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DOCUMENT Citation Only Corey Bowen.

With over 640,000 subscribers and 1.6 million unique monthly views, AskHistorians is the Internet’s largest public history education forum. AskHistorians’ simple Q&A format connects people with questions about the past to those with expert-level knowledge in the topic at hand, be it armored snails or erotic Moche pottery. Users of the popular, if controversial, social media site reddit post questions to the AskHistorians forum, and receive responses from a diverse panel of volunteers selected...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeanne Moe.

This is an abstract from the "Outreach and Education: Examples of Approaches and Strategies from the Pacific Northwest" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists have long considered classroom teachers as partners in our efforts to educate the public about the significance of archaeological sites and the importance of protection. While programs and projects on local, state, and national levels have provided professional development and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Clark.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Anthropologists have long defended the social value of their work beyond the immediate acquisition of new knowledge. In archaeology, community engagement and public outreach are now common and desirable. In general education, we tout the powers of archaeology classes to inform students of where we have come from, to appreciate diversity, and to be more...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Heath-Stout.

This is an abstract from the "Beyond Leaky Pipelines: Exploring Gender Inequalities in Archaeological Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the great parts of being an archaeologist is that it is an excuse to travel: for jobs, research, and conferences. Yet some of us are more free to travel than others. In this paper, I will focus on the experiences of parents—mothers in particular—to explore how the expectations of mobility in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Torben Rick.

While debate continues about when the Anthropocene began, many researchers have shifted focus away from questions about the onset of the Anthropocene to questions of why, how, and what next? Museums are poised to play an important role in societal and scientific conversations about the pressing issues of the Anthropocene and how best to move forward in the age of humans. Building on a variety of ongoing efforts, I discuss the role of museum based archaeological research, collections, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Bischoff. Cecilia Padilla-Iglesias.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological network studies use characterizations of many kinds and aspects of material culture (e.g., sourcing, style, technology) as proxies for social relations. Yet, it is often unclear what types of interactions are indicated by material culture. Social network analysis is a useful tool because it provides a set of methods and theoretical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Paige. Charles Perreault.

This is an abstract from the "The Expanding Bayesian Revolution in Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Observed changes in rates of technological change play important roles in many models seeking to explain or identify the greater adaptability of some hominins over others, adaptation to changing environments, and many other processes. We quantify how robust detection of a shift in the rate of technological change is to error in measuring...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mia Carey.

Have you recovered thousands of artifacts, but none from the time period of interest? Have you spent weeks or months in the field, with absolutely nothing to address your research questions so you keep digging? This is the phenomenon of negative data. While this can be a scary thing, it is okay. Archaeologists suffering from artifact addiction have developed an unhealthy obsession with the recovery, analysis, and interpretation of material culture. This addiction can result in delayed reports,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edward Banning.

This is an abstract from the "Refining Archaeological Data Collection and Management to Achieve Greater Scientific, Traditional, and Educational Values" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sweep width is a basic measure of survey effectiveness that has long informed search-and-rescue operations but is only slowly finding application in archaeological survey, mainly by fieldwalking. By “calibrating” field teams by having them survey tracts sewn with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erina Perez. Thomas Banghart. Hope Loiselle. Kevin Gibbons.

Historical ecology has become one of the most relevant research paradigms in understanding the long-term relationships between humans and their environments. Its multidisciplinary approach dissolves the boundaries between the social and natural sciences to bring together disciplines such as archaeology, ecology, biology, anthropology, ethnohistory, and geography toward the conservation and restoration of natural and cultural heritage. This paper specifically explores archaeology’s unique...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrea Carvey.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality are becoming essential aspects of archaeological investigation. We review past and current explorations, including the equipment and software available. Future applications for visualizing archaeological data will be investigated in keeping with the SAA Principles of Archaeological Ethics.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Peck.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Satellite and aerial images are used for archaeological site prospection worldwide. However, manually detecting and mapping archaeological sites from imagery can be time consuming. This poster examines the utility of an image processing and unsupervised classification procedure for archaeological feature detection and mapping in arid settings. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bryony Moody. Caitlin Buck. Tom Dye. Keith May. Gianna Ayala.

This is an abstract from the "Constructing Chronologies I: Stratification and Correlation" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper discusses developing prototype software for handling the relative and absolute dating evidence obtained during single context excavations as carried out in many European countries such as the UK. We seek to use mathematical graph theory to manage both stratigraphic and chronological information during Bayesian...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Price.

I describe a novel, age-structured, Bayesian framework for reconstructing past demography. The framework is quite flexible and can incorporate and synthesize a wide range of data. I demonstrate its use with human burial data, where each observation can include an AMS radiocarbon measurement, an estimate of age-at-death, or both. Conceptually, the framework is useful because it addresses in a statistically principled way two vexing sources of equifinality in archaeological data: (1) the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samuel Neunzig.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Why was the bow and arrow so widely used to replace the atlatl? To address this question, I present a study on the creation and use of the longbow and arrow in its early use, as well as the transition from the atlatl with focus on the effectiveness of both tools in penetrating power and accuracy at varying ranges to determine which is the overall more...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Natalie Munro.

This is an abstract from the "Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. More than a decade after Niche Construction Theory was proposed as an alternative to behavioral ecological models in the study of agricultural origins, many misconceptions about behavioral ecology and its contribution to the study of the emergence of sedentism and agriculture remain. Here, I address some of these misconceptions and consider some new...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Kansa. Sarah Whitcher Kansa.

In his influential book "To Save Everything, Click Here" (2014), Evgeny Morozov coined the term "solutionism" to describe a utopian vision that innovation in digital technologies can solve complex social problems. Fueled by Silicon Valley wealth, digital technologies have an obvious glamor. The high-profile reconstruction of the Palmyra Arch by the Institute for Digital Archaeology exemplifies how governments, universities, corporate sponsors, and granting foundations use media attention on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Oliver Smith. Glenn Dunshea. Robin Allaby. Tom Gilbert.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient DNA in Service of Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The power of ancient DNA to archaeological research needs little introduction. Recent technological revolutions in DNA sequencing have allowed entire populations, lineages, ecosystems, and epidemics to be reconstructed. While these large-scale studies address 'big picture’ questions of prehistory, more subtle, specific questions about past...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kenneth Aitchison. Christopher Dore.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The presenters, through their companies Landward Research and Heritage Business International, produce annual reports on the size of the heritage compliance or commercial archaeology sectors in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and worldwide. These reports show the enormous scale of commercial archaeology—hundreds of millions of dollars are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jayne-Leigh Thomas. Krystiana Krupa.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The last few decades have brought changes to archaeology through the establishment of ethics codes, repatriation, and community-based, participatory research. However, established ethical codes are often unfamiliar to researchers and the treatment of human remains continues to be unequal, while scientific justifications for doing bioarchaeological research are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pamela Geller.

This is an abstract from the "The Future of Bioarchaeology in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The future of bioarchaeology requires a robust sub-disciplinary bioethos. The concept refers to consolidation of a habit that gives rise to moral, normative practices related to exhumation, documentation, analysis, and posthumous treatment of dead bodies. Conversations in bioethics—about consent, anonymity, vulnerable populations, legislation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Franz Manni. Laurence Glémarec. Liliana Huet. Martin Friess.

This is an abstract from the "Body Modification: Examples and Explanations" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Musée de l’Homme hosts several collections corresponding to body modification practices. The collections correspond to body piercing (prehistoric artifacts, casts of living individuals from the nineteenth century, and early photographic images) and to other types of body modification: intentional cranial modifications of various types and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jakob Sedig.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient DNA in Service of Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient DNA (aDNA) data have provided unprecedented new insights on demographic changes through time. This paper demonstrates that aDNA can also enhance well-established archaeological techniques, by building on research that has explored how aDNA data can help refine radiocarbon date range estimates. Previous research established that since there...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erika Malo. Jeanne Moe.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology Education: Building a Research Base" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Project Archaeology, a national archaeology education program, relies on a diverse network of educators, museum professionals, and archaeologists certified as Master Teachers. Master Teachers provide nationwide professional development on the implementation of Project Archaeology’s curricula. Master Teachers are trained through a weeklong...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ethan Watrall.

This is an abstract from the "Capacity Building or Community Making? Training and Transitions in Digital Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As digital methods have become ubiquitous and critical in archaeology and heritage, the challenge of teaching those methods has become more complex. More importantly, we’re being faced with an equally important challenge - how do we build and foster communities in which scholars are connected through...