Worldwide (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Fissel.

Each succeeding generation of historians discovers and taps new types of evidence, prompting reconceptualization of what constitutes "history" and spawning new fields of study. Marine archaeology (and the overlapping fields of maritime archaeology and conflict archaeology) are instrumental not only in recovering new primary materials, but also in reconstructing historical interpretation and historical debates. To cite a solitary example, the teaming of marine archaeologist Colin Martin and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Canan Cakirlar. Francis Koolstra. Christian Kuchelmann. Salima Ikram.

Remains of marine turtles occur regularly in the archaeological record. They provide insights into ancient subsistence and community practices. They also contain crucial information that can be used to create baselines for conservation. Their explanatory power is increased when the species exploited are identified. Here we describe an osteomorphological method which allows us to analyze fragmented postcranial elements of common Cheloniidae (Caretta Caretta and Chelonia mydas) to species and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Linda Hurcombe. Theresa Emmerich Kamper.

This is an abstract from the "HumAnE Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human relationships with animals include materials not just food. Animal products provide strong resistant materials for tools, and flexible ones for clothing and containers. Humans can wrap themselves and sleep warmer because they have turned animals into clothing, bedding and shelters. The tools made from them can enable hunting, food processing, and the preparation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Todd Braje. Matthew Lauer.

Despite opposition by a number of anthropologists, archaeologists, sociologists, and other historical and social scientists, a proposal to designate a geologic epoch of humans, the Anthropocene, is moving forward with a proposed starting date sometime in the last 50 years. The Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) and other, mostly, geological scientists have focused on the stratigraphic signatures for the boundary marker in lieu of understanding the long-term processes that have resulted in human...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gilbert Tostevin.

This is an abstract from the "Establishing the Science of Paleolithic Archaeology: The Legacy of Harold Dibble (1951–2018) Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Harold Dibble’s contributions to Paleolithic archaeology are numerous. Of the two contributions that I feel had the largest impact, the first is the intensity of energy Dibble brought to every endeavor, particularly to broadening the application of rigorous empiricism to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Smetana. Christopher Lynn. Marco Samadelli.

This is an abstract from the "Body Modification: Examples and Explanations" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As the popularity of tattooing has surged worldwide, so too have studies of tattooing as a cultural and psychological practice, though research on the biological impacts of tattooing have lagged. In its basic form, tattooing is a purposeful wound on the body that leaves behind pigment and permanent meaning. Part of that meaning is the health...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Agamemnon Pantel. Chester Walker.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. 78,000 US Service Personnel are still “Missing in Action” (MIA). From World War II, they are located in both the Pacific and European theatres. History Flight, a nonprofit organization, has dedicated over 10 years to the search and recovery of these US Servicemen who are still MIAs through a transdisciplinary approach. Initial steps logically stem from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carol Rodríguez.

This study explores a recurrent problem in the archaeological field. How to start the analysis of archaeological material? Specifically, how to analyze a ceramic sample stylistically? Based on research carried out at the Cerro de Oro archaeological site on the south coast of Peru, the author proposes a methodology that covers identifiable aspects in most data groups. The study of decorative techniques, the identification of iconographic designs and the observation of distribution patterns will...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Schaffer. E. Kofi Agorsah. Kalina Kassadjikova. Lars Fehren-Schmitz. Kelly Harkins.

Kormantse is an influential and celebrated place name in the African Diaspora. Some scholars estimate that more slaves were transported from Kormantse and nearby Fort William in Anamabo than most other West African ports. For the last ten years, the Kormantse Archaeological Research Project (KARP) has been studying the human skeletal remains recovered from the site. A combination of PCR-based techniques, targeted enrichment, and next-generation sequencing of Kormantse teeth has confirmed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kurt Wilson. Kasey Cole. Brian Codding.

This is an abstract from the "Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Understanding what favors egalitarian versus non-egalitarian resource access and patterns of behavior is a long-standing topic of interest, with much research narrowing in on potential social and environmental causes. Past modeling exercises have implemented game theoretic and simulation approaches to explore social patterns that may underlay...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ben Marwick. Erik Gjesfjeld.

The history of archaeology is often told as a sequence of prominent individuals and their publications. Due to the focus on big names and big papers, the diversity of archaeological publications is often underestimated. Here we introduce a quantitative method that illuminates historical trends in archaeological writing by investigating a large number of journal articles. We use a Bayesian framework developed for estimating speciation, extinction, and preservation rates from incomplete fossil...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dietrich Stout. Justin Pargeter. Nada Khreisheh. Katherine Bryant. Erin Hecht.

Although commonly glossed as social "transmission," the acquisition of knapping skills requires extended interactions between social inputs and individual practice better termed social "reproduction." Individual differences in learning aptitude during this process provide both the raw material for neurocognitive evolution and a potentially significant source of variability in the lithic products used to infer patterns and mechanisms of Paleolithic social learning. Here we present results from an...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Timothy A. Kohler.

Over the last decade many archaeologists (the author included) have increasingly employed computational approaches to make sense of the ever-larger amounts of relatively low-quality data available, to identify signals within the noise. Numerous applications of summed probability distributions of 14C dates and similarly sophisticated processing of tree-ring dates fall within this category, as do attempts to extract data related to specific research questions from the growing worldwide...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Reetz. Jeanne Moe. Elizabeth Pruitt.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology Education: Building a Research Base" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As scientists, archaeologists collect data. Why don’t we often collect data on the effectiveness of archaeology education programming? Public archaeology is developing into an essential practice. However, our field lacks extensive comparative information about the outcomes of these programs, and we rarely assess what our participants learn...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Knoerlein.

With a background in forensics, David Knoerlein, vice president of Forensic Digital Imaging, is a certified evidence photographer who has developed a new and innovative process for the digital documentation of artifacts. Mr. Knoerlein will demonstrate how to capture museum quality images right out of the camera. Utilizing a customized tabletop camera station, he will demonstrate how to capture detailed diagnostic images of artifacts with pure white (shadowless) backgrounds. This combination of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Wai.

This is an abstract from the "Digitizing Archaeological Practice: Education and Outreach in the Archaeogaming Subdiscipline" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Collecting objects forms a core game mechanic. Traditionally, critiques have focused on the trivialization of cultural objects. However, I argue that such collections have grown in their educational and informative ability for players. Furthermore, such games are reflexive, informing the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John O'Shea.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Global Submerged Paleolandscapes Research" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite recent advances in method and approach, the underwater archaeological record continues to make a negligible contribution of prehistoric research. This is due, in part, to a series of widespread but erroneous beliefs about the character of the submerged record. These include the belief that underwater finds are chance...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ted Parsons.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. 3D modeling is an integral part of many archaeology projects. Photo-based 3D modeling using Structure from Motion and Multiview Stereo (SfM/MVS) algorithms is widely used. SfM/MVS requires minimal field gear and can produce very high-quality output: Agisoft’s PhotoScan Professional® is the most popular commercial implementation of SfM/MVS. Adequate...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Way. Amy Tabrett.

This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology II (QUANTARCH II)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There is a general awareness among archaeologists that the intensity of a sampling program, i.e. the number of pits, their size and their spacing, has a strong bearing on discovery rates. However, rarely is the effect of this relationship explicitly assessed due to the difficulty of running the required mathematical models....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Porter. Christopher Hoffman. Kea Johnston.

The growth in object photogrammetry standards and techniques offers new opportunities for university museums concerned with collections care, research, education, and public engagement. The Phoebe Hearst Museum’s global collection of 3.8 million objects spanning two million years and six continents presents an ideal context in which to explore such opportunities and work through interesting challenges. This paper describes how UC Berkeley faculty, staff, and students are collaborating on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joel Alves. Carly Ameen. Tom Fowler. Naomi Sykes. Greger Larson.

This is an abstract from the "Questioning the Fundamentals of Plant and Animal Domestication" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Rabbits are one of the most recently domesticated animals, and yet, over thousands of years, they have lived in a diverse range of relationships with people. This close interaction is recorded in archaeological and historical records and reflected today in the diversity of breeds worldwide. Whilst extensive research has been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laurence Bartram.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology as a Public Good: Why Studying Archaeology Creates Good Careers and Good Citizens" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. What utility does an archaeological education provide students who choose careers off well-trodden archaeological paths? What do these students bring to their careers and society at large? This paper focuses on why academic training in anthropological archaeology can offer students a desirable...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher McFarland. Ho Jung Yoo. Rosemary Elliott Smith. Thomas E. Levy. Falko Kuester.

Although new technologies have made it possible to document historical and archaeological sites in greater detail than ever before, and have made it faster and easier to disseminate information, they have also brought about new challenges, especially in connection to long term data preservation. As the quantity of information stored digitally continues to grow it becomes increasingly important to actively curate the information now, for present and future reuse. Not only does data need to be...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caroline Arbuckle MacLeod.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the last decade, scholars in the fields of archaeology and history have come to appreciate the potential of digital tools for transforming how we excavate, organize data, and share it with the world. As these various approaches become more integral to these disciplines, instructors have also been working on improving the digital literacy of their students....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Rogerson Jennings.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The practice of collections management is changing with the ever-growing technology that is embedded in society today. The museum's visitor no longer receives information on an analog platform, or at least not the majority of it, so why is this the main form of communication between museums and patrons? This creates a necessity for museums to alter their...