Multi-regional/comparative (Geographic Keyword)
176-200 (314 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent development in the field of landscape archaeoacoustics has resulted in improved GIS-based soundshed modeling solutions, however, it has also led to the identification of several limitations of these tools. Foremost among these limitations is the lack of reliable modeling capability to explore the effects of vegetation attenuation or variable ground...
MicroCT, Maternal Health, and Stress at the Beginning of Life (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Adventures in Spatial Archaeometry: A Survey of Recent High-Resolution Survey and Measurement Applications" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Winona LaDuke’s “All Our Relations,” the Mohawk midwife and environmental activist Katsi Cook declares that women are the first environment. Fetal growth and development correlate with the condition of that first environment. An infant skeleton with identifiable indicators of...
Middeningly Difficult: Methodological Advances in the Identification and Analysis of Submerged Midden Sites (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Middens are one of the most prevalent site types in coastal environments being found across the globe. They are also vital sources of information about past human behaviour, being records of, amongst many thing, human dietary practices and environmental change. In terrestrial contexts the identification of these sites is often a relatively straightforward...
Modeling a Collaborative Archaeological Synthesis of Human Migration for a Long-Term, Global Perspective (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Seeing Migrant and Diaspora Communities Archaeologically: Beyond the Cultural Fixity/Fluidity Binary" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since September 2019, members of the Coalition for Archaeological Synthesis have sought to model a collaborative synthesis of human migration for a long-term, global perspective, from the earliest hominid movements to contemporary forced displacement in Europe. In March 2022, the group...
Modeling Pan-Regional Interaction in Precolumbian Lowland Americas (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists have speculated for decades that interregional interaction occurred among precolumbian societies occupying the regions of Amazonia, the Caribbean, Mesoamerica, and the southeastern United States. Yet no formal investigation has been done into how these people and places were physically integrated across water. This paper seeks to explore...
Monaco in Prehistoric Times and Further Investigations (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in the Prehistory of Liguria and Neighboring Regions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Museum of Prehistoric Anthropology has conducted excavations and research in the Principality of Monaco and surroundings for more than 100 years. In this contribution, we tackle the issue of the prehistoric Liguro-Provencal panorama, including some major comparative items and new results obtained through the...
Monuments that Weren’t: Reckoning with Unmarked Histories of Violence (2018)
With recent events in the United States, monuments and their powerful implications have been widely covered across media outlets. Less often considered, however, are the monuments that were never built in the first place. This paper grapples with these questions archaeologically, ethnographically and historically by considering monuments and memory through extremely well-explored cases in Bavaria and through other far less discussed cases in the Northeastern U.S. It considers the historical...
Mortuary Analysis and Bioarchaeology: A Survey of Integrative Approaches (2018)
In her chapter in the 2006 volume "Bioarchaeology: The Contextual Analysis of Human Remains", Lynne Goldstein considered the intersection of mortuary analysis and bioarchaeology through a survey of articles from eight prominent archaeology journals (1995-2000). She concluded that significant work remained to be done to appropriately integrate the two fields. In our paper, we summarize Goldstein’s critiques and examine more recent publications in these same journals (2006-2016) to characterize...
Mothers, Mentors, and Belonging in the Academy: The Unintentional Legacy of Patricia Richards (2024)
This is an abstract from the "There and Back Again: Celebrating the Career and Ongoing Contributions of Patricia B. Richards" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mothers in academia occupy the intersection of two demanding worlds: the rigors of scholarly pursuits and the responsibilities of childrearing. They face systemic barriers, including gender bias, limited access to resources, and inflexible tenure-track structures. Balancing research, teaching,...
Moving toward a Nuanced View of Symbols and Symbolic Culture (2023)
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. Harold Dibble had strong views about the cognitive abilities and symbolic behavior of premodern humans as he gleaned them from the archaeological record through engravings, ornaments, burials, etc. After publishing a number of papers touching on these issues, mostly in the 1990s, Dibble...
Multiethnic Landscapes, Inclusive Identities, and Collective State Building (2018)
In small-scale societies, including territories of failed states and peripheries; regional landscapes are chaotic and rife with interpersonal violence, slaving, and social disorder, etc. Accordingly, organizing for collective defense and the management of common pool resources is vital for the survival of small communities occupying these zones. In such contexts, ethnic identities, constructed around concepts of blood, race, language, or locality, are important for achieving cooperation because...
Nature as Agent: Mass-Event, Incremental, and Biotic Perspectives (2018)
The recent development of the "Anthropocene" as a distinct geologic era, added to a century’s worth of scholarly discussion about the role of humans in their ecosystems, has solidified an interpretive view of humans as prime mover. Yet nature has a "mind of its own" relative to human knowledge, action, and volition. In this session, presenters will discuss the ways in which natural entities, ranging in size from mega-storms to viruses, have presented challenging conditions to which humans can...
Neanderthal Communities of Care: How & Why Did Non-modern Hominins Care for Victims of Interpersonal Violence? (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Systems of Care in Times of Violence" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Within the constantly evolving field of human origins, researchers are looking for new methods and theories to infer behavior from the paleoanthropological record. Here, Shanidar 3, a Neanderthal specimen with evidence of partially healed sharp force trauma, is examined using the Bioarchaeology of Care approach. Based on a comparison with...
Neanderthals, Denisovans and Modern Humans: Unravelling the Chronology of the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic of Eurasia (2018)
For more than half a century Paleolithic archaeologists have grappled with radiocarbon-based chronologies that are often contradictory and imprecise. Several key debates in the Palaeolithic have their roots in basic issues related to chronology; did the Aurignacian predate the Chatelperronian in some regions of Europe? When did Neanderthals disappear? How long did anatomically modern humans (AMH) and Neanderthals overlap, and what implications did this have for interaction, acculturation or...
Necromagikon: Comparing Egyptian and Casas Grandes Archaeology (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Death exists at the cornerstone of every culture. Each culture has death rituals through which humans seek to control the unknown. These rituals may focus on the event of dying and “crossing over” as dictated by each culture, but also include the role the dead might play even after their bodily death. Archaeologists have focused on mortuary ritual,...
Niche Construction and Cultural Complexity in Small-Scale Societies (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis and Human Origins: Archaeological Perspectives" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Identifying the factors that influence variation in cultural complexity among groups is an important task for archaeologists. In this paper, I argue that niche construction may be one of these factors. I begin by showing that empirical work on the drivers of technological complexity in small-scale...
No Fire without Wood? Some Reflections on Late Pleistocene Pyrotechnology in Northern Tundra Environments (East Siberia, Interior Alaska) (2018)
The use of alternate fuels such as grasses, bones or dung has often been interpreted as a typical response of Late Pleistocene (LP) hunter-gatherers to harsh environments, in which woody resources are scarce. In the context of early human dispersal from south-east Siberia into the Americas, the question of prehistoric migration and settlement is closely linked to the one of fuel availability, fire being considered, to the same extent as food, a vital element for survival. However, data regarding...
Not-so-Set in Stone: An Investigation of Rock Art Digitization Methods and Scale of Applicability (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Around the world, rock art sites present significant preservation challenges due to their vulnerability to deterioration from natural weathering as well as human impacts. Various forms of digital recordation are frequently presented as a means to preserve rock art images at various sites. The goal is to preserve them as they are before they disappear...
Notions of Value and Ahegemonic Archaeological Interpretation (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology as an Engine or a Camera?" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper takes up a theoretical exploration of the concept of "value" as it is articulated explicitly and implicitly within archaeological investigation. Recognizing that the issue is related to social science inquiry broadly, this paper looks to Bourdieu’s "Forms of Capital" to develop a framework for interpretation that does not rely on...
Objects in Motion: The Materiality of Irish Emigration in the 19th Century World (2018)
When departing one’s home, how does an emigrant decide what to bring? In arriving at a destination, in what ways does an emigrant (re)construct their understanding of place? This paper addresses the question of materiality in emigration by investigating the objects surrounding the act departure, and (re)structuring of one’s life in emigration. I focus on three facets of the material expression of emigration: the things they bring, the worlds they build, and the resulting influences they have...
Obsidian Characterization as a Means to an End: A Survey of the Scholarship of Professor Steven Shackley (2019)
This is an abstract from the "2019 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of M. Steven Shackley" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Obsidian sourcing is a well-established facet of archaeological practice and has the capacity to address a wide range of relevant archaeological questions. For decades, Professor Steven Shackley has been on the forefront of methodological and theoretical developments in obsidian characterization studies, and his...
On the Trail of Homo through Earth’s High Mountains and Plateaus (2018)
Of Earth’s habitable landscapes, mountain environments present humans with some of the most striking adaptive challenges. But they also offer unique opportunities. Cross-cultural comparative research on montane hunter-gatherers in prehistory has focused on the settlement of expanses of contiguous high-elevation terrain – the world’s ‘high plateaus.’ Yet plateau peopling represents one chapter in a much longer evolutionary story of when, how and why ancient people engaged with upland landscapes....
Opening Remarks: The Archaeology and Palaeoanthropology of Non-modern Humans (2018)
The study of archaic hominins (non-modern humans) poses some unique challenges to archaeological interpretation, and relies on close integration of archaeological data with those from other allied fields including palaeoanthropology, genetics, primatology, and ethnography. In this opening paper, I reflect on some of the recent advances and discoveries in these fields which are changing the ways in which we both conduct and conceptualise research in to non-modern humans in archaeology. I then...
The Origin and Spread of Antimony as a Raw Material in Metal and Vitreous Materials Making: From the Bronze Age to the Roman Period (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Movement of Technical Knowledge: Cross-Craft Perspectives on Mobility and Knowledge in Production Technologies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Antimony has a long history of use in metallurgy and glass making. The first attestation of Cu-Sb alloys dates to the 5th millennium BC (e.g. Nahal Mhismar), while its widespread adoption started around 3500 BC. Metallic antimony objects are reported in Mesopotamia (e.g....
Osteogrammetry: The Efficacy of SfM Photogrammetry for Documenting Human Skeletal Remains (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Futures through a Virtual Past" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research refines methods of digitally documenting human remains from archaeological contexts using structure-from-motion (SfM) photogrammetry and confirms the accuracy of employing this method for metric and nonmetric data collection. SfM photogrammetry offers a low-cost and accessible way to create accurate 3D digital models of...