Multi-regional/comparative (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Suzanne Pilaar Birch.

This is an abstract from the "Defining and Measuring Diversity in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While identifying and defining diversity in material culture studies, bioarchaeological assemblages, and site distribution has long been de rigeur, the advent and development of stable isotope analysis in archaeology since the publication of Leonard & Jones' seminal 1989 volume provides yet another layer of complexity in archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Blair.

This paper analyzes the role of public anthropology in socio-ecological justice movements by examining conflicts over natural resources and indigenous sovereignty through policy-oriented research. It considers the Natural Resources Defense Council’s (NRDC) international projects to protect "special areas" and wildlife in the Western hemisphere, specifically rivers in Chilean Patagonia, and the boreal forest in Canada. Despite geographical, historical and cultural differences, these two priority...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Carter.

This is an abstract from the "Coastal Connections: Pacific Coastal Links from Mexico to Ecuador" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For many years the shellfish, Spondylus, has been seen as a driver for long distance exchange. Overfishing of the highly sought Spondylus pushed harvesters farther and farther north, possibly as far as West Mexico, in search of the red, orange and/or purple shell and promoting interaction between distant and disparate...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jesse Casana. Madeleine McLeester.

This is an abstract from the "Finding Fields: Locating and Interpreting Ancient Agricultural Landscapes" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Twenty-five years ago, Naomi Miller and Katheryn Gleason edited the seminal volume, *The Archaeology of Garden and Field, an authoritative guide to the identification and interpretation of archaeological field systems and other evidence of past agricultural practice inscribed within the landscape. This paper...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marcy Rockman. Andrew Potts.

Archaeology has many connections to climate change: damage and loss due to the impacts of changing environments, the capacity to provide insights for policy and decision-makers about the human processes of adaptation and migration, community connections to the past and the importance of place, citizen science, media coverage, and connections between heritage and identity in conflict, to name only a few. This paper overviews this range of connections and the importance of assessing where cultural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wesley Gibson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this research, I explore the efficacy of stream network analysis as a data set to use in archaeological predictive modeling. Stream network analysis allows the researcher to use a digital elevation model (DEM) to create a geographic information system (GIS) layer representing stream channels in a study area. Stream network analysis can also be used to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gizeh Rangel De Lázaro. Marcelo Sánchez-Villagra. Stacey Ward. Caitlin Raymond. Laura Wilson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Intentional cranial modification (ICM) represents one of the most outstanding biocultural practices of the past in the Americas, resulting from a millennial evolution within distinct cultural territories. When the Europeans first arrived in the Caribbean in 1492, ICM was a widespread tradition among most of the native populations of the continent. Here we...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lois Martin.

This is an abstract from the "The Precolumbian Dotted-Diamond-Grid Pattern: References and Techniques" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Several precolumbian royal garments with simple, repeating geometric designs have explicit associations to maize, and hint at a deep significance to the cloth pattern–corn plant connection. In the Andes, Inca Coyas (noblewomen) wore special woven belts during the annual corn-planting ceremony. Sophie Desrosiers...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashlee Bird.

This is an abstract from the "From Tomb Raider to Indiana Jones: Pitfalls and Potential Promise of Archaeology in Pop Culture" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In her essay "Tradition and Performance", Stephanie Nohelani Teves details the importance of living Hawaiian tradition and identity, embodied by Kanaka Maoli performers. These performers preserve, shape, and embody indigenous tradition and knowledge, as well as personify what it means to be...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sophie Miller.

This is an abstract from the "If Animals Could Speak: Negotiating Relational Dynamics between Humans and Animals" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Current discourse articulates domestication as a series of actionable, multidimensional processes, shaped by temporally relevant cultural and social factors; “social contracts” (sensu Armstrong Oma) as maintained, agentive, sustained human-animal relationships. This definition is particularly relevant...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katharine Napora. Kristine Schenk. Chris Saunders.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dendroarchaeology, the use of tree-ring analyses to understand past human societies, is an excellent subfield by which to introduce students and the public to archaeological science because of its accessibility: trees are a visible part of many peoples’ daily lives, and people often have basic knowledge of tree growth that can be drawn on to introduce the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Emerson. Nancy Hoffman.

Managing collections means ensuring the data about them are useful, available, and accurate. In addition to the technical aspects of data management, there are layers of political and social structure that direct the construction and use of collections data. The Minnesota Historical Society employs a set of data standards that allows us to gather electronic cataloging data from a wide community of archaeology researchers depositing collections at MNHS. Though met with initial resistance, these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael E. Smith.

This is an abstract from the "Ephemeral Aggregated Settlements: Fluidity, Failure or Resilience?" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent research suggests that temporary aggregation sites were more common in the past than many traditional models would predict. Why have scholars failed to recognize these sites? Why do they seem so strange? Beyond the development of more refined methods of settlement analysis, a major reason is a pervasive conflation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara Klessig.

This is an abstract from the "Defining Perishables: The How, What, and Why of Perishables and Their Importance in Understanding the Past" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Tools used in the creation of textiles can be made of numerous materials, including stone, clay, metal, wood, bone, and anther, just to name a few. Numerous experiments in creating tools, such as spindle whorls, loom weights, needles, combs, and weaving battens have been carried...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shauna Latosky. Pascale de Robert.

This is an abstract from the "Body Modification: Examples and Explanations" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This chapter offers a comparative look at the labrets of the Mebêngôkre (Brazil) and Mursi (Ethiopia) with a special emphasis on how lip-plates are made, worn, valued, and evaluated at a normative level. By normative, we mean the historical, technical, symbolic, and discursive ways in which such practices are understood by the Mursi and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Kappelman. Matthew Hill. Frank Huffman.

This is an abstract from the "A Tribute to the Contributions of Lawrence C. Todd to World Prehistory" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Larry Todd has played a central role in applying taphonomy to studies of prehistoric human behavior. He developed standardized and, most importantly, reproducible methods of observational quantification. We here present studies of Trinil (Java) and Hadar (Ethiopia), both of which figure prominently in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marcus Hamilton.

This is an abstract from the "The Expanding Bayesian Revolution in Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. To date, the “Bayesian Revolution” in archaeology has focused primarily on statistical inference: the move from hypothesis testing to credence building. Bayesian thinking extends far beyond the practicalities of statistical inference. Bayesian theory is about epistemology; it describes how we acquire knowledge of the world by reducing the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ventura Pérez.

This is an abstract from the "The Future of Bioarchaeology in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In his article, Bioarchaeology as Anthropology (2003:27), George Armelagos noted that, "scientists’ perceptions of their discipline clearly influence how they frame their research agenda." This paper will illustrate how all such agendas are politicized. To engage with violence in the past from the safety of your labs and computer screens is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marlieke Ernst. Brendan J. M. Weaver.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this poster we present a ceramic phenomenon occurring at two Spanish colonial sites of differing spatial and temporal provenience in the Spanish Americas. The appearance of various African influenced comb-dragged and wavy line motifs in Cotuí and Concepción de la Vega (early colonial Caribbean, 1495-1562) as well as at the haciendas of San Francisco Xavier...

DOCUMENT Citation Only J. Cameron Monroe.

The Archaeology of the African Diaspora has long privileged the analysis of the everyday lives of enslaved Africans living on plantation sites in the New World. Notwithstanding the political and intellectual importance of this approach to our understanding of the emergence of the colonial world and its contemporary legacies, recent scholarship on both sides of the Atlantic has examined the new political entities that arose across the Black Atlantic World in dynamic tension with broader Atlantic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mikael Fauvelle. Peter Jordan.

This is an abstract from the "Negotiating Watery Worlds: Impacts and Implications of the Use of Watercraft in Small-Scale Societies" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One critical aspect of complex watercraft is their transformative power to amplify the impacts of social connections with distant places by allowing for longer, larger, and more frequent interactions. In many small-scale and indigenous societies, the use of advanced boats allowed for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sean Dolan.

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. The movement of people, objects, and ideas between the American Southwest/Northwest Mexico (SW/NW) and Mesoamerica is one of the most enduring and debated research topics in American archaeology. Pueblo and Mesoamerican groups prominently used obsidian for hunting, warfare, and ceremony, but is there Mesoamerican...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zev Cossin.

This is an abstract from the "Unsettling Infrastructure: Theorizing Infrastructure and Bio-Political Ecologies in a More-Than-Human World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Through European colonization, plantations and haciendas became infrastructures that “settled.” These colonial infrastructures transformed social and ecological relations throughout the Americas as they displaced Indigenous peoples from the land. Later, other forms of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Smith.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. I describe a new approach to understanding life and social dynamics in premodern cities around the world. Early cities varied considerably in their political and economic organization and dynamics. My approach is transdisciplinary in scope, scientific in epistemology, and anchored in the urban literature of the social sciences. The central concept is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stefani Crabtree.

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. Our understanding of the dynamics and stability of human systems cannot be uncoupled from their environmental and ecological contexts. Archaeological knowledge can deeply inform, enhance and transform our understanding of socio-ecological dynamics and sustainability, if we can only quantitatively assess these interactions. One...