Worldwide (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Dye.

This is an abstract from the "Research and CRM Are Not Mutually Exclusive: J. Stephen Athens—Forty Years and Counting" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Steve Athens' substantive and interpretive contributions provide a firm Bayesian grounding for Hawaiian chronology. This paper offers operational definitions for archaeological events, processes, and occurrences and describes how they can each be investigated in a Bayesian framework with the R...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erle Ellis.

Why did humans, unlike any other multicellular species in the history of the Earth, gain the capacity to shift Earth into a new epoch of geologic time, the Anthropocene? Here, a general causal theory, sociocultural niche construction, is presented to explain long-term changes in Earth’s ecology driven by societal dynamics across human generational time through sociocultural evolution of subsistence regimes based on cooperative ecosystem engineering, social specialization, non-kin exchange and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Dixon.

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. Despite rising tuition costs and decreasing budgets, students at 4-year public institutions still seek out opportunities to engage in archaeological fieldwork, laboratory and museum research, regardless of whether they plan to go on to graduate school in anthropology or to pursue careers...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jane Peterson.

This is an abstract from the "Gender in Archaeology over the Last 30+ Years" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the early 1990s when I began my explorations of changing divisions of labor associated with agricultural transitions in the Levant, archaeology was grappling with the tip of the biocultural iceberg that was “gender” (sensu Fausto-Sterling 2000). During the intervening three decades, discussions of gender in archaeology have broadened....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joseph Wayman.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Researchers have found bifaces situated on edge at Acheulean sites in what are felt to be undisturbed sediments, and have posited that they were placed this way by early humans, offering a clue to the use of the devices. Opposing this, it has been argued that animal trampling of such objects will turn them on edge, challenging the idea that they were placed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Garrett Toombs. Rachel Horowitz.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. It is well known that heat treating chert and other cryptocrystalline silicates improves the stone’s quality for knapping. However, ethnographic texts report that Indigenous knappers from around the world evaluate a stone’s moisture content as a marker of the stones’ quality for flaked tool production. Contemporary Euro-American flintknappers make similar...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Wheeler. Kathryn Kamp.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Education has become an important component of archaeology in all realms, from traditional teaching arenas in universities and K-12 schools to research to government and contract work. In 2017 the Robert S. Peabody Institute of Archaeology and the University of Maine, Orono collaborated to found the Journal of Archaeology & Education...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kendra Sirak. Jakob Sedig.

This is an abstract from the "Increasing the Accessibility of Ancient DNA within Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Preliminary research and anecdotal evidence suggest that there is an overrepresentation of male samples relative to female samples in published ancient DNA research; however, the reason behind this bias is poorly understood. In this paper, we quantify this sex bias within an ancient DNA database of 3,365 individuals for whom...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shadab Tabatabaeian.

A plethora of ethnographic and archaeological evidence indicates a cross-cultural association of dark zones of caves with supernatural phenomena. In various geographic locations and time periods, human beings have been frequenting dark zones for ritual purposes. Regarding the unsuitable living conditions of dark zones, the following question arises: what drives humans to choose such places for practicing rituals? The answer to this question lies in the way human beings interact with dark cave...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patrick Roberts.

Archaeology provides a truly long-term record of anthropogenic landscape interactions and human responses to environmental change. Such a record is particularly important in tropical settings that contain some of the most threatened terrestrial ecosystems in the world today. However, poor preservation and assumed human avoidance have meant that past records of human behaviour have been patchy for these biomes. Here, I review how new methodologies and archaeological interest has enriched datasets...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brea McCauley. Mark Collard.

This is an abstract from the "Body Modification: Examples and Explanations" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. To many people in the West, the idea that finger amputation would be carried out for nonmedical reasons is unheard of. However, recent studies suggest that it may have been quite common in the past. The aim of the study presented here was to shed some light on the prevalence of finger amputation customs. To accomplish this, we examined...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily McKenzie.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past few decades, archaeologists have embraced the compositional and elemental analysis of archaeological materials—primarily ceramic, metallic, and lithic objects—drawing new conclusions about the circumstances surrounding their production, such as the geographic origins of their raw components or the processes by which they were made. To explore the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Brown.

John Rick’s 1987 paper in American Antiquity presented the first systematic overview of theory underlying the "dates as data" approach (i.e., demographic temporal frequency analysis, dTFA), describing the general outline of a data generating process (DGP) linking paleopopulation dynamics to temporal distributions of archaeological materials (temporal frequency distributions, tfds). While research pursued in the dTFA framework has gained momentum over the intervening decades, questions regarding...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nathan Klembara.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite a long history in the philosophy of the science that has defended the gendered, subjective, and value-laden nature of knowledge production, few (if any) inroads have been made into the formulation of an explicitly queer philosophy of science. In this paper, I argue that archaeologists are uniquely situated to develop such a queer philosophy of science....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shannon McPherron.

This is an abstract from the "Inference in Paleoarchaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Insights into flake formation have come from fracture mechanics, controlled experiments, replication studies, and attribute analysis of lithic assemblages. Fracture mechanics would seem to offer great potential for offering insights into how the variables that knappers manipulate actually change flaking outcomes, and its strength is that it is based on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Keri Porter. Kaelyn Olson. Andrea Lopez.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Photogrammetry is a technique that creates a 3D model from 2D images. Photogrammetry is currently being used in archaeology to create models of artifacts, structures, excavation profiles, and burials with almost unlimited applications. Although the use of proprietary software may be related to general user-friendliness and accessibility, the cost can still be...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Margaret Conkey.

This is an abstract from the "From Middens to Museums: Papers in Honor of Julie K. Stein" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the scholarly contributions of Julie Stein, her key paper on the impact of worms on archaeological sites is among several that have been foundational to not just geoarchaeology but to those of us dealing with the bioturbation of archaeological sites. In this, she is a direct descendant of Charles Darwin. From this, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arie Altman. Stephen Shennan. John Odling-Smee.

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. Agriculture, including plant and animal domestication and breeding, is traditionally and mainly directed towards supplying human needs for food and nutritional factors, both for improving food quantity and quality and for tolerance to various environmental stresses. Less explored are the needs and driving forces behind...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meghan-Tomasita Cosgriff-Hernandez. Dane Magoon. Ryan Taira.

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. The DPAA case resolution process involves a number of important steps that occur before a recovery team is sent into the field to excavate an incident site, and typically includes a combination of historic research, witness interviews, field investigations, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Klint Janulis. Cory Stade. Mansoor Ahmad.

This is an abstract from the "More Than Shelter from the Storm: Hunter-Gatherer Houses and the Built Environment" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Humans today are ubiquitous shelter makers but despite this, relatively little is known about the construction of the earliest shelters built by palaeolithic humans. While there is possible evidence for earlier shelters, archaeological evidence in Europe and Asia indicate shelter construction had become...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Rose. Sabine Klein. Katrin Westner. Yiu-Kang Hsu.

This is an abstract from the "Geological and Technological Contributions to the Interpretation of Radiogenic Isotope Data" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lead isotope data are an important tool for the reconstruction of raw material provenances of non-ferrous archaeological materials. The quality of the provenance reconstruction depends, among other factors, on the comprehensiveness of the reference data the archaeological samples can be compared...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Igor Chechushkov.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Climatic conditions determine the ways in which local communities live to a great extent. The wind is responsible for the everyday life experience by bringing precipitation, moving dust and fire. The general assumption of the current research is that in the past people chose to live in relatively calm spots of the local landscapes to prevent themselves from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kate Kreindler.

This is an abstract from the "What Have You Done For Us Lately?: Discrimination, Harassment, and Chilly Climate in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Participation in archaeological fieldwork poses numerous practical challenges. This paper will address some difficulties that arise from the decision to start a family. The choice to have children frequently affects archaeologists working to establish their careers, namely (female)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stacey Camp. Dante Angelo. Kelly Britt. Margaret Brown.

This is an abstract from the "The Conceptual and Ethical Limits of Heritage in Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Through a contemporary archaeology of the COVID-19 pandemic, we attempt to dissect practices of commemoration, remembrance, and memory, which are linked to the process of heritage making through anthropological archaeology methodologies. The global pandemic poses some opportunities and challenges to archaeologists. On the one...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Fennelly.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology to Transform and Disrupt: Teaching, Learning, and the Pedagogies of the Future" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Heritage is a multidisciplinary field. Students of heritage come to the subject from a broad array of backgrounds, nationalities, and languages. The word heritage has many meanings depending on context and understanding the multiple meanings of the word itself is the first “translation” I task...