Worldwide (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Darcy Bird. Jacob Freeman.

Recent analyses of large samples of radiocarbon dates shows a change in radiocarbon date frequencies between 3000 BP and 800 BP. There is either an exponential or super-exponential increase in radiocarbon date frequencies followed by a sudden decline. The goal of this poster is to test a population ecology model as to whether or not the degree of population overshoot can predict the degree of population collapse. We want to analyze if the rate of increase in radiocarbon date frequencies over...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ted Parsons.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster examines the development of new, highly portable, entries into the short-range (~5m) scanning arena use LiDAR sensors in recent iPhones and iPads and how they impact archaeological data collection. Previous small 3D capture systems included specialized Google and Sony smartphones, and the moderately expensive DotProduct DPI-8X handheld scanner....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ted Parsons.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Small and inexpensive alternatives for capturing three-dimensional (3D) data have continued to proliferate. Previous 3D capture systems included specialized Google and Sony smartphones, the Scanse Sweep, and the moderately expensive DotProduct DPI-8X handheld scanner. This poster examines developments in the low-cost scanner arena during the last two years...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sophia Maline. Melanie Miller. Jillian Swift. Christine A. Hastorf.

Charred food residues provide a unique window into ancient peoples’ culinary cultures, and chemical analyses of burnt meals can help us identify the ingredients used to create specific recipes. However, limited experimental work leaves us wondering - when we find residue in an ancient pot, are we viewing the remains of the final meal cooked in that pot or is it the product of multiple recipes? Does the chemical signature of the residue accurately reflect the meal(s) cooked in that pot? Seven...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Heilen. Shelby Manney.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Most archaeological investigations in the United States and other countries must comply with preservation laws, if on government property or supported by government funding. Academic and cultural resource management (CRM) studies have explored various social, temporal, and environmental contexts and produce an ever-increasing volume of archaeological data....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carol McDavid.

Pragmatism is a challenging approach for a host of reasons – some emerge from the cultural behaviors and institutional structures of the academy, and others from the inequities that persist in modern society. It is also a profoundly satisfying one, when it "works". This paper will reflect upon the opportunities and pitfalls encountered while "using" pragmatism over the past 20 years (practicing public and community archaeology, working with community groups and professional societies, editing a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fernanda Neubauer.

This is an abstract from the "Fire-Cracked Rock: Research in Cooking and Noncooking Contexts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The information potential of fire-cracked rocks (FCR) and their associated features remain surprisingly understudied, given that they are ubiquitous at many sites, often well preserved, are little affected by the activity of collectors, and span hundreds of millennia of the human experience. Whereas FCR preserves well,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Davies. Matthew Douglass.

This is an abstract from the "Inference in Paleoarchaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Concepts from resilience theory (RT) have been variously applied in studies of the deep human past. Given emphasis on cross-scale interactions and cyclical trajectories, RT provides a framework to interpret historical sequences in terms of general ecological processes. However, less consideration has been given to the interface between the trajectories of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Codding. Kate Magargal. Douglas Bird. Rebecca Bliege Bird. David Zeanah.

This is an abstract from the "Life Is Risky: Human Behavioral Ecological Approaches to Variable Outcomes " session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Explaining major subsistence transitions in human prehistory requires an evaluation of the costs and benefits past people experienced. All too often, these trade-offs are explored solely by analysis of central tendency (i.e., mean returns), without exploring the distribution of possible outcomes. Here we explore...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jodi Reeves Eyre.

Digitization, the conversion of an analog item and creation a digital surrogate, is an important collections management tool. Digitizing collection materials can provide engaging images for public outreach and education, improve knowledge of the collection and access. It also aids in the preservation of materials by creating digital surrogates of content. Digitizing material can rescue content from obsolete media, provide a way for researchers to view content while protecting fragile, physical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam Markham.

This is an abstract from the "Accelerating Environmental Change Threats to Cultural Heritage: Serious Challenges, Promising Responses" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Climate change is the fastest growing threat to World Heritage properties, including archaeological sites, worldwide. Warming temperatures, sea level rise, coastal erosion, permafrost thaw, drought, worsening wildfires and more intense rainstorms, hurricanes and typhoons are putting...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul King. Franz Manni.

This is an abstract from the "Body Modification: Examples and Explanations" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Across continents, material evidence of body piercing jewelry abounds in the archaeological record. However, the varying procedures and processes of piercing, healing, and stretching these wounds for adornment remains unfamiliar to most archaeologists. This PowerPoint presentation discusses the early self-experimentations that led to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Radu Iovita. David Braun. Matthew Douglass. Simon Holdaway. Sam Lin.

This is an abstract from the "The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis and Human Origins: Archaeological Perspectives" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Because lithics preserve better than almost any other trace of human existence in the deep past, they receive the lion’s share of attention from Pleistocene archaeologists. In this paper we explore the theoretical and practical limitations of using lithics as subjects of evolutionary analyses. We base our...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Smith. Metin Eren.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. All natural substances have intrinsic acoustical properties. Flint, obsidian, and basalt, because of their comparable structure, have very similar sound properties. We explore here whether every piece of knappable stone, within certain parameters, will produce the same fundamental pitch along with its associated partials. The partials of the harmonic sequence...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sam Lin. Alex Mackay.

This is an abstract from the "Inference in Paleoarchaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In archaeology, distinct processes in the past can generate similar patterning in the material record under varying temporal and spatial scales. Facing this challenge of equifinality, archaeologists frequently use parsimony to help assess competing explanatory models by preferring simpler explanations over more complex ones. However, there is little...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aksel Casson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The use of role-playing games (RPGs) in university courses is increasingly common in the humanities and social sciences, most notably within the discipline of history. Here I describe my efforts to construct a series of mini-RPGs for an introductory archaeology course, with units designed around key behavioral developments: the emergence of technology,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sandra Joshel.

In the last 20 years, Roman archaeologists have analyzed the remains of Roman streets, counted graffiti, benches, and doorways in Pompeii and Herculaneum, and mapped the spaces of houses, workshops, and villas, and examined as well as the location of objects. Archaeologists have turned the material remains into facts and assembled an archive of the traces of human activities—traffic, movement, work, rituals, etc. How this scholarship has furthered our understanding of a heterogeneous population...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Neil Dixon. M. Kathryn Brown. Leah McCurdy.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Digital photography has ushered in many new methods of documenting archaeological resources in the past 15 years. Many of these new methods have been flawed because of a misunderstanding of the potential of the digital technologies and the analog methods they replace. Reflective Transformation Imaging (RTI) photography is a relatively new technique to document...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Diane Gifford-Gonzalez.

In 2015, the Executive of SAA discussed the need for action on its part to define SAA’s position regarding sexual harassment and violence, as well as harassment and violence based upon other real or perceived attributes of personal identity. On the one hand, the Board deemed it the moment for a brief general statement on these matters, as was the case with many professional organizations over this span of time. One the other hand, the Board believed that, as a professional organization with an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Esther Rimer.

The Anthropology department at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History holds over 2.2 million ethnological and archaeological artifacts from the USA and all over the world in its collections, including archaeofauna and bioarchaeological specimens. Every year a handful of researchers sample from our collections for destructive and non-destructive sampling analysis. These analyses run the gamut from portable XRF on textile dyes, isotope analysis of oyster shells from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Roland Fletcher.

This is an abstract from the "Ephemeral Aggregated Settlements: Fluidity, Failure or Resilience?" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. By convention urban settlements have been described as densely inhabited, permanently sedentary, and usually protected by barriers. While the latter might be conceded the other two were, until early in the 21st century, assumed to be definitive and fundamental to the functions of urbanism. The definition was a pillar of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Isaac Ullah.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sediment granulometry, also known as Particle Size Distribution Analysis (PSDA), is the analysis of the frequency of differently sized particles present in a sediment sample. I present a new workflow for applying PSDA to understanding past human impacts at the landscape scale. The workflow combines PSDA of both the fine (0.1 to 1,000 microns) and coarse...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robin Skeates.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation defines and evaluates some the key concepts and debates in sensory archaeology, arguing that this field is necessarily a work in progress. Today, there is a growing archaeological interest in the senses, experience and perception; but are we justified in calling for or claiming a ‘sensory turn’ in archaeology? And, besides seeking to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joseph Wayman.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Several persistent fallacies have resulted in truncated and stagnated development of thought regarding lithic large cutting tools. First, the big one: the Victorian era nickname “handaxe” is nearly ubiquitous, hides as a clever and well-known and harmless handle for the whole tool class, but stealthily, and mainly without questioning, presupposes that the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pamela Stone.

This is an abstract from the "Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Debra L. Martin" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Using the skeleton as a transcript of past experiences is not new, and over the last 40 years more nuanced interpretations, through intersectional, humanistic, scientific models have been developed. In the field of bioarchaeology this works has been impacted by the many exceptional contributions of Dr. Debra Martin. She has...