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DOCUMENT Citation Only John Hansen.

The Division of Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History launched its first online database in 1995. The image-oriented interface proved attractive to an audience with a moderate level anthropological background. Later, in response to numerous requests, unimaged archaeological collections with more technical data were offered through a password protected interface. As of September 2017, 250,000+ files with images were publicly available, the combined online database representing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katelyn Bishop. Samantha Fladd. Sarah Kurnick.

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. A recent paper by Mary Leighton problematizes the culture of archaeological practice and the emphasis on embodying aspects of “performative informality.” Social relationships among archaeologists are attributed to assessments of merit rather than the friendships they often represent, and these relationships...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicole Boivin.

While there is little doubt that we currently live in an era in which humans have become the dominant force shaping climate and environments globally, the question of when we entered this era has become a contentious one. Many archaeologists argue for an early start date, but have been largely excluded from geology-driven discussions by the Working Group on the Anthropocene. Does this matter? This paper will explore this question, and consider more broadly the place of archaeology in shaping...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michelle Bebber. Michael Wilson.

In biology the concept of theoretical morphology has been used as a heuristic device for better understanding the evolutionary trajectories of organisms. Theoretical morphology proceeds by creating and examining hypothetical specimens not actually found in nature. So instead of asking "why does feature X exist", a theoretical morphological approach asks "why doesn’t feature Y exist?". Here, we use this approach to address the question of why ceramic technology did not evolve to replace stone...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Vaclav Hrncir.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There is a popular idea that archaic humans commonly used wooden clubs as their weapons. This is not based on archaeological finds, which are minimal from the Pleistocene, but rather on a few ethnographic analogies and the association of this weapon with simple technology. This paper presents the first quantitative cross-cultural analysis of the use of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marcos Llobera.

This is an abstract from the "Developments and Challenges in Landscape Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation focuses on an ongoing project aimed at the development a new set of methods (in the way of a python package) that will enable the analysis of 3D Scenes. This open source package will provide the tools to be able to render and combine digital terrain models (DTM) with 3D objects generated through photogrammetry or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lewis Borck.

This is an abstract from the "In Defense of Everything! Constructive Engagements with Graeber and Wengrow’s Provocative Contribution" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For many, *The Dawn of Everything* emerges as a watershed moment in their perception of a new history, how that history impacts the present, and the implications these cast on the future. For others, it is a brazenly biased distortion of history. For still more, the book creates waves...

DOCUMENT Citation Only C. Michael Barton. Julien Riel-Salvatore.

Mobility is a phenomenon of importance across all past and present societies. For hunter-gatherers, mobility structures ecological strategies, social organization, and response to environmental change. For prehistoric societies, we cannot observe mobility but it is possible to study it through a proxy record of discarded material items and biological remains that form the archaeological record. Increasingly archaeological practice has shifted from proposing intuitive links between mobility and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only J. Anne Melton. Emily Liu. Jeff Calder. Katrina Yezzi-Woodley.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. It is widely accepted that angle measurements taken on lithic artifacts form a crucial part of lithic analysis. Thanks to advances in 3D-scanning technology, researchers now have virtual angle-measuring options. However, since these new virtual tools were created independently and thus are utilizing their own “suite” of algorithms dependent on the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claire Smith.

This presentation focusses on Larry Zimmerman’s contributions to world archaeology through his leadership roles within the World Archaeological Congress. This includes his various roles on the WAC Executive and Council and his convening of the first Indigenous Inter-Congress, held at Vermillion, South Dakota in 1989 and the subsequent development of the Vermillion Accord on Human Remains.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jarod Hutson. Anna K. Behrensmeyer. Diane Gifford-Gonzalez. Gary Haynes. Amanda Millhouse.

Taphonomy, the study of how organisms fossilize and information that is lost and gained along the way, has emerged as pivotal to reconstructing the paleoecology of animal communities and ancient human lifeways. Through taphonomic analysis, we can decipher the sources of bone accumulations at paleontological and archaeological sites and the processes involved in bone modification and preservation. Such inquiries rely upon well-documented reference collections that link certain bone modifications...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Rapes. Jesse Wolfhagen. Max Price. Erik R. Otárola-Castillo.

Zooarchaeologists contribute valuable data to the exploration of archaeology’s grand challenges. The scale and complexity of these problems requires zooarchaeologists to aggregate and analyze data using rigorous statistical methods while ensuring reproducibility and validity. Because assemblages can contain thousands of data points, conducting statistical analyses on all of the available data in a standardized fashion is difficult. ZooaRchGUI provides zooarchaeologists a free, user-friendly...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kitty Emery. Rob Guralnick. Michelle LeFebvre. Laura Brenskelle. Sarah Whitcher Kansa.

Re-use of large zooarchaeological datasets offers new ways of tackling the grand challenges of archaeological science. But big-data research requires integrating multiple zooarchaeological datasets while maintaining the biological and archaeological details needed to contextualize the faunal information. Accessing and combining these data remains difficult despite the increasing use of open-access archaeological data publishers and archiving services, and the open-access, interoperable...