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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 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 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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Evan Peacock. Sheeji Kathuria. David S. Nolen.

Applied zooarcheology has been on an apparent upward swing, gaining practitioners and seeing an increasing number of publications in natural science journals. Whether the intended consumers (conservation biologists, land managers) are receiving the message remains uncertain. We used a two-phase process to survey the literature pertaining to applied zooarchaeology: 1) keyword searching for highly cited applied zooarchaeology publications in Google Scholar; and 2) tracking of specific articles...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Margaret Helzer.

This is an abstract from the "Pedagogy in the Undergraduate Archaeology Classroom" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. After three decades of teaching archaeology courses at the college level, students still ask me about my views on Sasquatch, aliens, and intelligent design. In fact, these questions come up more frequently now than they ever had in the past. Those of us who teach archaeology are faced with a paradox: while current advancements in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mairead Doery.

This is an abstract from the "Pedagogy in the Undergraduate Archaeology Classroom" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Graduate students occupy a unique space in undergraduate archaeological education. We serve as teaching assistants, field school instructors, and trusted mentors to our undergraduate students, yet unlike professors, we are not viewed as commensurate authorities in the classroom. Simultaneously, we are positioned professionally as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katharine Ellenberger.

When teaching about preservation, it can be difficult to communicate the options and ethical dilemmas that inform principles of archaeological ethics. The message many members of the public get from brief exposure to digital records and virtual models often adds to the challenge, leaving them with impression that these are viable alternatives to physical site preservation. I propose employing evidence-based teaching practices to create public and university lessons which result in a properly...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Ray. Nadia Neff.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As archaeologists, we can be slow to adopt new technology in the field. Sensitive documents such as field notes and maps are often still done by hand for fear of data loss. Working in remote field settings with limited or no electricity can amplify this concern. This case study examines the use of an iPad for recording field notes, creating maps, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Buckley.

This is an abstract from the "Zooarchaeology and Technology: Case Studies and Applications" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. ZooMS, or ‘Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry’, is a relatively recently developed method in the field of archaeology, with the ability to identify large numbers of fragmentary animal bone to genus or species level. Most importantly, its advantages over ancient DNA-based approaches of identification are that it can be...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Delgado.

Advances in robotic and satellite technology have shifted ocean exploration into an interactive forum that links scientists and the public via "telepresence." Working with this paradigm, archaeologists have joined the ranks of ocean explorers on a variety of projects ranging from surveys to excavation in depths ranging from a few hundred to thousands of meters deep. The process has encouraged wider scientific integration, provided access to sites at depths previously not considered "workable,"...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam Rabinowitz.

This is an abstract from the "Constructing Chronologies I: Stratification and Correlation" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper explores the potential of the PeriodO period gazetteer to facilitate temporal reasoning and visualization in archaeological datasets, both within and between stratigraphic databases that refer to PeriodO definitions for their period terms, and within and between datasets using only natural-language labels. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Greger Larson. Laurent Frantz. Angela Perri. Ophelie Lebrasseur. James Haile.

Despite numerous investigations leveraging both genetic and archaeological evidence, the geographic origins of dogs remain unknown. On the basis of an ancient Irish dog genome and an assessment of the spatiotemporal appearance of dogs in the archaeological record, a recent paper suggested that dogs may have been domesticated independently in Eastern and Western Eurasia from distinct wolf populations. Following those independent origins, a mitochondrial assessment suggested that the Mesolithic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kirsten Green. Meradeth Snow.

No one expects to face any sort of harassment or discrimination and we can feel blindsided when something occurs that puts us, and/or our career, at risk. The question of ‘what next?’ can be daunting, especially in the face of choices that have massive repercussions personally and professionally. Frank discussion of the variety of ways to best maneuver a harassment situation, based on the literature and the experience of peers and colleagues, will be discussed. Additionally, how harassment and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aylar Abdolahzadeh.

This is an abstract from the "Establishing the Science of Paleolithic Archaeology: The Legacy of Harold Dibble (1951–2018) Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For many Paleolithic archaeologists, it is important to determine whether similar characteristics of lithic artifacts and/or assemblages resulted from convergent evolution because this may help us better understand the evolutionary developments of stone artifact technologies from H....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Curtis Marean.

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. The methods that we use to excavate archaeological sites shape the resulting data in an unchangeable manner and have significant downstream impacts on our ability to study and interpret our data. In 1987 Harold Dibble published “Measurement of Artifact Provenience with an Electronic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Miranda LaZar. Jonathan Dombrosky.

This is an abstract from the "Birds in Archaeology: New Approaches to Understanding the Diverse Roles of Birds in the Past" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ability to track trade of socially valued goods made from raptor bones can give archaeologists a deeper understanding of both human-raptor interactions and networks of exchange. Reconstructing distribution of such goods from production centers, however, requires the ability to identify bones...