Multi-regional/comparative (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hunter Vaughan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological, heritage, and museum practice are increasingly inundated with the machineries and practices of digital technology, yet the costs and risks of these technologies remain outside disciplinary discourse. LiDAR drones survey stratigraphic materials; tablet-based tours provide educational tools and immersive museum experiences; augmented reality...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Abigail Desmond.

This is an abstract from the "Animal Resources in Experimental Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. How does our knowledge of what people made influence our understanding of who people were? In most prehistoric contexts, stone tools serve as default technological benchmarks. This emphasis on stone tools, in turn, foregrounds practices related to hunting and animal processing. Organic technologies more closely linked with child-wearing,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Audrey Horning.

The ‘ontological turn’ in archaeology encourages the decentering of the human subject, and the longstanding focus upon identity, in favour of exploring material relationalities. While the discipline may congratulate itself for finally finding a way out of the twin traps of Enlightenment dualism and the humanism which underpins neoliberal geopolitics, it runs the risk of becoming even less relevant to society at large at a time when global conflicts are widely understood through the lens of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine Beaule. John Douglass.

Ethnogenesis and cultural persistence are dynamic and variable processes of identity creation, manipulation, and co-constitution, which also include the persistence, reinforcement, and reconstitution of elements of cultural and ethnic identities. Our focus is not simply on indigenous groups or colonists, but rather on the larger context of agents within multi-cultural, pluralistic colonies. The colonies established by the Spanish throughout the Americas, the Caribbean, Pacific, Southeast Asia...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ian Jorgeson. Ryan Breslawski. Abigail Fisher.

This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology I (QUANTARCH I)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Evaluating chronological hypotheses using complex radiocarbon datasets is challenging. Sources of variability, including measurement error, interlab variability, uncertainty associated with the radiocarbon calibration curve, the inherent randomness of the physical processes of radiocarbon formation and decay, and potential...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kevin Wann.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The avocado has a complicated evolutionary history resulting from landscape-level management and domestication practices. Cultivars of the species are well-documented and categorized into three botanical races based on genetic differentiation, morphology, and adapted environment. However, we have very little knowledge of the avocado’s genetic variation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only J. M. Adovasio.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The year 2020 marks the 50th anniversary of my first publication on prehistoric basketry. Over the past half century, the field of perishable artifact analysis has evolved dramatically. Though this evolution has not resulted in a geometric increase in the number of practitioners of this still arcane specialty, it has witnessed numerous transformations and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine A. Hastorf.

Archaeobotanists find herbaceous plants in their collected macrobotanical collections regularly. Usually they are associated with animal fodder and fuel. But what if they were condiments? Recently there has been more information on wild herbaceous plants and insects as part of rural people’s cuisines. These oft-hidden ingredients should be recalled when taxa lists are studied, as some could have been important if rarely used spices and flavoring ingredients. We see, for example, that some...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Logan. Sophie Reilly.

This is an abstract from the "Thinking about Eating: Theorizing Foodways in Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Why do we do food archaeology, and what can we use it for? In the last few decades, social archaeology has strongly shaped approaches to food in the past, directing our attention to how food is used to create social boundaries and values. More than ever before, archaeology is now facing the challenge of making ourselves relevant...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Britta Spaulding.

In the aftermath of the United States election in 2016, it was claimed that one reason for the outcome was that voters in rural areas were tired of being "forgotten" by the rest of the country. However, this statement is problematic in putting forth a rural-urban dichotomy that may not exist in modern times in the western world, and may have rarely existed in the past in the ways that some assert in popular media. While studying different forms of rural archaeology and landscapes, I have seen...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ventura Pérez.

This is an abstract from the "Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Debra L. Martin" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Our scientific perspectives of the world are bound to moments of clarity. Clarity comes from the realization that the questions worth asking are the ones that illuminate the human experience while understanding positionality and privilege in the exploration of those questions. As an MA student, Dr. Martin encouraged me to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tiffany Fryer.

This is an abstract from the "The Conceptual and Ethical Limits of Heritage in Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past two decades, the Critical Heritage Studies Movement (CHSM) has spurred a sea change in archaeological, anthropological, and historical approaches to the study of heritage. CHSM scholars interrogated the underlying assumptions of the growing heritage industry, including how places and objects designated as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aimee Miles.

This is an abstract from the "Pedagogy in the Undergraduate Archaeology Classroom" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ethical questions surrounding the social politics and disciplinary culture of archaeology—especially questions arising from the unequal power dynamics pervasive in fieldwork settings—have primarily been framed as professional problems and are seldom considered from a pedagogical perspective. In this paper, I argue that fieldwork (and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jane Webster.

My title is borrowed from a groundbreaking volume of papers published in 1997. Eltis and Richardson's Routes to Slavery: Direction, Ethnicity and Mortality in the Transatlantic Slave Trade marked the first flowering of a hugely ambitious project to synthesize archival data on known Transatlantic slave trading voyages from ca. 1500-1900. The resultant database is now widely used by archaeologists in both Africa and the Americas. But there were many other routes to slavery in different times and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aaron Gidding. Alicia Boswell.

This is an abstract from the "From Households to Empires: Papers Presented in Honor of Bradley J. Parker" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper we seek to emulate two different aspects of Bradley J. Parker’s career: his transition from the Near East to the Andes and his interest in the theoretical underpinnings of frontier communities. We are inspired by his work on frontiers and borderlands in our own work in these regions and use his...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maureece Levin. Jenny Evans.

This is an abstract from the "Pedagogy in the Undergraduate Archaeology Classroom" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Experimental archaeology is, by definition, a hands-on field. In the undergraduate classroom, students enrolled in experimental archaeology courses typically learn not only the theory and methods behind experimentation to better understand past technologies, but also engage in experimentation themselves. Experiments vary depending on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Rodning. Stephen Acabado.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dominant historical narratives have favored interpretations that conquered groups yielded to the political and economic might of colonizing powers. Recent models in archaeology, however, emphasize that indigenous responses to colonialism are more complex than succumbing or capitulating to colonial and imperial hegemony, and that indigenous peoples...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Killion.

Plant cultivation in and around residential locations and at greater distances from settlements are options early cultivators employed, supplemented by wild resources, to meet subsistence needs. The mix of plants, soils and cultivation practices varied by environment, distribution of resources, population density and other factors. This paper examines the role of gardens over the long transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture in tropical lowland environments. Ethnographic data,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicolas Gauthier.

This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology I (QUANTARCH I)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Distance is a fundamental constraint on human social interaction. This basic principle motivates the use of spatial interaction models for estimating flows of people, information, and resources on spatial and social networks. These models have both valid dynamical​ and​ statistical interpretations, a key strength well supported...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Palace. Meghan Howey. Franklin Sullivan.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Vision in the Age of Big Data" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeology has always been in the realm of "Big Data". Every site, feature and artifact holds a myriad of attributes that can be qualitatively and quantitatively recorded. While a near endless amount can be measured, the challenge has been identifying data that are actually connected to past human behavior that is of anthropological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fredrick Halford. Jayson Murgoitio.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Though making great strides over the past 50 years, Section 106, the primary driver of Cultural Resource Management (CRM), is still boxed in by rote inventory and unimaginative interpretation and implementation. This poster details a national initiative by the Bureau of Land Management to create cultural heritage resource data standards, which allow the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Anderson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Very small things, especially ones worn on the body, have unique positions within persons’ lives and across them. They possess their own type of temporal and material persistence, arising not from being large and formidably unmovable, but from an ability to discreetly carry on from one moment and space to another. Given their substance, significations, or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zachery Clow. Issac Ullah. Juliette Meling.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Geographic information system(s), GIS, have been used in the past to visually represent a dataset, perform basic computation analysis, or compile data. In recent decades this trend has shifted to incorporate a theoretical framework for thinking spatially about data across temporal scales. This was brought up recently by Locke and Pouncett (2017) who asked,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amber Johnson. Rudolf Cesaretti. Christina Collins. Peter Turchin.

Understanding variation in the stability and productivity of subsistence strategies is fundamental to explaining patterns of variation in long-term human demography. This poster addresses under what conditions societies intensify food production at both global and regional scales using frameworks ranging from relatively abstract environmental measures to models based on detailed historical and archaeological data relating to agricultural productivity. At a global scale, the combination of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jean-Michel Chazine.

This is an abstract from the "Culturing the Body: Prehistoric Perspectives on Identity and Sociality" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The checking of thousands of hands stencils from Borneo's caves and rockshelters, followed by the application of Manning's formula measuring at least the 2D/4D ratio, inasmuch as other world data from Africa and South America, witnessing the men and women presence, have led to the hypothesis of an healing process...