate Variability in Pacific Interaction (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Modeling Mobility across Waterbodies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Current debates over migration and mobility in Pacific prehistory hinge on the capacity of mariners to sail to windward. With this ability, voyages between any two points were possible, with ease of travel conditioned on the favorability of winds. Without it, movement in any given direction was dependent on winds traveling along a similar path, a...
Hinterlands and Mobile Courts of the Hawai`i Island State (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Hinterlands in Polynesia" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The eighteenth century Hawai`i Island state included more than 400 local communities divided among six districts, each with a resident elite. The king’s mobile court of as many as a thousand people frequently moved from one highly productive district core to another. The "capital" was wherever the king resided. Varying in time and space, hinterlands...
History, Archaeology, and the Lost Marines of Guadalcanal (2019)
This is an abstract from the "A Multidimensional Mission: Crossing Conflicts, Synthesizing Sites, and Adapting Approaches to Find Missing Personnel" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2016 Garcia & Associates conducted forensic archaeological investigations for the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) on Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands. Beginning on 7 August 1942 the Battle for Guadalcanal was the first major Allied offensive of World War II in...
Hokkado, Japan as an Island System in East Asian Pre-Colonial History (2017)
Hokkaido, Japan is an island separate from the East Asian mainland and Honshu yet closely linked culturally to the rest of the Japanese archipelago. Hokkaido was never isolated entirely from the East Asian mainland either. This paper reviews several key events that relate to Hokkaido as an island with a distinct cultural history. As the contemporary home of an indigenous population, the Ainu, Hokkaido has played, and can continue to play, an important role in our understanding of cultural...
Holocene Paleoenvironment and Demography of the New Guinea North Coast (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Pacific islands are often used as model cases of human-environment systems and the development of biocultural diversity. In comparison to the smaller islands of the southwestern Pacific, the prehistory of the north coast of New Guinea remains poorly understood, particularly prior to ~2000 BP. We draw together a variety of archaeological evidence collected...
Holocene Vegetation Cycles, Land-use and Human Adaptations to Desertification in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia (2017)
Since the retreat of the Pleistocene some 11,700 years ago, the landscape and vegetation of the Mongolian Gobi Desert has been profoundly changing, punctuated by the appearance of lakes, wetlands, and finally aridification. Vegetation communities have responded to these changes according to temperature shifts and northward to southward movements of the edges of East Asian monsoonal systems. Human groups have lived, foraged, and traveled through the landscape of the Gobi for millennia, adapting...
Honshu’s Pre-Agricultural Landscapes: Perspectives from Mt. Fuji and Toyama Bay (2017)
Pre-agricultural Japan experienced significant changes in its cultural and natural landscapes over some 30 millennia of human habitation and modification (ca. 34,000 to 2,300 calendar years BP). As an extensive period witnessing fundamental environmental and cultural changes, the pre-agricultural era was dynamic, with sub-periods of relative stability punctuated by episodes of rapid change in lifestyle, material culture, and environmental and cultural setting. This research compares and...