North America: California and Great Basin (Geographic Keyword)
51-75 (374 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Formal Models and Experimental Archaeology of Ground Stone Milling Technology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Daily activities such as grinding plant material require energy input. It is ideal to put in the least amount of work to obtain the greatest yield of product. Energetic expenditures and returns for grinding slab and mortar and pestle use remain largely unstudied. In this study, resting and grinding heart-rate...
A Comparison of Changing Reduction Sequences of Obsidian from the Grandad Site in the Central Sierra, California (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This is an investigation of obsidian chipping waste from the Grandad site, located in the Central Sierra near Mariposa, California based on point types found in deposits that have shown evidence of continuous occupation from 9000 BP to European contact. We searched for evidence of a changing reduction sequence from biface blank characteristics of large...
A Comparison of DNA Metabarcoding and Macroremains Analysis for Dietary Reconstruction using Coprolites from Bonneville Estates Rockshelter, Nevada (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Coprolites are increasingly the subject of multiproxy analyses, but there is need to determine how the data, results, and interpretation of coprolite contents could differ depending on the methods chosen. This study presents a comparison of DNA metabarcoding and macroremains analysis performed on ten coprolites from Bonneville Estates Rockshelter, Nevada....
The Consequences of Drought: Inadvertent Discoveries on Federal Land (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Beyond Collections: Federal Archaeology and "New Discoveries" under NAGPRA" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Several years of unrelenting drought in California has resulted in historically-low drawdowns to the state’s reservoirs. A corollary effect has been a notable increase in the number of inadvertent discoveries along the newly-exposed shorelines, an occurrence that has clear implications for NAGPRA. In response,...
Considering Women's Tech Choices: Grinding Efficiency and Performance Characteristics of Hunter-Gatherer Milling Tools (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Formal Models and Experimental Archaeology of Ground Stone Milling Technology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Milling tools were a cornerstone of many plant-based hunter-gatherer economies. Women are often involved in food processing and would have used these tools, in some cases daily, to expand the breadth of foods available for consumption. Despite their important economic role, few studies have compared...
Convergence of Tears at Momonga: Spiritual, Social and Personal Interactions of the Multiethnic Mourning Ceremony (2018)
The village of Momonga (Ca-LAn-357) is located in the San Fernando Valley of Southern California, along the pre-Columbian boundaries of multiple ethnic groups. Rock art in the area indicates ritual activities involving people from various cultural traditions, including ancestral Chumash, Tongva, Yokuts, and Tataviam peoples. Excavations in a portion of the site have produced exchange and utilitarian items, such as shell beads, stone beads, amulets, stone bowls, hammer stones, pressure flakes,...
Cooperative Foraging Strategies and Technological Investment in the Western Great Basin: An Investigation of Archaeological Remains from the Winnemucca Lake Caves (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research investigates evidence for the intensity and development of cooperative foraging strategies and investment in cordage and lithic technologies through time in the western Great Basin. It specifically addresses (1) when the region’s inhabitants invested in cordage technology used to create cooperation-oriented nets; (2) when the region’s inhabitants...
Countermapping, Data Visualization, and Archaeological Pedagogy: What Happened Here? (2018)
Data and spatial visualization programs afford archaeologists various ways of showcasing their research. Programs, such as the Knight Foundation’s free StoryMap JS, and Esri StoryMaps, are of particular use when sharing our research results with the public and, I argue, are useful for conducting collaborative research with communities. In this paper, I detail the experience of using online StoryMap programs in the creation of local history maps created by undergraduate students in...
Creating a Geospatial-Temporal Database for California’s Central Coast (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. California’s Central Coast is characterized by a variety of environments that would have offered indigenous peoples a plethora of resources for nearly ten thousand years. Over the course of nearly a century of archaeological investigations, thousands of sites have been identified in the region. Since the 1950s, radiocarbon dating has offered relatively...
Cultural Dimensions of Toolstone Variability in the Santa Barbara Channel Region, California (2018)
The Santa Barbara Channel region of southern California lacks reliable sources of high quality toolstone except in a few prominent locations. The nearest obsidian sources are hundreds of miles away, and local chert can be highly variable in quality and availability. Monterey chert, common to both the northern Channel Islands and the adjacent mainland, varies widely in terms of inclusions, color, and consistency; Franciscan chert from the mainland is similarly troublesome for tool-makers on a...
Cultural Landscapes of Glass Buttes, Oregon (2018)
Located on the northern fringe of the Great Basin, in Lake County, Oregon, the Glass Buttes volcanic complex is the most important obsidian toolstone source in North America. Glass Buttes obsidian is world renowned because it is colorful, abundant, available in large pieces, and of extremely high quality for making flaked stone tools. Throughout the late Pleistocene and Holocene, Native Americans have continuously used Glass Buttes obsidian, and it was widely traded in the Pacific Northwest...
Cultural Resource Implications of Wildfires on the Orchard Combat Training Center (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Crucial Issues in United States Department of Defense Cultural Resources Management " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Orchard Combat Training Center (OCTC) is a premier joint combined arms training site, located on the western Snake River Plain in southern Idaho. Military training activities often come with an added risk of wildfire, and like much of the western United States, climate change has increased the...
Culture Contact and Change in the Industrial American West: Examples from the 19th Century Samuel Adams Lime Kiln Complex, Santa Cruz, California (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological investigations of historic industrial sites in the American West have long been dominated by questions surrounding power, resistance, and the emergence of class structures and ideologies. While these questions are still relevant, these sites offer the potential for a much wider range of anthropologically situated research that extends beyond...
Current Perspectives on the Western Stemmed Tradition and Clovis in the Mojave Desert (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Current Perspectives on the Western Stemmed Tradition-Clovis Debate in the Far West" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper summarizes the spatial and temporal distribution, technology, and subsistence patterns of Clovis/fluted and Western Stemmed tradition sites and isolates in the southern Great Basin, particularly the Mojave Desert. Fluted and Western Stemmed Tradition (WST) points/sites occur throughout the...
The Dated Paleoindian Archaeology of the Old River Bed Delta (2018)
The Old River Bed delta is a premier open-air Paleoindian locality in the eastern Great Basin. Its chief distinction is scale—some 2,000 square kilometers-plus of nearly continuous and single-component archaeological material on what would have been the largest basin wetland in the region. But the record is largely surficial. In this poster, we detail a series of sites that have yielded temporal data from buried cultural contexts. The sites help clarify the broader associations of artifact types...
Dating the Western Stemmed Tradition in the Northern Great Basin (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Current Perspectives on the Western Stemmed Tradition-Clovis Debate in the Far West" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent University of Oregon investigations at the Paisley and Connley Caves have resulted in 300+ radiocarbon ages including coprolites with human DNA. Earliest human occupations have been established at the Paisley Caves by stone tool cut marks on bone dated to 12,380 ± 70 14C yr B.P. Western Stemmed...
Decolonization and Co-stewardship: Protecting Cultural Landscapes across Serrano Ancestral Territory (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Refining Archaeological Data Collection and Management to Achieve Greater Scientific, Traditional, and Educational Values" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since time immemorial, the Serrano people have maintained a close relationship with their ancestral lands, and have been tasked by the Creator to steward these lands in meaningful ways. As such, the Cultural Resources Management Department for the San Manuel Band of...
Deconstructing Rock Art – An Experimental Approach to the Application of Portable Analytical Instrumentation to Applied Pigments at Pleito, South-Central California (2018)
The composition of background substrate, overpainted layers and admixtures can influence the data acquired from portable instrumentation at rock art sites. An understanding of the extent and impact of this influence is crucial when comparing in situ rock art pigments with potential source materials. This study uses an experimental process to assess the impact of factors such as a pigment thickness, overpainting, and addition of organic binders on the readings acquired using portable...
Deep Creek Site (CA-SBR-176): Rehabilitating Legacy Collections with the Veterans Curation Program (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Deep Creek Investigation is a small legacy collection of artifacts and documents from the Deep Creek Site (CA-SBR-176), which is located in the Mojave River Forks region in San Bernardino County, CA, within the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), Los Angeles District. This collection was recently rehabilitated by technicians at the Veterans Curation...
Demography of Skeletal Remains from Point San Jose (2018)
A critical question concerning the Point San Jose (PSJ) skeletal remains is the nature of the living population from which the assemblage was derived. We approach this issue indirectly through comparison with other mortality profiles. Here, we report the age, sex, and ancestry of the PSJ skeletal remains, and compare them with those parameters of other groups. The comparative age distributions consist of the 1870 California mortality census, 1870 California living census (as a proxy for a...
Density Dependent Models Rely on Accurate Population Estimates (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists increasingly leverage ideal distribution models to analyze settlement and demographic patterning in the past. Successful application requires adequate, spatially explicit proxies of both environmental suitability and past population. This paper focuses on the latter, recognizing that a growing number of studies rely on summaries of...
The Desire to Know: Pathways to Social Justice in Archaeological Research with Indigenous Peoples (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Social Justice in Native North American Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. When working with Native American and Indigenous peoples toward the goal of social justice in archaeology, scholars must remember that "research may not be the intervention that is needed" (Tuck and Yang 2014:236). In exploring this issue with communities, it is crucial to decenter the position of scholars and refocus on the desires of...
Despotism in the Southern Sierra Nevada: Linking Habitat Distribution and Tubatulabal Territorial Behavior (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Fifty Years of Fretwell and Lucas: Archaeological Applications of Ideal Distribution Models" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Fifty years after their introduction, ideal distribution models have recently contributed to our understanding of numerous behavioral processes. In this paper, I argue these models hold the potential to increase our understanding of a broader suite of behaviors including, but not limited to,...
Developing a Culinary Archaeology Framework for Comparative Studies of the Chinese Diaspora (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Culinary Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In addition to being a primary concern for descendant community stakeholders, the identification of food ingredients, their supply, and their uses are an increasingly important avenue for investigating the health effects of labor and care practices in the late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century Chinese diaspora, especially for railroad workers and at other...
Developing a Geomorphic and Archaeological History of Painters Flat (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Painters Flat is a small basin along the California/Nevada border and has never been described in literature. This past summer, the Far Western Anthropological Research Group recorded numerous sites spanning the entire chronological sequence for the region. Along with archaeological data, I collected information on landforms, profiles, and outcrops to...