Worldwide (Geographic Keyword)
51-75 (310 Records)
This is an abstract from the "To Have and Have Not: A Progress Report on the Global Dynamics of Wealth Inequality (GINI) Project" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The CfAS’s Inequality Project focuses on economic inequality, a feature of modern society that has attracted both increasing public concern and growing historical and social research because of its critical implications for individual, national, and global well-being. The Inequality...
Ceramic Petrographers in the Americas: An Introduction to our Mission and Goals (2018)
Founded in June 2017, the mission of the Ceramic Petrographers in the Americas (CPA) group is the promotion, discussion, and development of ceramic petrography in archaeology. Of principal interest is providing resources for those interested in employing ceramic petrography for their research and those who would like to pursue this method as a specialty. The group consists of archaeologists residing in the Americas who use optical petrography and other characterization techniques to infer the...
Challenges for Archaeologists: A Changing Climate Is Only One Development (2018)
There is general awareness among cultural heritage professionals, including archaeologists, that a drastically changing climate requires re-examination of our responsibilities and practices for identifying, documenting and managing sites and objects. The occurrence and effects of phenomena such as warming temperatures, sea-level rise, desertification, violent storms, and flooding, are frequently discussed. However, the socio-economic ramifications of a changing climate and severe weather events,...
Changing Diets: Using Stable Isotopic Micro-sampling Approaches to Explore Dietary Changes throughout Life (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Isotope analysis of bulk carbon and nitrogen from tooth dentine and bone collagen are now commonly used in studies of dietary reconstruction from past populations. Teeth do not remodel once formed, so bulk dentine values provide an “average” dietary signal from the few years of childhood when the tooth was formed. Bones, on the other hand, continue to...
Chapter 7 Supplemental References (2017)
The references listed here are for reports and other sources from which raw data were collected and used to calculate Ginis for the Mississippian structures in Chapter 7 and the Woodland structures in Chapter 11. See https://uofi.box.com/v/ESTL-Data for raw data for each structure.
Characterizing Argentinian Quartzite and Polish 'Chocolate' Flint for Sourcing Studies (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The application of reflectance spectroscopy in sourcing studies of quartzite and flint illustrates the broad potential that the technique has in helping us explain human behavior using lithic provenance data. An ongoing line of research is to characterize tool stone used by prehistoric peoples in order to source artifacts back to known deposits. The large...
Characterizing Spatial Variability of Chert to Inform Sampling Strategies (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Case Studies in Toolstone Provenance: Reliable Ascription from the Ground Up" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sampling is crucial in characterizing variability in chert at a spatial scale meaningful for provenance data needed to explain prehistoric human behavior. Nearly four decades ago Barbara Luedtke examined the extent and kind of trace element variation in Burlington chert as a mechanism to determine sample size....
City Nights: Archaeology of Night, Darkness, and Luminosity in Urban Environments (2019)
This is an abstract from the "After Dark: The Nocturnal Urban Landscape & Lightscape of Ancient Cities" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the modern world, we are constantly surrounded by natural and artificial light that blends day into night. As a result, the contrasts between day and night, and their associated activities, have been deadened in our contemporary urban environments. This blurring has also bled over into our examination of cities...
Climate Change Adaptation: Implementing Indigenous and Local Knowledge to Increase Community Resilience (2018)
Community resilience can be enhanced by engaging local and indigenous groups in the management of their cultural resources, both intangible and tangible. Many communities in developing nations were formally subjected to colonial governance, which imposed foreign architectural designs, irrigation agriculture and economic crops—and these systems vastly changed the social-cultural dynamics of these communities, often destabilizing systems that had been in place for generations. After colonial...
Climate Change and Archaeology (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Congress: Multivocal Conversations Furthering the World Archaeological Congress Agenda" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This contribution will discuss the relationship between climate change research in archaeology and its application in the heritage management sector, museums, education, and policies. We will do so within a global framework of past climate change action in intergovernmental panels,...
Climate Change Has a History and Landscape Learning Is One of Its Storytellers (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. Development of the landscape learning model began more than 20 years ago as part of my work to find ways to use the past to help address modern environmental problems. Combining initial work with nineteenth-century gold rush miners in Wyoming with models of Paleoindian colonization and assemblages led to the hypothesis that...
Cognitive Archaeology and the Minimum Necessary Competence Problem (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Inference in Paleoarchaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cognitive archaeology faces the problem of minimum necessary competence: as the most sophisticated thinking of ancient hominins may have been in domains that leave no archaeological signature, it is safest to assume that tool production and use reflects only the lower boundary of cognitive capacities. Cognitive archaeology involves selecting a model from...
Collaborative and Community Archaeology: Introduction and Some Case Studies (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Collaborative and Community Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Collaborative and Community Engaged Scholarship (CES) continues to be an important topic in our profession, encompassing a growing diversity of activities. This session displays a commitment to the concept of conducting research and historic preservation in effective partnership with a wide spectrum of stakeholders as a matter of fairness, ethics,...
CollectionSpace at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology: A Strategic Information Platform for Cultural Heritage Collections (2018)
Museums use collection management systems to manage metadata about objects in their collection and track transactions such as loans and exhibitions. At UC Berkeley however, museums are turning the open source CollectionSpace system into a strategic platform for research, education, and public service. The Hearst Museum of Anthropology is in the midst of a major effort to improve the quality of the data documenting its collection of approximately 3.8 million objects. With this improved...
A Common Analytical Language: Compound-Specific Isotope Analysis as a Means for Collaboration between Archaeology and Ecology (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in Interdisciplinary Isotopic Research" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists first embraced stable isotope analysis decades ago and have used this tool to study many aspects of human ecology, including diet, movement patterns, and the domestication of plants and animals (to name a few). In comparison to bulk tissue isotope analysis, technological advances in the analysis of individual compounds such...
Community-based Economic Development: Is it Pragmatic? Should it Be? (2018)
Does pragmatism work in practice? More particularly, does pragmatic philosophy actually contribute to the well being of stakeholders, especially those from the local community who have historically been marginzalized and have not benefitted from archaeological practice? Can archaeological practice be expanded beyond the production of knowledge to include the needs and desires of community members as they themselves express them? This paper will explore these questions, utilizing the...
Competition for Resources: How Commensal Competition Informs Us of Past Human Activity (2018)
Humans have a dramatic impact on environments around them. They augment, manipulate and engineer local environments to their own benefit, often resulting in a concentration of easily available food and nest sites. These anthropogenic resources and environments are readily exploited by a myriad of other organisms. These organisms, in local and neighbouring environments, engage in a range of different relationships with humans, reflecting the level of interaction and dependence. Due to the...
The Complexities of Managing Global Forensic Archaeology with Differing Archaeological Entities, including CRM Firms, Private NGOs, University Researchers, and Field Schools in the Search for Missing US Servicemen. (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Forensic Archaeology: Research & Practice" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency is a US DoD organization that has the awesome responsibility of conducting and managing world-wide forensic archaeological excavations to recover missing US military servicemen from past conflicts. The DPAA-Lab (which traces back to 1947) has the sole forensic authority to make positive identifications of...
Conflict and Heritage (2018)
During recent years cultural heritage has moved into public awareness as part of contemporary conflicts. Destructions of sites and monuments in The Middle East and North Africa, and in the former Yugoslavia have given us blatant examples also of targeted destruction. However this is nothing new. Throughout history monuments and heritage have played their part in conflict between people. A recent conflict in the United States over monuments relating to the Civil War and its aftermath has further...
Considering Seascapes, Waterscapes and the Relational (2018)
This paper introduces some key themes for this session, and considers how seascapes and waterscapes relate to the many and varied people, things, and places with which humans live. While many aspects of the archaeological record can be interpreted as referencing the watery realm through association (e.g. shell middens) or visual cues (e.g. rock art), our goal with this session is not to focus on simply identifying these connections, but to interrogate the nature of these relationships – to...
Contribuyendo a la Viabilidad y a la Calidad en la Práctica Arqueológica desde la Sociedad sin Fronteras del Patrimonio Cultural A.C. (2019)
This is an abstract from the "La Práctica Arqueológica en México en Tiempos de Crisis: Escenarios, Problemáticas Claves, Actores, Acciones y Propuestas" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Actualmente identificamos problemáticas críticas que inciden directamente en la viabilidad y la calidad de la práctica arqueológica en México: (1) presupuesto nacional recortado a la cultura, la investigación, la protección y la conservación del patrimonio cultural...
Converging or Contradictory Ways of Knowing: Assessing the Scientific Nature of Traditional Knowledge in Archaeological Contexts (2019)
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. Traditional knowledge (TK) has become a familiar element of ethnobiology and anthropology but only recently has it gained the attention of the "harder" sciences (e.g., archaeology, biology, climatology). However, many archaeologists have an uneasy alliance with TK...
Coprolite Analysis: The Early Years (2018)
Volney Jones was one of the first to examine coprolites found in Eastern Kentucky caves. By today’s standards, his technique was primitive, but it did provide information about early human diets. During the mid-1950s Eric Callen pioneered the study of coprolites when he looked at coprolites from the site of Huaca Prieta de Chicama in the coastal region of Peru. Later, in the early 1960s Callen worked in Mexico with Richard MacNeish at Tehuacan. Callen worked in isolation at McGill University in...
Creative Problem-Solving for Unconventional Conditions: Archaeological Recovery of a WWII Aircraft Crash Site, Ko’olau Mountain Range, Island of O’ahu, State of Hawaii, U.S.A. (2019)
This is an abstract from the "A Multidimensional Mission: Crossing Conflicts, Synthesizing Sites, and Adapting Approaches to Find Missing Personnel" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Conventional archaeological sites, with their relatively level topography and wide-open spaces to accommodate excavations, are not typically encountered by the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) Archaeologist. The majority of sites encountered by DPAA field...
Crossroads of Disciplines: Precipitating Causes and Latent Causal Conditions (2018)
Historians and archaeologists are habitually drawn to one or the other of two very different types of causal explanation. Those habits arise in great measure from the two distinctly different kinds of data that the two disciplines deal with. Archaeological causal explanations are frequently limited to "latent causal conditions," that is, environmental and cultural (thus anonymous and collective) vulnerabilities or proclivities, broad-scale physical and societal pushes and pulls that set the...