Multi-regional/comparative (Geographic Keyword)
126-150 (245 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Violence is a pervasive feature of human prehistory, and its traces can be found throughout the archaeological record. Collective violence has important effects on individual survival and is thought to play a critical role in the evolution of complex social systems. However, participation in coalitionary violence elicits a collective action problem and...
Los señores de la Casa del Mendrugo, Puebla: Tras los pasos de su vida a partir de los dientes (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in Puebla/Tlaxcala Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Los cráneos decorados de nueve hombres y una mujer del México Antiguo atestiguan una compleja red social y cultural que trasciende hasta nuestros días. Al no contar con un registro arqueológico de su hallazgo, los análisis óseos, dentales, gráficos, de manufactura, tafonómicos y arqueométricos, son valiosos puentes de conocimiento que permiten...
Low-Density, Dispersed Urbanism in the Tropical World: Some Global Implications (2018)
Though low-density, dispersed urbanism is conventionally understood as a feature only of modern industrial societies there was actually substantial low-density, dispersed urbanism in the agrarian world of Central America, Sri Lanka and SE Asia during the 1st and early 2nd millennia CE. These cities, such as Tikal, Anuradhapura and Angkor with areas between 200 and a 1000 sq km, substantially altered their natural environment and were dependent on massive infrastructure. They were then impacted...
A Macroarchaeology Approach: How Can Archaeology Make Novel and Useful Contributions to Evolutionary Theory? (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. The quality of the archaeological record limits the range of evolutionary research questions archaeologists can ask. The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis mostly describes micro-scale phenomena that unfold at the hierarchical level of the individual and over very short time scales. This means that most of...
Maize Adaptation to Changing Environments (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Subsistence Crops and Animals as a Proxy for Human Cultural Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. All organisms must contend with rapidly changing environments in the face of climate change in order to ensure the survival of the population (Hoffmann and Sgrò 2011). Domesticated plants, with a 10,000 year history of adapting to new environments, provide an excellent model for understanding genetic responses to...
Maize Domestication and Dispersal in the Americas (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Fryxell Symposium in Honor of Dolores Piperno" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dolores Piperno’s work during the last four decades transformed our understanding of maize domestication and dispersal in the Americas. To honor this legacy we synthesize current genetic, paleoecological, and archaeological data regarding the early development of this globally important staple crop. Genetic evidence indicates initial...
Making Data Free, Immediate, and Having Equitable Access: How Federal and State Agencies Work to Meet OSTP Governance through Responsible Curation and Preservation (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With the call from the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to make federally-funded research openly and immediately available, many archaeologists, archivists, and CRM professionals in the U.S. are left wondering how this affects their research and ability to preserve and protect their data. Most affected by this governance are state and...
Making the Invisible Visible or How Culture History Can Have An Impact (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper treats Archaeology as an exercise in revitalizing social memory. In it we detail the current development of the Anthropology degree program at Medgar Evers College CUNY. Emphasizing anthropology and archaeology as a means to promote the underrepresented narratives of marginal groups in the Americas, the program also provides the knowledge required...
The Marginal Utility of Inequality (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The emergence of hereditary social inequality resulted in enormous impacts on human history, yet its causes remain heavily debated and unexplained. Here we propose and evaluate an environmentally informed model explaining the emergence of social inequality based on the interaction between circumscription and environmental inequality. We demonstrate how the...
Mass Spectrometry Database of Archaeologically Relevant Plants for Organic Residue Analysis (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Organic residue analysis in archaeology using mass spectrometry (MS) is a robust technique to detect and explore ancient biomolecules for reconstructing past cultural behavior, such as diet composition and even specific recipes. Studies often involve targeted MS analyses of known or suspected substances, while untargeted analyses characterizing broad...
Measuring Lithic Complexity from the Lower Paleolithic through the Late Holocene (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. The extended evolutionary synthesis emphasizes the importance of understanding how the interaction of biological and cultural inheritance systems have shaped human evolution. Within the animal kingdom, modern humans possess a unique ability to transmit and maintain complex cultural traditions (Tennie et...
The Metallurgical Cycle and Human Responses to Material Fatigue (2018)
Innovations in metallurgy had and continue to have significant and transformative effects on society. From mineral exploration and mining to primary metal production, manufacturing, and consumption across a range of social contexts, metallurgy influenced a wide range of distinctly human conditions. However, while metals are particularly transmutable, they also rapidly corrode back into increasingly stable mineral compounds in processes that people tried to mitigate and often unsuccessfully...
Methodological Improvements in Landscape Archaeoacoustics: Exploring the Effects of Vegetation and Ground Cover (2019)
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...
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...