Worldwide (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan Beney. Shelby Putt. Dietrich Stout.

Teaching is uniquely developed in humans and was likely critical to the emergence of cumulative culture. However, the importance of various forms of teaching, including the use of language, in transmitting Paleolithic skills like stone knapping is less understood. Here we examine the knapping behaviors of 17 subjects who learned to make Oldowan and Acheulian stone tools from watching video demonstrations either with verbal instruction or without sound. Despite intriguing differences in brain...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claudio Latorre. Jacob Freeman. Erick Robinson. Eugenia M. Gayo. Mauricio Lima.

From the civilizations in Easter Island to the Mayas or to the collapse of the prehistoric populations in the Great Basin, researchers have proposed a wide range of hypotheses to disentangle the causes and drivers behind such pronounced demographic change. PeoPLE (PalEOclimate and the PeoPLing of the Earth) 3K is a new working group recently created by Past Global Changes (PAGES) to examine in detail how environmental change over the last 3000 years has affected, either by facilitating...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Johna Hutira.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For women discussing our menstruation cycles in the context of the workplace is a double-edged sword. I am a boomer. Back in the day we didn't talk about periods, or cramps, or heavy flow days because those conditions were weaponized against us by the patriarchy. Fast forward 40 years: the status of women in archaeology is amazingly good compared to other...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mycroft Roske. Pamela Geller.

This is an abstract from the "Thinking with, through, and against Archaeology’s Politics of Knowledge" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this talk, we discuss the visible effects of sex-variance on skeletal material and in the modern politico-ethical world, drawing on bioarchaeological, historical, and medical sources. Here, sex-variance includes the overlapping categories of castrates (such as castrati and eunuchs), transgender people, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Devin Pettigrew.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Perishable Weaponry Studies: Developing Perspectives from Dated Contexts to Experimental Analyses" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Straight-flying boomerangs—in North America commonly referred to as rabbit sticks—were used worldwide for both hunting and combat. When properly designed and implemented, the boomerang functions as an airfoil and gyroscope, slicing through atmosphere, generating lift, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Blinman. Marvin Rowe. J. Royce Cox.

The development of low-energy plasma oxidation as a sampling technique has created new opportunities for applying radiocarbon dating. Plasma oxidation can be carried out at energies below the threshold of carbonate and oxalate dissociation, dramatically reducing the need for pretreatment and subsequent loss of sample volume. Radiocarbon sample size can be reduced toward the minimum of the 40-100 millionths of a gram of carbon that is actually needed for standard AMS dating. This allows the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pamela Geller.

This is an abstract from the "Storeroom Taphonomies: Site Formation in the Archaeological Archive" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Plastics present a paradox for archaeology. They are ubiquitous and inevitable, taking myriad forms—bags for artifacts, tarps for units, containers for storage, etc.—in excavation and archival settings. Their utilitarian value is predicated on the presumption of durability and stability. But for how long and in what...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paula Sabloff.

Royal women—queen consorts and princesses—were pawns in rulers’ marriage game. But once established in their husbands’ courts, they exhibited political agency through several means, e.g., spying, ruling in their husbands’ or sons’ stead, participating in the usurpation of the throne, etc. They were able to do so partly because of their position, which gave them access to power, and partly because of their ability to accumulate wealth, which enabled them to become patrons in their own right. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Roddick. M. Elizabeth Grávalos.

This is an abstract from the "Political Geologies in the Ancient and Recent Pasts: Ontology, Knowledge, and Affect" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Researchers working across the humanities and social sciences have recently demonstrated how the study of earthy materials is rooted in historically and ontologically specific frameworks. Such frameworks are, as Bobbette and Donovan (2019) demonstrate, “political geologies.” Geological practices are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Biehl. Johannes Mueller. Carol Nash. Heather Wholey.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper will discuss the need to popularise the archaeology of climate change beyond our professional networks to the general public via museums and education as well as the media. We will discuss ways to translate the archaeology of climate change into actionable science to inform decision making within a global framework of climate change action in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bill Angelbeck.

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. In *The Dawn of Everything*, Graeber and Wengrow present a thought-provoking archaeological history of humankind that challenges common understandings of our pasts. Instead of a linear progression from egalitarian pasts to state-based hierarchies, they show the spectrum of variability...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Klervia Jaouen. Pauline Méjean. Benjamin, T. Fuller. Jéssica Mendes Cardoso. Zineb Moubtahij.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There is currently a growing body of evidence that Zn isotope ratios (δ66Zn) are a useful tool to assess the trophic level of past humans and animals from archaeological sites. However, the isotopic variability which has been previously measured in herbivorous species remains unexplained. In this contribution, we explore and attempt to explain the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Suramya Bansal.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research experimentally investigates and theoretically situates the distinct impression and expression of hand imprints (prints and stencils) in rock art studies. This hominin act of imprinting hands, which cuts across spatial and temporal boundaries, showcases essential behavioural and cognitive characteristics. The various intricacies involved in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine Halling. Ryan Seidemann.

This is an abstract from the "Human Remains in the Marketplace and Beyond: Myths and Realities of Monitoring, Grappling With, and Anthropologizing the Illicit Trade in a Post-Harvard World" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Louisiana Department of Justice (LDOJ) has routinely monitored online sites for trafficking of human remains and antiquities since 2007. Since that time, new state laws have been enacted to strengthen the ability to confiscate...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexander Bauer.

This paper interrogates the pragmatics of heritage in two ways. First, what are the discourses and rhetorics of heritage—how is heritage invoked and talked about, like a sign of history, in making statements about the world? How has that shifted over time, as the term is increasingly invoked to explain and defend a wide range of actions and attitudes, and how do the different discursive communities who speak about heritage engage (or not) with one another? Most importantly, why have these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patrick Baert.

This paper explores the potential of a pragmatist-inspired philosophy of social science for both archaeology and social anthropology. Firstly, we explain the main tenets of contemporary pragmatism and the variations within it. Secondly, we analyse the potential methodological ramifications for both archaeology and social anthropology. Thirdly, we discuss some of the critique of this pragmatist stance.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Taylor Picard. Marisol Cortes-Rincon.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the 2016 – 2017 academic year a Humboldt State University Anthropology Graduate Student recreated a macuahuitl, a wooden club with obsidian blades, and used it on two pig heads for a use-wear analysis of the obsidian. The pig heads were partially de-fleshed and frozen to be added to the university’s zooarchaeology collection. This allowed for the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexis Catsambis.

The U.S. Navy maintains a program responsible for the management of its sunken military craft, which are distributed world-wide and extend temporally from the American Revolution through to the Nuclear Age. These multi-faceted submerged heritage sites are managed by the Underwater Archaeology Branch of the Naval History and Heritage Command, which engages in archaeological field research, heritage management, artifact conservation, collections management, and outreach initiatives in furtherance...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Cullison.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The popularity of pseudoarchaeological content on the internet reveals an issue in the way academics approach the public. To measure how quickly an individual with an interest in archeology can be influenced by pseudoarchaeology, I conducted a preliminary study on the app TikTok. The content that is presented to the users of the app is determined by a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stefan Brannan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Project management is an extremely important but critically underutilized body of knowledge in our discipline. Many of the activities that archaeologists engage in fit the definition of a project, that is a temporary effort that creates value through a unique product, service, or result. Despite that, many of us were never introduced to effective project...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristen Rayfield. Lushuang Huang. Hayley Lanier. Si Wu. Courtney Hofman.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sex determination from animal skeletal remains can be challenging as it relies on sex specific bones or osteometrics. Determining sex is beneficial in understanding animal husbandry practices, as well as human-animal interactions. Building on previous work with humans, here we present a proteomic approach for determining sex from tooth enamel in nonhuman...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Heath-Stout.

This is an abstract from the "Presidential Session: What Is at Stake? The Impacts of Inequity and Harassment on the Practice of Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this Presidential Session, we are exploring how and why archaeology remains dominated by white, straight, and (in positions of power) men. One piece of this puzzle is recruitment of archaeologists, which tends to take place in field schools and academic departments. How do...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sjoerd Van Der Linde.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper calls for a creative, interpretive archaeology that does not take reports for agencies or other archaeologists as its end goal but instead speaks to a far wider range of audiences through the development and presentation narratives that will engage and inspire people. I argue that this can be achieved by implementing "Emotion Design" –an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cindy Hsin-yee Huang. John Murray. Sydney James. Nicolas Hansen. Jonathan Paige.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The issue of inter-analyst variation is common across nearly all archaeological artifacts. Within lithic analysis, there are many quantitative and qualitative assessments that could vary among analysts, which can cause problems in interpretation of stone tool assemblages. In addition, the effects of raw material on inter-analyst variation is not entirely...

PROJECT Timothy A. Kohler. Michael E. Smith. The Amerind Foundation, Inc..

This project contains datasets and other resources used in a volume to be published by the University of Arizona Press in 2018 entitled Ten Thousand Years of Inequality: The Archaeology of Wealth Differences, edited by TA Kohler and ME Smith. This volume emanates first from a symposium at the April 2016 Society for American Archaeology meetings entitled Measuring and Explaining Household Inequality in Prehistory: Inequality from the Bottom Up, also organized by Kohler and Smith. That was...