Multi-regional/comparative (Geographic Keyword)
201-225 (314 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Mediterranean Archaeology: Connections, Interactions, Objects, and Theory" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Bronze Age in both the Mediterranean and Europe represents a period during which new socio-economic relationships were being forged that inextricably linked far-off communities. Within these discursive social networks, new commodities were traded over long-distances, new markets emerged, and along with novel...
Pack Your Boots, Trowel, and Ray Gun: Advances in Portable XRF for Archaeological Science (2018)
Portable XRF instruments have advanced considerably over the past decade, and many of their technical advancements are highly useful for the archaeological sciences, especially compared to fields like art conservation. The newest generation of detectors and their processing electronics, for example, make measurements significantly shorter, allowing characterization of much larger assemblages. Other advances, though, involve more than mere speed. Ruggedized instruments are dust-proof,...
Paleo Core: A Conceptual Framework for Integrating Paleontological, Archaeological, and Geological Data (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Big Ideas to Match Our Future: Big Data and Macroarchaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Data sharing, integration, and synthesis remain elusive goals for paleoanthropological and archaeological research into human biological and cultural origins, which relies on fossils, artifacts, and geological specimens collected by diverse, independent research teams. Integrating find data across these efforts is an...
Paleoanthropology and Pedagogy: Raising Horizons for the Next Generations (2018)
The 21st century will be remembered as a period of exponential change within paleoanthropology. Though such developments pose academic challenges, an overlooked issue is how we communicate this information to students. A constantly changing foundation of knowledge that increasingly requires an understanding of complex theoretical techniques, coupled with the importance of student satisfaction surveys, educators are faced with a pedagogical dilemma: stick with ‘established’ teaching methods...
A Paleoethnobotanical Analysis of the Trincheras Tradition: Community, Identity, and Foodways (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Trincheras Tradition thrived in the Altar Valley, Sonora, Mexico between AD 400 to 1400. The Hohokam are known for their extensive irrigation systems and reliance on agriculture. Lacking evidence of similar features, the Trincheras were interpreted as primarily hunters and gatherers, a rustic branch of the Hohokam. This characterization of Trincheras...
Paleoindians from Mexico: What Do They Tell Us about the Early Peopling of the Americas? (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Dedication, Collaboration, and Vision, Part II: Papers in Honor of Tom D. Dillehay" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mexico is important in the debate on the early peopling of the Americas because several well-preserved Paleoindian/Preceramic individuals with ages between 13,000 and 8,000 years have been found in lake sediments/volcanic deposits surrounding a Late Pleistocene Lake in Central Mexico and in submerged...
Parenting in the Past: Investigations into the Spaces, Places, and Traces of Parenting in the Archaeological Record (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 seeks to bring together the existing literature and extend its theoretical and methodological implications for an archaeology of parenting, particularly in the times/places where contemporary written records do not exist. While parenting and childhood may be more readily visible to researchers and the public in periods where written records...
Pathways to Plant Domestication: Categories of Cultivation Practice and Convergent Evolution (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Questioning the Fundamentals of Plant and Animal Domestication" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Taking inspiration from Zeder’s notion of pathways to animal domestication (commensal, prey, directed), this presentation will outline equivalent pathways of plant domestication types, and suggest a range of species that can be grouped by these pathways. These pathways are united by issues of habit (annual, perennial),...
Pathways to the Archaeology of Footwear (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Approaches to Archaeological Footwear" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper introduces the symposium “Approaches to Archaeological Footwear.” Evidence suggests that footwear has been an important component of human technology for at least the last 50,000 years. In addition to becoming a signature feature of dress and adornment in many cultures, footwear has also played an underappreciated role in human mobility...
Patients and Practitioners: Archaeological and Ethnohistorical Approaches to Ancient Medicine and Healing Practices in the Americas (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Medicine and Healing in the Americas: Archaeological and Ethnohistorical Perspectives" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Medicine, health care, and healing comprise a sub-set of cultural practices that are under-represented in archaeological work in the Americas. In other parts of the world, rich textual traditions consisting of medical treatises or surgical manuals combined with archaeological evidence in the form of...
Paying the Price for Passion: Navigating Compensation Realities in US Academic Archaeology (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Transformations in Professional Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper explores the complex realm of compensation realities encountered by academic archaeologists by examining the interplay between salary structures and regional cost of living variations. A hyper-competitive job market and the gradual decline of tenure track job availability have had profound effects on early-career scholars’ prospects...
PEOPLE 3K (PalEOclimate and the PeopLing of the Earth): Investigating Tipping Points Generated by the Climate-Human Demography-Institutional Nexus over the Last 3000 Years (2018)
One of the least understood aspects of paleoscience is the interplay between climate, human demography, and how changes in population influence resource management strategies. With the goal of understanding such processes, we created the PEOPLE 3000 research network to study trade-offs inherent to the climate-human population-institutional adaptation system over the last 3000 years. We propose that strategies reducing variation in food production and institutions for protecting those strategies...
People-Plant Relationships in Long-Generation Arboreal Fruit Cultivation (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The study of human-plant relationships in archaeology is rich and varied, including gathering, cultivation of wild species, domestication, intensive agriculture, and nonfood uses of plants. People-plant relationships in agricultural entanglements, however, have primarily focused on...
Perceptions vs. Reality: Animal Lives in the Ancient Maya, Aztec, and Inca Cultures (2018)
Past and present human-animal relationships have always been shaped by culturally-based beliefs, perceptions, and treatment of nonhuman animals, which in turn influence the lives of the animals in their environments. That being said, how accurate were ancient cultures in their attempts to understand animals, and how did subsequent human perceptions influence animal realities? What might it have been like as a nonhuman animal living near ancient peoples, based on biology and culture? What of the...
Pioneering Poultry: A Morphometric Investigation of Domestic Chickens (Gallus gallus) in Preindustrial North America (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Frontiers in Animal Management: Unconventional Species, New Methods, and Understudied Regions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Chicken bones are common in many historic faunal assemblages. Historic accounts indicate that domestic chickens introduced to North America by European colonists did well and multiplied quickly, but provide little information on the origins, characteristics, or roles poultry played in the North...
Planning for the Future: Integrated Resource Management and Ecosystem Services (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me: What Have We Learned Over the Past 40 Years and How Do We Address Future Challenges" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Resource managers, researchers, and policymakers are increasingly considering ways to integrate across silos for more effective land management in the 21st century. In 2005, the UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment articulated an international strategy of ecosystem services which...
Planning Research at the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory and Don’t Forget your Cowboy Boots (2019)
This is an abstract from the "How to Conduct Museum Research and Recent Research Findings in Museum Collections: Posters in Honor of Terry Childs" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The University of Texas at Austin’s Texas Archeological Research Laboratory (TARL) is the oldest and largest archaeological repository in Texas, housing many millions of artifacts from more than 8,000 sites in Texas and beyond. Collections at TARL range from massive WPA...
Political Authority and the Creation of Wilderness: American National Parks and Mexican Eco-Archaeological Parks (2018)
Over the last several decades, scholars have reexamined the importance of spatiality to human life and argued that space is social, relational, and that it produces and is produced by social relationships. This reconceptualization of space has highlighted the ways in which the production of landscapes is integral to the creation, maintenance, and negation of social inequality and political authority. Recent archaeological approaches to studying inequality through landscape have taken a variety...
The potentials of airborne geomagnetic survey systems for cultural resources management: Preliminary results of experimental geophysical investigations in eastern Hungary and central Arizona, USA (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Simultaneous innovations in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and geophysical technologies present the possibility of a potentially groundbreaking approach to archaeological geophysics: airborne geophysical survey. As part of an ongoing effort on behalf of the Environmental Management Office of the Arizona Army National Guard to integrate conventional and...
Pottery and Fire-Cracked Rock Use-Alteration: Assessing the Impact of James M. Skibo (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Method and Theory: Papers in Honor of James M. Skibo, Part II" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. James M. Skibo’s pioneering work developing the methods and theory of ceramic use-alteration analysis has allowed archaeologists to make new range of inferences from one of the most broadly available classes of artifacts, utilitarian ceramics. His ethnoarchaeological and experimental work has brought about a...
Pouring the Past: A Discussion of Authenticity in Re-created Ancient Ales (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Raise Your Glass to the Past: An Exploration of the Archaeology of Beer" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Beer, by all archaeological evidence, has been a passion of humanity since before written language. This fermented beverage was the chosen drink of many ancient cultures and societies, for health and nutrition, for the effects of alcohol, and for social and religious occasions. Today, the craft beer movement is...
The Power of Reuse and Removal: A Case Study of the Indonesian Megaliths of Iowa City, Iowa (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Reinvent, Reclaim, Redefine: Considerations of "Reuse" in Archaeological Contexts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The co-opting of cultural heritage is one of the ways that archaeological materials are “reused.” This process references and reinforces power structures related to cultural identity through the control of archaeological material, narratives, and meanings. In some situations, the process includes the...
Precolumbian Art History at the University of California: Teaching, Mentorship, and Disciplinary Contention (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Bringing the Past to Life, Part 2: Papers in Honor of John M. D. Pohl" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this presentation, I will recount my trajectory influenced by John Pohl during the formative undergraduate years of my art history training at UCLA, taking into account his teaching, the connections between the University of California (UC) and the California Community Colleges (CCC), and the disciplinary tensions...
Predicting Water Availability from Phytolith Assemblages of Finger Millet, Pearl Millet, and Sorghum (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Archaeobotany, Part II" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The interpretation of water management practices and the use of irrigation for agricultural intensification has been central to the archaeological debate. Until now no direct method has been presented for the discrimination of water availability for C4 cultivated crops, representing the main components of the...
Prehistoric Millet Cuisine: Diversity across Eurasia (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Food and Foodways: Emerging Trends and New Perspectives" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum) was first domesticated in northern China and spread both to east and to west during the mid-Holocene. Recent developments in biomolecular analytical techniques have enabled archaeologists to investigate prehistoric millet cuisines by examining the organic residues absorbed by...