Multi-regional/comparative (Geographic Keyword)
101-125 (314 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in Geoarchaeology and Environmental Archaeology Perspectives on Earthen-Built Constructions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Earthen agricultural terraces are prevalent worldwide and have continued to be built and used for millennia. Yet relative to their stone-faced counterparts, earthen terraces are often characterized as less intensive and productive, requiring less time, labor, and material resources to...
Engaging Archaeology and Native American and Indigenous Studies (2018)
Using concepts proposed and developed in Native American and Indigenous Studies would provide a useful way for archaeologists, especially those dealing with the relatively recent past, to address the challenge posed by indigenous scholars to decolonize archaeology. A few concepts have already been employed by archaeologists in North America, notably Gerald Vizenor's idea of "survivance". But as Maarten Jansen and Mixtec scholar Gabina Aurora Pérez Jiménez have shown in their work decolonizing...
Enhancing Ceramic Petrography through Deep Learning (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Ceramic Petrographers in the Americas: Recent Research and Methodological Advances" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Clay recipes reveal information about the local geology and the inclusion of different additives that make up a vessel, which in turn reflects the social, environmental, and technological context of ceramic manufacture. Ceramic petrography has long been instrumental in shedding light on key manufacturing...
The Environmental Costs and Benefits of Digitizing Archaeology (2023)
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...
Ephemera: Bone Tools as Windows into the “Archaeologically Invisible” (2023)
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,...
Ethics, Positionality, and Pragmatism: Archaeological Approaches to Identity and the Role of Archaeological Practice in Conflict Transformation (2018)
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...
Ethnogenesis and Cultural Persistence in the Global Spanish Empire (2018)
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...
Evaluating Chronological Hypotheses by Simulating Radiocarbon Datasets (2019)
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...
Exploring Wild Avocado Germplasm through Herbarium Genomes (2023)
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...
Fifty Years with Baskets (2021)
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...
The Flavors Archaeobotany Forgot (2018)
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...
Food Archaeology for Social Justice (2021)
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...
Forgotten or Remembered? Rural-Urban Connections in the Modern and in the Past. (2018)
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...
A Four-Field View in an Increasingly Myopic World (2021)
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...
From Critical to Substantive Heritage Practice (2021)
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...
From Field to Table: Critical Perspectives on the Social Dynamics of Field-Based Learning, and How They Can Help Us Refine More Reflexive Educational Approaches (2023)
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...
From Rome to Charleston: A Comparative Perspective on the Archaeology of Forced Migration (2018)
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...
From Trypillia to Tswana: A Global Perspective on Giant Low-Density Settlements (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Theorizing Prehistoric Large Low-Density Settlements beyond Urbanism and Other Conventional Classificatory Conventions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Early giant settlements such as Chaco Canyon, the Tswana “towns,” and the European oppida have long seemed anomalous to scholarship because they did not ally their vast extents with characteristics of conventional urbanism. These large low-density settlements emerged...
Frontiers and Borderlands Phenomena, what would Bradley say?: Comparative Case Studies from the Levant and Andes (2019)
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...
Functional Art in the Experimental Archaeology Classroom (2023)
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...
Game Theory, Chaos Theory, and the Archaeology of Indigenous Responses to Global Spanish Colonialisms (2021)
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...
Gardens, Infields and Outfields: Cultivation Intensity, Neotropical Landscapes and the Evolution of Early Agricultural Systems (2018)
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,...
Generalized Additive Mixed Models for Archaeological Networks (2019)
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...
Geomatics for Landscape Archaeology: Dreams of Eternal Youth (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Developments and Challenges in Landscape Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Geographic information technologies already have a long history of use in archaeology. In fact, archaeology has perhaps been the field of humanities where these technologies have reached the most widespread development, in many cases becoming part of the “standard package” of work for any archaeologist. To what extent is this true, or...
Geospatial "Big Data" in Archaeology and the Enduring Challenge of Anthropological Significance (2019)
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...