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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 Christine VanPool. Gavin Easley.

This is an abstract from the "Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Altered states of consciousness (ASC) is a defining characteristic of shamanism. ASC, however, is not unique to shamans nor is it a single neurological/physiological phenomenon. Mystics and mediums also use ASC, and mediums are even “possessed” to greater or lesser degrees. In contrast, most shamans go on soul flights during “ecstatic” trances....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jason Kennedy. James Berry.

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. The study of archaeological ceramics has relied on a reconstruction of the techno-functional choices made by potters in the past through a chaîne opératoire approach. However, the insights gained through this analysis have largely confused or eluded our students due to a lack of practical experience with ceramic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Zimmerman. Mikheil Elashvili. Giorgi Datunashvili.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2019, a three-year NSF IRES grant (#1854153) was awarded to Bridgewater State University, Ilia State University, and the Cyberarchaeology Lab at U.C. San Diego to engage U.S. undergraduate students in interdisciplinary research of historical and ongoing human-environmental interactions in the Shiraki Plateau in the southeastern part of the country of...

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paris Franklin.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Microdebitage—flakes and flake fragments < ¼-inch in size—are often overlooked. Because the average size of debitage decreases as reduction progresses, archaeologists often infer tool maintenance (e.g., scraper resharpening or projectile point rejuvenation) when finding large quantities of small debitage in archaeological contexts. However, experimental...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Sheridan.

This is an abstract from the "The Future of Bioarchaeology in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Social media has provided bioarchaeology a tool for collaboration with colleagues around the globe; interaction with legislators, the press, and the general public; a means to quickly disseminate research; an educational tool for reaching a younger audience; and, a means to employ the latest Web 2.0 technologies. The BioAnthropology News...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Roscoe.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. An important theory for the origins of war defines it as lethal retaliatory action based on a structural principle of social substitutability, a principle that any member of the targeted group can be killed to avenge the actions of any one of its members. Prior to the Holocene, according to the theory, this principle (and hence war) did not exist. Lethal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Goldberg.

Soils are different from sediments. Many of these differences have been revealed by Vance Holliday during his career, through field work and numerous publications that have significantly influenced all disciplines. Nevertheless, there is a tendency to treat any soft stuff that is being excavated as "soil", and this confusion needs to be continuously corrected. Here, I present a number of examples of the use of archaeological micromorphology to highlight the distinctions between soils and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nolan Ferar. Claudio Tennie. Mark Moore. Alexandros Karakostis. Elena Moos.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human culture’s unique complexity depends upon the ability to faithfully transmit know-how over generations. Given other primates do not exhibit a similar capacity, when hominins began to transmit know-how between one another is a key question for human evolution. In the archaeological record, the reoccurrence of stone artifact forms is often taken as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rita Austin. Courtney Hofman. Sabrina Sholts.

Technological and analytical advancements of biomolecular techniques allow scientists and museums to explore and assess archaeological collections from a new perspective, revealing new insights into past peoples, health, and the environment. One of the major challenges for biomolecular research on archaeological remains are uncertainties surrounding biomolecule preservation. Information on how samples were collected, washed, preserved, and maintained are valuable for generating and interpreting...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Judith Sealy. Petrus le Roux. Maximilian Spies. Kerryn Gray.

This is an abstract from the "The Intersection of Archaeological Science and Forensic Science" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Applications of 87Sr/86Sr in studies of palaeomobility and migration have developed in an interdisciplinary space at the intersection between archaeology, geochemistry and ecology. The approaches taken have depended on the home discipline of the lead researchers. Differences in approach and criteria in the many, very...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stanley Ambrose.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Material Sourcing and Provenience Studies in Africa" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Interpretation of chemical and isotopic tracers of individual life history requires a realistic understanding of skeletal biology and physiology, particularly gender differences in mineral nutritional requirements for reproduction such as lactation, which may affect bone mineral elemental turnover and transfer of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elisa Mathieu.

This is an abstract from the "Fulfilling a Nation’s Promise: The Search, Recovery, and Accounting Efforts of DPAA and Its Partners" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Investigating archaeological sites related to the recovery of MIAs from past conflicts requires international collaboration among various agencies and civilian volunteers. I graduated in 2023 as an art history and archaeology student at the University of Namur (Belgium). I served as an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shaheen Christie. Eava Snodden.

This is an abstract from the "Fulfilling a Nation’s Promise: The Search, Recovery, and Accounting Efforts of DPAA and Its Partners" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological recovery of missing service personnel on conflict landscapes have increased since 2015 through strategic partnerships between the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) and volunteer organizations, heritage and cultural resource management (CRM) businesses, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Evans. Matthew Keith.

The study and management of submerged paleolandscapes is an extension of terrestrial prehistoric archaeology, but due to the location of the sites on now submerged lake margins and continental shelves, it is typically lumped into a general category of "underwater" or "marine" archaeology. Marine archaeology has been, and in many ways, still is, strongly associated with shipwrecks. In some ways, the lumping of shipwrecks and submerged landscapes into one category is beneficial, since many of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tim Kohler. Amy Bogaard.

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. In this paper we summarize key results from the previous papers in this symposium, all of which report preliminary findings of the Global Dynamics of Wealth Inequality (GINI) Project. As Lauren Bacall sings in “To Have and Have Not”: how little we know! Archaeologists have assembled the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sander Van Der Leeuw.

This paper argues that much sustainability research, which sees the challenge as an environmental one rather than as a societal one, misses the fact that the societal changes that are occurring are so fundamental, as part of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) revolution, that our societies will be unrecognizable before the impact of the environmental changes hits our world most heavily, in the second half of the current century. The paper will argue that developing a societal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kara Davis. Jeneva Wright.

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. Fielding new capabilities and leveraging untapped resources for the acceleration of operational mission tempo has become a central imperative for the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency's (DPAA) fullest possible accounting mission. Since 2015, DPAA's Partnerships and...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Charlene Collazzi.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Every archaeological site holds the potential to contribute its own irreplaceable piece into the vast jigsaw puzzle that is our shared human past. Meticulous field and lab procedures ensure data and subsequent reports are accurate. But what happens after the project closes? For decades, it has been standard practice to file the report away into an...