North America: California and Great Basin (Geographic Keyword)
26-50 (374 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Life Is Risky: Human Behavioral Ecological Approaches to Variable Outcomes " session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Anarchic societies resist despotic rule and centralized political power. Such systems are far from chaotic and developed and prospered throughout much of western North America. Both human behavioral ecology (HBE) and anarchist theory offer explanatory frameworks for understanding heterarchy as well as the...
Bioarchaeology of Care in Three San Francisco Bay Area Muwekma Ohlone Ancestral Sites (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation applies Tilley and Cameron’s 2014 Index of Care to the mortuary population of three ancestral Muwekma Ohlone sites that were excavated in the San Francisco Bay Area between 2016- 2022 (CA-ALA-565/H, CA-ALA-677/H, and CA-ALA-704/H). These sites include the remains of 147 individuals dating between approximately 2200-110 cal BP. This...
Bodies Apart: Dissection and Embodied Structural Violence in a Historic Skeletal Assemblage from San Francisco (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Historic-era skeletal samples from the United States routinely reflect marginalized and vulnerable populations, many of which were also subject to dissection, a partible practice widely considered a form of desecration in the nineteenth century. Using historic and osteological data from a skeletal assemblage (MNI=25) at Point San Jose in San Francisco, CA (AD...
Burning Down the House: A Project that Is an Intersection of Tribal and Academic Interests (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster reports on a collaborative research project between CSU-Fresno Anthropology Department, UC San Diego, and the Santa Rosa Rancheria (Tachi Yokut). Baked clay or daub is an underappreciated piece of evidence from our past. Archeologists often find pieces or concentrations of daub in old Native American village sites that occur in California’s Central...
"But We Are Not Broken": Practices of Home in San Francisco Bay Area Homeless Encampments (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Immigration and Refugee Resettlement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In January 2018 United Nations Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing Leilani Farha visited Oakland, CA homeless encampments. Farha reportedly remarked, "every person I spoke to today has told me, 'we are human beings.’ But if you need to assert to a UN representative that you are a human, well, something is seriously wrong." The...
CA-ALA-11: A Middle Period Site and Cemetery on the Oakland Estuary (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents the results of recent data recovery excavations at CA-ALA-11, a coastal shell midden located on San Francisco Bay. Our excavations recovered 182 burials and 262 thermal features with dates predominantly from the Early Period through Middle 2 (2500 cal BCE to 600 cal CE). The excavation sheds light on resource use, environmental change,...
California Channel Islands Micromammals: A Story of Invasion and Extinction. (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Humans have unintentionally and intentionally introduced rodents to islands around the world, sometimes causing local extirpation and extinction of endemic fauna. On the northern California Channel Islands, island deer mice (Peromyscus maniculatus), may have arrived as stowaways on Native American canoes at least 10,000 years ago. Following this...
California Tribal Unilateral Apprenticeship Program (CTUAP) (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. California Tribal Unilateral Apprenticeship Program (CTUAP) sets out to solve to fundamental problems: 1. Chronic unemployment and lack of job opportunities in Indian Country for tribal youth and 2. demand for diverse well trained archeological technicians in the field of Cultural Resource Management. CTUAP is an officially accredited California State...
California’s Enduring Mystery: The Drake Landing Site Controversy Revisited (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Trace element X-ray florescence analysis is applied to ceramics from sixteenth-century shipwrecks in order to help resolve the enduring mystery of the location of Sir Francis Drake’s brief landing on the west coast in 1579. The landing site has been debated for decades. Was it California, Oregon, or Washington? Various sites have been proposed and each has...
Cascade Phase Context and Chronology at the Connley Caves, Oregon (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cascade projectile point chronology in the northern Great Basin is poorly understood, with associated evidence ranging from the early to middle Holocene. The broad temporal range of Cascade points results from the difficulty in distinguishing this type from the more general "foliate" category and lack of well-dated sites containing such artifacts. Recent...
Cave Rituals in South Central California: Ethnographic and Archaeological Interpretations (2018)
Two different versions of a myth, one Kitanemuk and one Kawaiisu, recount the tradition of a man taken into a cave where he was instructed in sacred knowledge by animal spirits. Neighboring Chumash and Yokuts elders passed along accounts of caves being used for shamanistic purposes, in part associated with rock paintings. These ethnographic accounts imply the private use of caves for special rituals by individuals. Nonetheless, there are particular Chumash pictograph sites that appear to have...
Challenges to Managing Tribal Knowledge and Physical Places within the Homelands of the Confederated Klamath Tribes (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Heritage Sites at the Intersection of Landscape, Memory, and Place: Archaeology, Heritage Commemoration, and Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. People recognize places on the landscape that have historical and spiritual importance to their communities, and it is often the case that different cultural communities sharing the same space have very different cultural maps. Among Tribal communities, identifying...
Change, Continuity and Foodways: Indigenous Diet at Mission Santa Clara (1777-1836) (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper examines mission documents, agricultural production reports, and faunal remains recovered from three middens situated alongside the Native American barracks at the Spanish mission site of Santa Clara (1777-1836). Mission Santa Clara housed a diverse population of differing Native American groups including predominantly Ohlone speakers, as well as...
Changing Shorelines and Maritime Foraging during the Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene along California’s Northern Channel Islands: Assessing Settlement Patterns with Chirp Subbottom Data (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Coastal Environments in Archaeology: Ancient Life, Lore, and Landscapes" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The California Northern Channel Islands contain one of the best preserved and most abundant records of terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene human occupation in all of North America. These records have contributed to our understanding of early coastal migrations, the importance of Paleoindian maritime economies,...
Charcoal, Pollen, and Statistics: Spatio-Temporal Occupation of the Black Rock Desert Basin (2021)
This is an abstract from the "People, Climate, and Proxies in Holocene Western North America" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Black Rock Desert Basin (HUC-6 160402) comprises the largest basin in northwest Nevada. Covering approximately three billion hectares, this basin contains the Quinn River drainage and the Black Rock and Smoke Creek playas. A radiocarbon database for the basin was assembled from the peer-reviewed and cultural resource...
Chemical and Standardization Analysis Results on Fremont Snake Valley Black-on-gray Pottery (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists widely argue that Fremont potters from the Parowan Valley, in southwestern Utah, manufactured Snake Valley pottery. For my research, I examined various properties of Snake Valley Black-on-gray (SVBG) ceramics using metric data, statistical methods, and newly obtained neutron activation analysis data. I compared my data results on SVBG sherds...
A Chronological Multisite Analysis of Shellfish Gathering Strategies in the King Range National Conservation Area, Northwest California (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The King Range National Conservation Area (KRNCA), located in southern Humboldt County, California, has been of particular interest to archaeologists since the 1970s. Early archaeological investigations in the KRNCA were crucial for developing regional North Coast chronologies and have yielded some of the oldest coastal sites north of San Francisco Bay....
Citizen Science Archaeology at Bodie State Historic Park (2018)
Bodie State Historic Park is located in the western Great Basin, near the California and Nevada border and encompasses a 2,900-acre historical landscape comprised of buildings, archaeological sites, and features related to 80 years of Gold Rush era mining. Cultural and natural resources at Bodie are at risk of being lost due to wildfires, earthquakes, and lack of funding. Discussing the application of digital heritage methods in the Bodie 3D Project, this paper focuses on community-engaged...
Classification of Fremont Ceramics Using a Neural Network (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ceramic classification is central to archaeological analysis, but without systematic and objective quantification, archaeologists cannot determine the definitive number of types or what they represent, despite decades of research. Recently archaeologists have applied machine learning models to improve the effectiveness of ceramic classification and extend...
A Clean Break: A Departure from Standard Typologies through an Investigation of Pottery Temper at Joshua Tree National Park (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster will focus on my current master’s research and is in joint partnership between the University of New Mexico, Joshua Tree National Park, and the descendant communities from the California Desert. The project developed through consultation with the Twenty-Nine Palms Band of Mission Indians, the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians, and Agua...
Cleaning Up a Stinky Ghost Town: Developing the Townsite of Sulphur, Nevada, into a Cultural Interpretive Site (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Digging Deeper: Pushing Ourselves to Engage the Public in Our Shared Heritage through Outreach and Education" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Sulphur Townsite is a 400-acre, NRHP-eligible historic archaeological site in northwest Nevada. The site is managed by the Bureau of Land Management, Black Rock Field Office within the Winnemucca District. Although originally developed into a cultural interpretive site in...
Climate, Prey Choice, Signaling, and Risk: An Integrated Analysis of Holocene Hunting in the Bonneville and Wyoming Basins, USA (2023)
This is an abstract from the "The Socioecological Dynamics of Holocene Foragers and Farmers" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this poster, we synthesize the available empirical data on return rates for artiodactyls and lagomorphs and explore and integrate different currencies to guide a trans-Holocene analysis of variation in artiodactyl hunting using massive archaeofaunal datasets from predominantly open-air sites from the Bonneville and Wyoming...
Climatic Controls on Prehistoric Utah Populations (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recognizing how climate variability altered the landscape in regards to nutrient availability is a key aspect in reconstructing how prehistoric peoples were able to thrive. Further, understanding how past climate and environmental change affected organisms is important for predicting the role of imminent future climate change on populations today. Previous...
Combating the Ongoing Erasure of Native Americans from Late Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Archaeological Landscapes (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. It’s been over 25 years since Lightfoot published his seminal article on the ethnocentric and arbitrary dichotomy between prehistoric and historical archaeology, and numerous authors have since echoed his sentiment. Yet, problems of this nature persist in cultural resource management in California, as Panich and Schneider have demonstrated in their 2019...
Communal Trapping and Pinyon Exploitation in the Wovoka Wilderness (2018)
Heritage resources are recognized as a characteristic of the relatively new Wovoka Wilderness, created in 2014. Located in western Nevada’s Pine Grove Hills and in the Sierra Nevada’s rain shadow, resources relate to pine nut exploitation and communal artiodactyl hunting. The Wichman deer game trap still has standing corral posts, providing insights about the structure and function of Great Basin traps. Other game traps, blinds, rock rings, brush huts and bow stave trees are among the resources...