USA (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
34,426-34,450 (35,816 Records)
This is an abstract from the "13,000 Years of Adaptation in the Sonoran Desert at La Playa, Sonora" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ceramics blanket La Playa’s vast landscape and include some of the earliest pottery produced in the Southwest/Northwest. Despite its high frequency and value for reconstructing occupational histories, there has been no synthetic discussion of La Playa’s ceramics. This presentation chronologically frames the site’s...
Understanding Manifestations of Public Ritual in Late Mississippian Pottery: A Comparison of Millstone Bluff and Dillow’s Ridge Ceramic Assemblages (2018)
This research entails the thorough analysis and comparison of two ceramic assemblages to understand whether and how ritual manifests in pottery of the Late Mississippian Southeast. The study focuses on ritual phenomena exhibited at two Late Mississippian Period (ca. late 1200s A.D. to A.D. 1500) settlements in southern Illinois, the Millstone Bluff site in Pope County (11Pp3) and the Dillow’s Ridge site in Union County (11U635). Millstone Bluff has been interpreted as a site of public ritual and...
Understanding Maritime Cultural Resources Within Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary (2020)
This is a poster submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This poster presents the first phase of a multi-phase effort within Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary to create a maritime heritage trail leveraging the concept of Maritime Cultural Landscapes. It also provides discussion for future phases and goals for creating an interactive outreach initiative allowing the public to better understand the quantity and quality of the cultural...
Understanding Multi-sited Woodland Communities of the American Southeast through Categorical Identities and Relational Connections (2021)
This is an abstract from the "People and Space: Defining Communities and Neighborhoods with Social Network Analysis" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While communities are often considered to be isomorphic with settlements, this equivalency is ill-suited to understanding contexts in which the structure of settlement and social organization was cyclical and nested at multiple spatial and temporal scales. In the coastal plain of the American...
Understanding Past Human Securities, Sustainability, and Migration for a Climate-Changing World (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology and Landscape Learning for a Climate-Changing World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the 1200s–1400s CE in the US Southwest and Mexican Northwest, tens of thousands of people were on the move—many leaving places where knowledge of landscapes had accrued at the scale of millennia. By the end of the 1400s, population levels had declined by about 50%. What conditions led to this migration and...
Understanding Patterns of Indigenous White-tailed Deer (*Odocoileus virginianus) Exploitation in the North Carolina Piedmont Using Strontium (87Sr/86Sr) Isotope Analysis (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Animal Bones to Human Behavior" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The varied responses by Native communities within the American Southeast to European colonization resulted in a period of dynamic social, economic, and political change. One such response to the colonial encounter was the development of a robust trade in the skins of white-tailed deer. In this paper, I focus on the effects of the deerskin trade on the deer...
Understanding Prearchaic Mobility and Settlement Patterns: The Role of Theory, Models, and Ethnographic Analogies (2018)
Most evidence suggests that Prearchaic hunter-gatherers were highly mobile, and equipped with a hunting oriented lithic technology that lacked milling equipment. Nonetheless, they acquired a broad spectrum of prey and tended to camp near wetlands rich in small game and plant resources. Archaeologists have questioned to what degree this evidence reflects an adaptation that fundamentally differed from ethnographically observed patterns in the Great Basin, as well as whether it was shaped primarily...
Understanding the African-Caribbean Landscape of the Wallblake Estate, Anguilla. (2018)
Historical archaeologists have explored the plantation landscapes of the Caribbean for more than 50 years, and there have been archaeological excavations at historical sites on every major island. However, there are still islands where there have not been any previous excavations at historic sites, including plantations. Anguilla was one such island until June 2017 when archaeological survey and excavations began at the Wallblake Estate to understand the plantation landscape and the major...
Understanding the Battlefield Terrain: Components of the Battlefield Archeological Landscape (2016)
Since its inception, the ABPP has made over 559 planning grants with over $18 million available to preservation professionals for the long term care of battlefield resources. Approximately 40% of those funds have driven both underwater and terrestrial archeological projects since 1996. The vast majority of those battlefield projects have centered on resource identification, inventory, assessment and setting boundaries for aggressive resource protection. A system of identification of the...
Understanding the Culture of Teaching and Learning: The Role Evaluation Played in Developing a Project Archaeology: Investigating Shelter Case Study (2018)
Archaeologists have long been interested in developing and providing archaeology-based educational resources to teachers for use in the classroom, but they have spent significantly less attention on evaluating resource effectiveness. Evaluation was a key component in the development of "Investigating a Shotgun House,"one ofthe newest case studies in the Project Archaeology: Investigating Shelter curriculum. This paper will discuss a pilot program conducted during the development of...
Understanding the Emergence and Spread of Chupadero Black-on-white Ceramics through Network Analysis (2018)
It has been hypothesized that social ties between the Salinas Pueblo Province and the Jornada Mogollon sparked cultural change in both regions. In this study, I use Social Network Analysis to characterize these interactions from A.D. 900 to 1450 via the spread of Chupadero Black-on-white pottery. Integral to the study of social interaction and the emergence of Chupadero Black-on-white ceramics is the nature of the pithouse-to-pueblo transition in each region. Prior to the emergence of pueblo...
Understanding the Irish Famine Using Deep Neural Networks and Protolanguage (2017)
Drawing from historical records and archaeological data, we used multilayer neural networks to construct a sociocultural model of the Irish Famine. We found that Capital Exchange optimization for non-elites frequently contained polynomial-time mappings to the Assignment and Knapsack problems (which are both NP-hard). However, we only occasionally encountered nontrivial instances of these mappings when the same algorithms were applied to elites. That pattern of asymmetric computational...
Understanding the Landscape and Material Sources through Community Partnership in Abiquiú, New Mexico (2018)
This paper aims to discuss how the success of community partnership has led to an understanding of the way people moved across the landscape in the past. Situated in northern New Mexico, the Pueblo de Abiquiú contains a rich history that dates back at least into 2,800 – 4,000 BP (Before Present). Using portable x-ray fluorescence spectrometry, obsidian artifacts found at the pueblo suggests that groups are bringing obsidian from at least three known local sources. However, there is an...
Understanding The Material And Spatial Strategies Of Border Crossers Through Water Bottles And Beverage Containers (2015)
Because of the clandestine and complex nature of undocumented migration in southern Arizona, many aspects of this social process have proven difficult to systematically analyze using ethnography alone. Using a combination of ethnographic and archaeological data collected between 2009 and 2014, this paper uses statistical analysis to further understand the relationships between artifacts associated with clandestine migration and the material and spatial strategies migrants employ to cross...
Understanding the Materials and Methods Used in the Construction of the 1617 Church at Jamestown, Virginia (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Excavating the Foundations of Representative Government: A Case Study in Interdisciplinary Historical Archaeology." , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. From 2016 to 2018 Jamestown Rediscovery excavated the 1907 Memorial Church where the foundations of: 1) a 1617 timber-framed church and 2) a 1640s brick and mortar church are located. The 1617 church is where the first legislative assembly in British North...
Understanding the Placement of LA 20,000, a Spanish Colonial Settlement Located in New Mexico (2015)
This project will explore the environmental and social factors that influenced the placement of Spanish New Mexican sites by looking at the location of LA 20,000, a seventeenth-century secular ranch located about 25 miles southwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico. This project will use GIS to explore the environmental factors essential to the Spanish colonists who settled as farmers, specifically focusing on the natural resources around LA 20,000, including distance to water, soil fertility, and...
Understanding the Transition to Villages: A Comparison of Maize between Basketmaker III Sites and an Early Pueblo I Village (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Comparative morphological and other analysis on maize samples informs us of crucial nutritionary changes in key Ancestral Puebloan cultural stages. The transition of the Basketmaker III (500-750 CE) period to the Pueblo I (750-950 CE) period in the Southwestern Utah archeological record is marked by distinct technological changes and larger, more densely...
Understanding Variation in Utilitarian Ceramic Assemblages of the Chesapeake: The Impacts of Local Production (2013)
Utilitarian ceramics made of earthenware and stoneware were important tools in the early American domestic sphere. Milk pans, storage jugs, baking dishes, and other specialized forms made a variety of domestic industries possible. However, the abundance and characteristics of these wares were not consistent through time or across households. In turning analytical focus to this under-investigated class of artifacts, a better understanding of the relationship between domestic and economic life in...
Understanding Your Neighbor: An Analysis of Mixed-Use Immigrant Households in Nineteenth Century Port Richmond (2020)
This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Millions of Europeans left their homes during the closing decades of the nineteenth and dawn of the twentieth centuries, seeking new lives and opportunities in the United States. Many clustered in specific, less desirable neighborhoods of American cities drawn by cheap housing, available jobs, and proximity to their ethnic and religious kin. One such immigrant-heavy neighborhood was...
Underwater 3D Imaging with Structured Light: Implications for Ethics and Economics (2015)
A prototype underwater 3D imaging technology is discussed that is both inexpensive and creates accurate, high resolution 3D data. We focus on the connection between this technology and archaeological ethics and economics. First, we discuss a cutting edge, low cost, highly portable and user-friendly 3D imaging system using structured light, which has generated very high resolution images in both terrestrial and underwater contexts. Next, we compare it to other low-cost 3D techniques. Finally, we...
An Underwater Archaeological Investigation of Two Potentially Significant Magnetic Anomalies near Cape Canaveral Harbor, Brevard County, Florida (1995)
This report presents the results of an archaeological investigation of two magnetic anomalies thought to be associated with submerged cultural resources near Canaveral Harbor, Brevard County, Florida. Of the two anomalies relocated, only one was positively identified as a wreck of a modem, steel fishing trawler. The other anomaly was identified as a large, flat-surfaced steel object approximately 12 feet wide by 35 feet long, lying in the low water surf zone. Because of the object's size, shape,...
Underwater Archaeological Investigations of Four Potentially Significant Remote Sensing Targets, Canaveral Harbor Entrance Channel Widener, Brevard County, Florida (1998)
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Jacksonville District, has proposed to widen the entrance channel to Canaveral Harbor, Brevard County, Florida. Because of the potential for shipwrecks and other submerged cultural resources in the vicinity of Cape Canaveral, the Jacksonville District contracted Tidewater Atlantic Research, Inc. (TAR) of Washington, North Carolina, to conduct a literature search and remote sensing survey to identify any submerged cultural resources in the vicinity of the...
Underwater Archaeology in Cuba: a Critical Review (2017)
This paper endeavors to take a critical look at underwater archaeology research in Cuban coastal areas, mostly after 1959. Stress is made on the early research and the organizations which participated and the foreign companies which made an effort in underwater archaeological excavation on the Cuban shelf. However, this paper underlines the controversial role played by Carisub, a company in charge of underwater archaeological research until 2004, and its role in granting permits for commercial...
Underwater Archaeology Skills, Training, and Opportunities in U.S. Colleges: The 2017 ACUA University Benchmarking Survey (2018)
The Advisory Council on Underwater Archaeology developed a series of three Benchmarking Surveys to understand how students, professors, and employers perceive and prioritize "basic" underwater archaeological skills. The ACUA surveys are intended to guide students, faculty, and employers as new generations of archaeologists enter the profession. The second survey, completed in 2017, was directed to university faculty in the United States, and received fourteen responses from eight universities....
Underwater Archaeology Through the Ages (2019)
This is an abstract from the "POSTER Session 2: Linking Historic Documents and Background Research in Archaeology" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Archaeology underwater is a broad field. While traditionally associated with historical resources such as ships, harbors, and sunken cities, growing attention is focused on less researched portions of the submerged archaeological record such as prehistoric sites, shipwrecks in deep water, and sunken...