Worldwide (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brittany Hundman. Alyssa M. Tate. Jonathan Heile.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Established field sample collection procedures have fostered misconceptions of the vulnerable nature of organic materials destined for radiocarbon dating. To address common contamination concerns and debunk these misconceptions, wood samples of known age were intentionally exposed to a variety of substances found in the field and the lab, including coffee,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lee Drake.

The Lukas-Tooth and Price algorithm for empirical calibration of x-ray fluorescence systems has become the standard for archaeometry, particularly in obsidian sourcing. Here, a new way of using the computer language R and HTML5 websites is introduced to calibrate these systems.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Philip Carr.

This is an abstract from the "Inference in Paleoarchaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the late twentieth century, the investigation of settlement patterns and mobility were considered important archaeological endeavors. Analyzing stone tools assemblages to make inferences of group mobility was based on utilizing simple dichotomies. For stone tools, the concepts of curated and expedient dominated thinking. Likewise, the constructs of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Piscitelli.

This is an abstract from the ""Is There Gold in that Field?" CRM and Public Outreach on the Front Lines" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This is a call to action for CRM professionals and archaeologists more broadly. In a world of viral tweets and social media influencers, the past is getting swept under the rug. Our work is regulated to gray literature, a checked box before breaking ground. Nevertheless, our efforts reveal powerful human stories...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexander Rogers. Christopher Stevenson.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Obsidian Studies of the Old and New Worlds" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Obsidian hydration dating (OHD) is a method for estimating age of an obsidian artifact based on time-dependent absorption of water. The process is temperature-sensitive, and its application to archaeological dating currently requires assuming that current temperature parameters are a reasonable approximation to ancient temperatures....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elise LeCompte.

This is an abstract from the ""Re-excavating" Legacy Collections" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The analysis of legacy collections is often hampered by documentation that is fragmentary, preserved on obsolete media, or entirely absent. Like the physical material that makes up a legacy collection, the associated documents may be spread across institutions. This may include other museums, educational facilities, government agencies, and private...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Yaquinto. Lyle Balenquah.

This is an abstract from the "Braiding Knowledge: Opportunities and Challenges for Collaborative Approaches to Archaeological Heritage and Conservation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Heritage Voices Podcast, hosted by the Archaeology Podcast Network, centers the voices of indigenous and traditionally associated peoples in discussions on anthropology, cultural resources and heritage, and land management. This includes a focus on community...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Oliver Boles. Emily Hammer. Kathy Morrison.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. PAGES LandCover6k explores the relationship between past human activity and variability in the palaeoecological record to produce global maps of anthropogenic land-cover change based on sound archaeological knowledge and palaeoecological proxies, maps which will be available for use by the climate modelling community to better understand past climate dynamics....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan Beney. Shelby Putt. Dietrich Stout.

Teaching is uniquely developed in humans and was likely critical to the emergence of cumulative culture. However, the importance of various forms of teaching, including the use of language, in transmitting Paleolithic skills like stone knapping is less understood. Here we examine the knapping behaviors of 17 subjects who learned to make Oldowan and Acheulian stone tools from watching video demonstrations either with verbal instruction or without sound. Despite intriguing differences in brain...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claudio Latorre. Jacob Freeman. Erick Robinson. Eugenia M. Gayo. Mauricio Lima.

From the civilizations in Easter Island to the Mayas or to the collapse of the prehistoric populations in the Great Basin, researchers have proposed a wide range of hypotheses to disentangle the causes and drivers behind such pronounced demographic change. PeoPLE (PalEOclimate and the PeoPLing of the Earth) 3K is a new working group recently created by Past Global Changes (PAGES) to examine in detail how environmental change over the last 3000 years has affected, either by facilitating...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Blinman. Marvin Rowe. J. Royce Cox.

The development of low-energy plasma oxidation as a sampling technique has created new opportunities for applying radiocarbon dating. Plasma oxidation can be carried out at energies below the threshold of carbonate and oxalate dissociation, dramatically reducing the need for pretreatment and subsequent loss of sample volume. Radiocarbon sample size can be reduced toward the minimum of the 40-100 millionths of a gram of carbon that is actually needed for standard AMS dating. This allows the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paula Sabloff.

Royal women—queen consorts and princesses—were pawns in rulers’ marriage game. But once established in their husbands’ courts, they exhibited political agency through several means, e.g., spying, ruling in their husbands’ or sons’ stead, participating in the usurpation of the throne, etc. They were able to do so partly because of their position, which gave them access to power, and partly because of their ability to accumulate wealth, which enabled them to become patrons in their own right. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Roddick. M. Elizabeth Grávalos.

This is an abstract from the "Political Geologies in the Ancient and Recent Pasts: Ontology, Knowledge, and Affect" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Researchers working across the humanities and social sciences have recently demonstrated how the study of earthy materials is rooted in historically and ontologically specific frameworks. Such frameworks are, as Bobbette and Donovan (2019) demonstrate, “political geologies.” Geological practices are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Klervia Jaouen. Pauline Méjean. Benjamin, T. Fuller. Jéssica Mendes Cardoso. Zineb Moubtahij.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There is currently a growing body of evidence that Zn isotope ratios (δ66Zn) are a useful tool to assess the trophic level of past humans and animals from archaeological sites. However, the isotopic variability which has been previously measured in herbivorous species remains unexplained. In this contribution, we explore and attempt to explain the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Suramya Bansal.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research experimentally investigates and theoretically situates the distinct impression and expression of hand imprints (prints and stencils) in rock art studies. This hominin act of imprinting hands, which cuts across spatial and temporal boundaries, showcases essential behavioural and cognitive characteristics. The various intricacies involved in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexander Bauer.

This paper interrogates the pragmatics of heritage in two ways. First, what are the discourses and rhetorics of heritage—how is heritage invoked and talked about, like a sign of history, in making statements about the world? How has that shifted over time, as the term is increasingly invoked to explain and defend a wide range of actions and attitudes, and how do the different discursive communities who speak about heritage engage (or not) with one another? Most importantly, why have these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patrick Baert.

This paper explores the potential of a pragmatist-inspired philosophy of social science for both archaeology and social anthropology. Firstly, we explain the main tenets of contemporary pragmatism and the variations within it. Secondly, we analyse the potential methodological ramifications for both archaeology and social anthropology. Thirdly, we discuss some of the critique of this pragmatist stance.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Taylor Picard. Marisol Cortes-Rincon.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the 2016 – 2017 academic year a Humboldt State University Anthropology Graduate Student recreated a macuahuitl, a wooden club with obsidian blades, and used it on two pig heads for a use-wear analysis of the obsidian. The pig heads were partially de-fleshed and frozen to be added to the university’s zooarchaeology collection. This allowed for the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexis Catsambis.

The U.S. Navy maintains a program responsible for the management of its sunken military craft, which are distributed world-wide and extend temporally from the American Revolution through to the Nuclear Age. These multi-faceted submerged heritage sites are managed by the Underwater Archaeology Branch of the Naval History and Heritage Command, which engages in archaeological field research, heritage management, artifact conservation, collections management, and outreach initiatives in furtherance...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristen Rayfield. Lushuang Huang. Hayley Lanier. Si Wu. Courtney Hofman.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sex determination from animal skeletal remains can be challenging as it relies on sex specific bones or osteometrics. Determining sex is beneficial in understanding animal husbandry practices, as well as human-animal interactions. Building on previous work with humans, here we present a proteomic approach for determining sex from tooth enamel in nonhuman...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Heath-Stout.

This is an abstract from the "Presidential Session: What Is at Stake? The Impacts of Inequity and Harassment on the Practice of Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this Presidential Session, we are exploring how and why archaeology remains dominated by white, straight, and (in positions of power) men. One piece of this puzzle is recruitment of archaeologists, which tends to take place in field schools and academic departments. How do...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sjoerd Van Der Linde.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper calls for a creative, interpretive archaeology that does not take reports for agencies or other archaeologists as its end goal but instead speaks to a far wider range of audiences through the development and presentation narratives that will engage and inspire people. I argue that this can be achieved by implementing "Emotion Design" –an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cindy Hsin-yee Huang. John Murray. Sydney James. Nicolas Hansen. Jonathan Paige.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The issue of inter-analyst variation is common across nearly all archaeological artifacts. Within lithic analysis, there are many quantitative and qualitative assessments that could vary among analysts, which can cause problems in interpretation of stone tool assemblages. In addition, the effects of raw material on inter-analyst variation is not entirely...

PROJECT Timothy A. Kohler. Michael E. Smith. The Amerind Foundation, Inc..

This project contains datasets and other resources used in a volume to be published by the University of Arizona Press in 2018 entitled Ten Thousand Years of Inequality: The Archaeology of Wealth Differences, edited by TA Kohler and ME Smith. This volume emanates first from a symposium at the April 2016 Society for American Archaeology meetings entitled Measuring and Explaining Household Inequality in Prehistory: Inequality from the Bottom Up, also organized by Kohler and Smith. That was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chelsea Blackmore.

We volunteer and engage with the public because we believe that history matters; that visibility of the everyday, of peoples and pasts marginalized and made invisible should be central to what we do. We can use our work, pre- and post-contact, as a means for public engagement and to dismantle political discussions rooted in ahistorical notions of human behavior and morality. But in serving the public interest, how do we also serve our membership, both in protecting their rights as human beings...