North America: Southern Southwest U.S. (Geographic Keyword)
1-25 (195 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Geometric Morphometrics in Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This work tests the feasibility of using 2D geometric morphometric analyses of archival vessel profiles to reevaluate vessel form classifications from Pueblo Grande in order to aid in asking new questions of the dataset. Two-dimensional profile drawings of whole and reconstructible ceramic vessels were routinely made during archaeological projects...
3D Modeling in Excavation (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Photogrammetry and 3D Modeling are tools that are greatly underutilized in excavation. Yet, they are very helpful to archaeologists. There are both drawbacks and benefits to using 3D modeling. However, this study of features in southeastern Utah shows that the positives outweigh the negatives. Although they can be tricky and time consuming to generate,...
Aerial Imaging Using UAVs (Drones) in Chihuahua and Nayarit, Mexico, to Map and Archive Archaeological Sites (2018)
In 2017, we used UAVs (drones) to record eight archaeological sites from the air. As this type of technology becomes more refined, we have found that it is especially useful in carrying out three specific tasks: contour mapping, archiving site conditions, and identifying architecture. This paper reports our findings resulting from aerial images captured while flying archaeological sites in Nayarit and Chihuahua, Mexico.
Agave Bloom Stalk Ovens in the Southern Chihuahuan Desert (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Hot Rocks in Hot Places: Investigating the 10,000-Year Record of Plant Baking across the US-Mexico Borderlands" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Fire cracked rock (FCR) and hearth features represent one of the most commonly observed cooking features encountered by archaeologists. This research presents an ethno-archaeological context in which FCR utilization and discard is observed, providing a Middle Range theoretical...
Agave Roasting Pits of the Mescalero Apache (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Hot Rocks in Hot Places: Investigating the 10,000-Year Record of Plant Baking across the US-Mexico Borderlands" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the main staple foods of the Mescalero Apache was Mescal or Agave. The heart of the plant is cooked in an earth oven for four days. The plant is then eaten straight out of the oven or dried for storage and supply. Today the roasting of Mescal is still done every year in...
An Alternative Explanation for a Modified Rabbit Innominate Spatulate Tool (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Local Development and Cross-Cultural Interaction in Pre-Hispanic Southwestern New Mexico and Southeastern Arizona" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bone tools are not always recognized in a zooarchaeological analysis, and often once identified, the function or use is even more difficult to define. A modified rabbit innominate found by the authors in two Jornada-Mogollon sites presented here is one such example. The...
American Periphery, Sonoran Heartland: Recent Archaeological Explorations of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Transcending Boundaries and Exploring Pasts: Current Archaeological Investigations of the Arizona-Sonora Borderlands" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument (ORPI) is a vast, rugged, and remote unit of the U.S. National Park System situated in the heart of Arizona’s Sonoran Desert. Measuring 1,338.25 km² (517.7 mi²), the park encompasses an area half the size of the state of Rhode Island....
The Ancient Landscapes of South Texas Initiative and Augmented Reality: An Immersive Experience in Archaeological Education and Community Engagement (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. To educate and engage the community about archeological and geological resources available to the inhabitants of the Rio Grande Valley from Laredo to Brownsville, the Community Historical Archaeology Project with Schools Program at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley completed a multi-year initiative combining community engagement with the creation...
Animal Remains and Archaeological Context in the Mogollon Area, AD 1000–1450 (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Research Hot Off the Trowel in the Upper Gila and Mimbres Areas" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster examines contextual patterns in deposits of animal bones from the Mimbres and upper Gila areas of southwest New Mexico from the Mimbres Classic through Cliff phase Salado periods (AD 1000–1450). Remains of common animal species in contexts like sheet middens and room fill are often interpreted as food remains....
Applying Mean Thickness Measurements to Newly Recorded Cohonina Sites on the South Kaibab National Forest, Northern Arizona (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As part of the Four Forest Restoration Initiative, Logan Simpson conducted two intensive cultural resource surveys on the South Kaibab National Forest consisting of more than 1,800 acres in the Upper Basin and 5,330 acres to the east of Red Butte, south of Tusayan, Arizona. Logan Simpson employed the mean thickness model developed by Sorrell (2005) to...
The Archaeology of Skiles Shelter (41VV165) (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Eagle Nest Canyon, Texas: Papers in Honor of Jack and Wilmuth Skiles" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Skiles Shelter (41VV165) is a small south-facing rockshelter near the mouth of Eagle Nest Canyon. While the site lacks the extensive organic preservation typical of dry rockshelters in the region, it is notable for its Pecos River style rock art, diversity of bedrock milling features, and prominent...
Archaeothanatological Analysis of Mortuary Practices in the Prehistoric Sonoran Desert and Implications for Interpreting Sickness through Postmortem Processing (2018)
The La Playa archaeological site in the Sonoran Desert represents one of the earliest agricultural settlements in northwest Mexico. Over 310 mortuary features have been uncovered during salvage excavations since the site was discovered in 1930, revealing a wide variability in mortuary practices that may reflect specific treatments for pathological or transgressive individuals after death. This paper describes analyses of burials uncovered during the 2017 field season utilizing the...
The Art and Light of Paint Rock, Texas (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeological site of Paint Rock, Texas (41CC1) at over 300 m in length is the largest continuous rock art site in Texas. Many of its older pictographs have been scheduled to spectacularly interact with the sun on the equinoxes and solstices and apparently also on the cross-quarter days. The older rock...
Ash Matters: The Ritual Closing of Domestic Structures in the Mimbres Mogollon Region (2018)
Throughout much of the Southwestern U.S., ash was an important component of ritual deposition and has ethnographically been closely associated with processes of cleansing and renewal. The presence of ash in ritual contexts is well documented, but it also appears to have played an important role in the closing of domestic structures. In this paper, I present cases of ritual closure of domestic structures and examine the role that ash played in these closures using data from pithouse sites in the...
Assessing Evidence of Hunting as Subsistence Specialization at an Early Classic Period Hohokam Farmstead (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Logan Simpson recently mitigated multiple prehistoric sites along the Middle Gila River in Arizona for the Natural Resources Conservation Service’s Florence Flood Retarding Structure Rehabilitation project. One site, AZ U:15:836(ASM), is a small Hohokam farmstead within the Grewe-Casa Grande canal system. Recent investigations at the site identified evidence...
Assessing the Variability and Chronology of Red Linear Style Pictographs of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of Texas: Final Results (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper aims to further define the characteristics of Red Linear style (RLS) anthropomorphs and establish its temporal relationship with other regional rock art styles of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of Texas and Coahuila, Mexico. In 2013, Boyd et al. presented a list of diagnostic attributes for the RLS...
Automatic Classification of Mimbres Pottery Styles through Convolutional Neural Networks (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Research Hot Off the Trowel in the Upper Gila and Mimbres Areas" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster describes our attempt to address some long-standing questions about Mimbres pottery through convolutional neural network-based classifiers. Over the past few years the field of computer vision has made major strides in classification and segmentation tasks particularly due to the availability of rich training...
Backpack Biographies: Re-scaling Undocumented Migration in the US-Mexico Borderlands (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Immigration and Refugee Resettlement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Federal agencies and news media often report undocumented migration across the US-Mexico border in gross terms of hundreds of thousands to millions of crossings and apprehensions—a scalar project that then plays into broader political discourse about national belonging. In this paper we draw on research by the Undocumented Migration...
Between Casas Grandes and Salado: The Establishment of an Indigenous Borderland in the Ancient American Southwest/Mexican Northwest (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Whereas archaeologists continue to investigate processes of culture contact and frontier construction in hunter-gatherer and small agricultural societies using models primarily originally created and applied for ancient states and modern geopolitics, historians have recently begun investigating Indigenous borderlands. My dissertation, which includes the...
Beyond Ethical, Legal and Practical Considerations: Unprovenienced Archaeological Items at Descendant Tribal Heritage Centers and Museums (2019)
This is an abstract from the "To Curate or Not to Curate: Surprises, Remorse, and Archaeological Grey Area" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The mission of the Huhugam Heritage Center, which is both a tribal and federal repository, is to "ensure our Akimel O’otham and Pee Posh cultures flourish for future generations." This includes not just the physical remains of ancestral culture, but the cultural practices themselves. While we care for the...
The Black Burned Bits of Prehistory: A Celebration of Dr. Karen R. Adams (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Enduring Relationships: People, Plants, and the Contributions of Karen R. Adams" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper provides a brief overview of Karen Adams’s career and contributions, with a special emphasis on her extensive research and her legacy as a mentor to decades of junior scholars and budding archaeobotanists. Dr. Adams’s investigations into the long history of people-plant relationships in the US...
The Black Mountain Phase in the Southern Mimbres Valley: Addressing the Last “Fuzzy” Phase in the Mimbres Area Cultural Sequence (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Black Mountain phase (AD 1180-1300) in the Mimbres Mogollon area is an important transition between the cessation of Classic Mimbres pottery production and masonry pueblos to a new suite of pottery types and poured adobe wall pueblos. Debate among Mimbres archaeologists primarily focuses on whether the occupants of Black Mountain phase sites were the...
Bold Line Geometric: Revisiting a Lesser-Known Rock Art Style in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of Texas (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Art of Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bold Line Geometric is one of five currently identified rock art styles in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas. It has previously been described as thick, glossy pigment applied in bold lines, geometric shapes, and globular anthropomorphic and zoomorphic forms. In 1965, David Gebhard laid the ground work for the initial description and definition of...
Bonita Canyon: A Chronology of Prehistoric Occupation and Predictive Analysis of Archaic Sites (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Partners at Work: Promoting Archaeology and Collaboration in the Chiricahua Mountains" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the goals of the Student Conservation Association (SCA) is to develop the next generation of conservation leaders. While the focus is often on natural resources, cultural resources, as a nonrenewable resource, have, until recently, been neglected. Chiricahua NM has been partnering with the SCA...
The Boulder Glyphs: An Analysis of Prehistoric Conflict and Historic Ranching Lifeways along the Big Bend of the Rio Grande (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Located in the Sierra Vieja breaks, a subset of the Chihuahua Desert near the Rio Grande in far west Texas, are fields of thousands of small vesicular boulders and survey work found some contain petroglyphs. Beginning in the fall of 2018 the Center for Big Bend studies led a thorough investigation and documentation of over 200 petroglyphs pecked into these...