Worldwide (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gilliane Monnier.

Lithic residue analyses have produced exciting results in recent years: microscopic bits of plant and animal tissue adhering to stone tools tens of thousands of years old; the remains of hafting materials such as bitumen and birch-bark pitch; and fiber technology from the Paleolithic, to mention but a few. Yet, for many archaeologists these results seem ‘too good to be true’. How can biological materials be preserved for thousands of years in temperate environments? How can they appear, under...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cornel Pop.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. An increasing number of studies are demonstrating the advantages and potential of 3D data acquisition and analysis techniques for documenting and understanding drivers of morphological variability in lithic assemblages. Applications of 3D geometric morphometrics, for instance, are challenging and refining traditional classifications and promise to open new...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Heilen. Shelby Manney.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As more and more data are born digital, archaeologists increasingly focus on operationalizing and refining data models, workflows, and practices. Important considerations include not only whether data will be useable for their intended purpose but also whether data generated by archaeological projects will be findable, accessible, interoperable, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mel Miller. Danielle Macdonald.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. To reconstruct the life history of an artifact one must understand how the tool was made, used, but also what happened to the artifact after it was discarded. For stone tool analysis, evaluating lithic artifact condition helps reconstruct this life history through insight into site exposure, assemblage integrity, and post-depositional processes. Multiple...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tim Messner.

This is an abstract from the "Experimental Pedagogies: Teaching through Experimental Archaeology Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For several million years our ancestors used tools to shape their world, and themselves. Some argue we have lost our way, as artificial intelligence and machine learning has reshaped the fabric of society. Our post-industrial, capitalist mode of production resulted in a nearly complete detachment from the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shawn Graham. Damien Huffer.

There is a thriving online trade, and collector community, that seeks specimens of numerous categories of human remains. This commerce is facilitated by posts on new social media such as Instagram, Facebook, Etsy, and, until recently, eBay and operates within a complex ethical and legal landscape. This presentation will share key results of ongoing work to data mine these online markets on both new social media and multi-lingual e-commerce platforms. In particular, we are interested in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lynn Dodd. Sabina Zonno. Lauren Malkoun.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cultural repositories struggle with competing missions of wide access and preservation. To release this tension, we created the Virtual Reality Global Library (VRGL), a shareable, immersive VR headset experience that provokes presence through real-time virtual reading of ancient manuscripts with parchment simulation. Informed by experts and experimental...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hilde Vangstad.

Since 2003, the Norwegian Maritime Museum has had several extensive excavations in the area of Bjørvika in the harbour of Oslo as a measure to document archaeological remains before being removed or covered during the rapid urban development of the area. This paper will discuss two of the major sites that have yielded 29 well-preserved boat wrecks and large areas of previously unknown harbour constructions of timber. Boats and constructions date to the 16th and early 17th century and varies from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Darcy Bird. Jacob Freeman.

This is an abstract from the "Global Perspectives on Climate-Human Population Dynamics During the Late Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent analyses of large sample of radiocarbon ages illustrate the potential of these records to investigate general problems in human ecology. While much of the current literature focuses on the relationship between local ecology shifts and population booms or busts, no one has yet to address the general...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Fissel.

Each succeeding generation of historians discovers and taps new types of evidence, prompting reconceptualization of what constitutes "history" and spawning new fields of study. Marine archaeology (and the overlapping fields of maritime archaeology and conflict archaeology) are instrumental not only in recovering new primary materials, but also in reconstructing historical interpretation and historical debates. To cite a solitary example, the teaming of marine archaeologist Colin Martin and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Canan Cakirlar. Francis Koolstra. Christian Kuchelmann. Salima Ikram.

Remains of marine turtles occur regularly in the archaeological record. They provide insights into ancient subsistence and community practices. They also contain crucial information that can be used to create baselines for conservation. Their explanatory power is increased when the species exploited are identified. Here we describe an osteomorphological method which allows us to analyze fragmented postcranial elements of common Cheloniidae (Caretta Caretta and Chelonia mydas) to species and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Linda Hurcombe. Theresa Emmerich Kamper.

This is an abstract from the "HumAnE Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human relationships with animals include materials not just food. Animal products provide strong resistant materials for tools, and flexible ones for clothing and containers. Humans can wrap themselves and sleep warmer because they have turned animals into clothing, bedding and shelters. The tools made from them can enable hunting, food processing, and the preparation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Todd Braje. Matthew Lauer.

Despite opposition by a number of anthropologists, archaeologists, sociologists, and other historical and social scientists, a proposal to designate a geologic epoch of humans, the Anthropocene, is moving forward with a proposed starting date sometime in the last 50 years. The Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) and other, mostly, geological scientists have focused on the stratigraphic signatures for the boundary marker in lieu of understanding the long-term processes that have resulted in human...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gilbert Tostevin.

This is an abstract from the "Establishing the Science of Paleolithic Archaeology: The Legacy of Harold Dibble (1951–2018) Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Harold Dibble’s contributions to Paleolithic archaeology are numerous. Of the two contributions that I feel had the largest impact, the first is the intensity of energy Dibble brought to every endeavor, particularly to broadening the application of rigorous empiricism to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Smetana. Christopher Lynn. Marco Samadelli.

This is an abstract from the "Body Modification: Examples and Explanations" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As the popularity of tattooing has surged worldwide, so too have studies of tattooing as a cultural and psychological practice, though research on the biological impacts of tattooing have lagged. In its basic form, tattooing is a purposeful wound on the body that leaves behind pigment and permanent meaning. Part of that meaning is the health...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Agamemnon Pantel. Chester Walker.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. 78,000 US Service Personnel are still “Missing in Action” (MIA). From World War II, they are located in both the Pacific and European theatres. History Flight, a nonprofit organization, has dedicated over 10 years to the search and recovery of these US Servicemen who are still MIAs through a transdisciplinary approach. Initial steps logically stem from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carol Rodríguez.

This study explores a recurrent problem in the archaeological field. How to start the analysis of archaeological material? Specifically, how to analyze a ceramic sample stylistically? Based on research carried out at the Cerro de Oro archaeological site on the south coast of Peru, the author proposes a methodology that covers identifiable aspects in most data groups. The study of decorative techniques, the identification of iconographic designs and the observation of distribution patterns will...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emiliano Gallaga.

This is an abstract from the "And They Look into the Mirror for Answers: Mirror Analysis to Understand Its Holder" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. No matter what material they were made of, stone, metal, or crystal, or if it was cheap or expensive (gold, silver, copper, bronze, obsidian, or pyrite), mirrors are one of the most fascinating artifacts made by artisans in the past. The users of these items were normally high-class members of society...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Schaffer. E. Kofi Agorsah. Kalina Kassadjikova. Lars Fehren-Schmitz. Kelly Harkins.

Kormantse is an influential and celebrated place name in the African Diaspora. Some scholars estimate that more slaves were transported from Kormantse and nearby Fort William in Anamabo than most other West African ports. For the last ten years, the Kormantse Archaeological Research Project (KARP) has been studying the human skeletal remains recovered from the site. A combination of PCR-based techniques, targeted enrichment, and next-generation sequencing of Kormantse teeth has confirmed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kurt Wilson. Kasey Cole. Brian Codding.

This is an abstract from the "Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Understanding what favors egalitarian versus non-egalitarian resource access and patterns of behavior is a long-standing topic of interest, with much research narrowing in on potential social and environmental causes. Past modeling exercises have implemented game theoretic and simulation approaches to explore social patterns that may underlay...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ben Marwick. Erik Gjesfjeld.

The history of archaeology is often told as a sequence of prominent individuals and their publications. Due to the focus on big names and big papers, the diversity of archaeological publications is often underestimated. Here we introduce a quantitative method that illuminates historical trends in archaeological writing by investigating a large number of journal articles. We use a Bayesian framework developed for estimating speciation, extinction, and preservation rates from incomplete fossil...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Parnas. Megan Savoy.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Parasitic infections present in human populations are often correlated with increased sedentism, interaction with domesticated animals, and urbanism. However, parasitic population trends are rarely used to infer ancient human behavior. In this study we examine the relationship between soil-transmitted helminth (STH) infection rates and small sedentary...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dietrich Stout. Justin Pargeter. Nada Khreisheh. Katherine Bryant. Erin Hecht.

Although commonly glossed as social "transmission," the acquisition of knapping skills requires extended interactions between social inputs and individual practice better termed social "reproduction." Individual differences in learning aptitude during this process provide both the raw material for neurocognitive evolution and a potentially significant source of variability in the lithic products used to infer patterns and mechanisms of Paleolithic social learning. Here we present results from an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bettina Arnold.

This is an abstract from the "There and Back Again: Celebrating the Career and Ongoing Contributions of Patricia B. Richards" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dead bodies are a source of a range of extreme emotions in human societies past and present, from superstitious fear of the dangerous dead (burials at cross-roads in medieval Germany) to ancestor veneration and the curation and display of skeletal remains (catacombs in Portugal, Italy, and...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Timothy A. Kohler.

Over the last decade many archaeologists (the author included) have increasingly employed computational approaches to make sense of the ever-larger amounts of relatively low-quality data available, to identify signals within the noise. Numerous applications of summed probability distributions of 14C dates and similarly sophisticated processing of tree-ring dates fall within this category, as do attempts to extract data related to specific research questions from the growing worldwide...