Violence (Other Keyword)
1-25 (76 Records)
This is an abstract from the "The Movement of People and Ideas in Eastern Mesoamerica during the Ninth and Tenth Centuries CE: A Multidisciplinary Approach Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Durante las últimas décadas se han documentado varios conjuntos de restos humanos no reverenciales y altamente procesados en diferentes estados de manipulación dentro el territorio de Mesoamérica. En un principio se les apreció como hechos aislados hasta...
All in One Boat: How to Keep a Raiding Party Together in Bronze Age Southern Scandinavia (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Warfare and the Origins of Political Control " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For southern Scandinavia, the evidence of use-wear on weapons and of violent encounters settled the long debate over whether prehistoric warfare existed. Much of this violence was driven by waterborne raiding parties and maritime warriors and successful participation in fighting provided a path to social status. Each expedition lasted...
Analysis of Human Skeletal Remains from Late Postclassic Iximché, Guatemala (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Innovations and Transformations in Mesoamerican Research: Recent and Revised Insights of Ancestral Lifeways" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Analysis of human skeletal remains from the Postclassic Kaqchikel Maya capital of Iximché, Guatemala, supports the interpretation that many of the partial skeletal remains were trophies taken in war or were from war captives sacrificed at the site. Other, more complete, remains...
Appendix 7.1: Skeletal Material from Hasanlu IVB Showing Interpersonal Violence (2011)
Skeletal material showing interpersonal violence from Hasanlu Special Studies IV Peoples and Crafts in Period IVB at Hasanlu, Iran. Appendix 7.1 includes data for 245 skeletons recovered from excavations at the Iron Age mounded settlement of Hasanlu, Iran. The attached Excel file includes the following data categories: ID Number, Age Category, Gender, Total Fractures, Fracture 1-5.
An Archaeology of Violent American Landscapes in Rosewood and Beyond (2021)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Hidden Battlefields: Power, Memory, and Preservation of Sites of Armed Conflict" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Landscape and violence are social processes. The complex interplay between the two is a key facet to racism and other forms of intolerance animating American history. Inspired by this session’s abstract, this paper examines the role archaeology plays in researching the violence inherent to many...
Aspirational Architecture and AK-47s: The Intersections of Nineteenth-Century Settlement Processes and the Post-Conflict Detritus of Violence in Liberia (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Reckoning with Violence" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Global awareness of Liberia’s recent past is largely limited to the long-term bloodshed that erupted with a 1980 coup and the ensuing civil conflict. What remains understudied is how recent episodes of violence are tethered to the decades following Liberia’s founding as a settler colony of the American Colonization Society in 1822. Our new...
Assessing Systemic Stress from Archaeological Hormones Recovered from Hair of Human Sacrifices at Huanchaquito Las Llamas, Peru (~1450 CE) (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Excavations at the Peruvian northern coastal site of Huanchaquito-Las Llamas (HLL) revealed the largest mass human sacrifice event in the Americas, with more than 400 sacrificed children, women, and camelids governed under the Chimú State. Dated to the Chimú’s imperial decline (circa 1450 CE), preliminary genetic analyses indicate that these children were...
The Beginning of the Bow (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Why was the bow and arrow so widely used to replace the atlatl? To address this question, I present a study on the creation and use of the longbow and arrow in its early use, as well as the transition from the atlatl with focus on the effectiveness of both tools in penetrating power and accuracy at varying ranges to determine which is the overall more...
Beyond Broken Bones: The Value of Creating an Osteobiography when Analyzing Violence in the Past (2017)
Population level analyses of violence that are focused on quantifying and comparing traumatic injuries on human skeletal remains recovered from an archaeological context are crucial for understanding violent interactions through time and across regions. However, these types of studies are also limited because, by design, they place less emphasis on individuals and their lived experience. In contrast, when researchers create what Frank and Julie Saul called an osteobiography for each set of...
The Bioarchaeology of Social Order: Cooperation and Conflict among the Mimbres (AD 550-1300) (2015)
A comprehensive bioarchaeological assessment of Mimbres health, activity, and interpersonal violence was completed using data from a sample of 248 human burials from 17 Late Pithouse (AD 550-1000) and Pueblo (AD 1000-1300) sites in the Mimbres region. The findings presented here demonstrate broader patterns for interpretation of community experiences that have not been as well described in previous case studies from individual site samples. This larger sample of all available adult burials...
Biodistance Comparisons for the Chimú-Era (AD 1000–1450) Child Sacrificial Remains from Pampa la Cruz, Huanchaco, North Coast of Peru: A Preliminary Report (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Here we report dentally derived biodistance results for 120 Chimú-era (AD 1000–1450) children from three of six temporally discrete sacrificial events—specifically events 1, 4, and 5, at Pampa la Cruz (PLC), Huanchaco, Perú, which we compare with a late Chimú-Inka affiliated skeletal sample (n = 44) from the nearby cemetery at Iglesia Colonial, Huanchaco,...
Borderlands, Continuances and Violence: A Social Nexus at Black Star Canyon, San Juan Capistrano California (2015)
Post European contact the historicity of the Santa Ana Mountain landscape of Orange County, California has been popularly constructed around the narratives of bucolic mission and ranch life, and that of the "wild frontier". The interplay between both histories has contributed to a memorialization of the Santa Ana Mountains as a borderland space during the Spanish, Mexican and American colonial eras that deemphasizes indigenous social life. This paper seeks to complicate the historical concept of...
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...
The Character of Conflict Research Project
Objectives: This study uses osteological and radiocarbon datasets combined with formal quantitative analyses to test hypotheses concerning the character of conflict in the Nasca highlands during the Late Intermediate period (LIP, 950 – 1450 C.E.). We develop and test osteological expectations regarding what patterns should be observed if violence was characterized by intra-group violence, ritual conflict, intermittent raiding, or internecine warfare. Materials and methods: Crania (n = 267)...
Climate Change Intensifies Violence in the South Central Andean Highlands, 1.5–0.5 ka (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeology of the pre-Columbian Andes provides an ideal study of the range of human responses to climate change given the region’s extreme climatic variability, excellent archaeological preservation, and robust paleoclimate records. We evaluate the effects of climate change on the frequency of interpersonal violence in the south central Andes from 470...
Communities in Conflict: Racialized Violence During Gradual Emancipation on Long Island (2016)
From New Amsterdam to Seneca Village, Diana diZerega Wall has examined the often-conflicting interactions of communities living in close relation. In the early nineteenth century, the nearly 30-year process of Gradual Emancipation slowly dismantled the system of slavery in New York State, but it also created the conditions for the perpetuation of inequality among closely intertwined peoples: the black and white inhabitants of eastern Long Island. Inspired by Wall’s ability to uncover the...
Comparative Approaches to Casas Grandes Taphonomy and Violence (2015)
Recent bioarchaeological analyses of human skeletal remains from the Medio Period Casas Grandes region (AD 1200-1450) have demonstrated taphonomic indicators variously interpreted as massacre, violent persecution of witches, or anthropophagy. In this presentation, we re-examine taphonomic data from Paquime and within a larger southwestern perspective. We combine new approaches to demography and individual well-being with taphonomic and mortuary datasets from Paquime to evaluate the causes,...
Conflict and the Politics of Solidarity: Hierarchy and its Limits in the Late Precolumbian Andean Highlands (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Warfare and the Origins of Political Control " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Premodern groups under significant external threat often developed a politics of solidarity, emphasizing group strength and shared responsibilities rather than vertical distinctions. This paper draws on evidence from the late precolumbian Andean highlands to illustrate how the demands of defense shaped political dynamics and leadership...
Conveying Inka Ideology of Warfare for Establishing and Maintaining Political Control (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Warfare and the Origins of Political Control " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient empires relied on warfare to conquer other groups and incorporate them politically. However, they did not always resort to armed conquest and often annexed new territories through negotiation backed by the perception of the empire’s military strength, which also underpinned the consolidation and perpetuation of political control in...
Cooperation and Violence in Prehistoric California: A Brief Inter-Regional Evaluation (2017)
Inter-group cooperation in prehistoric California has traditionally been evaluated via the relative intensity of exchange--tracked archaeologically with shell beads and obsidian. Transported great distances (most commonly via down-the-line exchange) trade items in abundance imply amiable inter-group relations, if not actual cooperation. Violence, on the other hand, as represented in the ethnographic and bio-archaeological records, is generally assumed to represent hostile interactions between...
Crnobuki: A Garrisoned Acropolis (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cal Poly Humboldt has established a relationship with the Museum of Bitola to conduct research in the Pelagonia region of Macedonia. The museum and Cal Poly Humboldt conducted an initial reconnaissance of several locations and established a research location in Crnobuki. The acropolis adjacent to the town is the location of an ancient Macedonian garrison...
Death that Endures: A Bioarchaeological and Biogeochemcial Study of Human Sacrifices from the Moche Valley, Peru (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This project investigates how rituals of human sacrifice performed by the Chimú Empire (AD 1000/1100-1450/1470) transformed in response to Inca imperialism (AD 1450-1532) in the Moche Valley of Peru. Recent discoveries of hundreds of sacrificial victims in the Moche Valley suggest that ritual violence was used to maintain the sociopolitical and religious...
Deer, Drought, and Warfare: An Isotopic Investigation of Hunting Strategies from the Eleventh through the Fourteenth Centuries in the Central Illinois River Valley (CIRV) (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Zooarchaeological Methods" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study explores the relationship between garden hunting and food security in the Central Illinois River Valley, an area plagued by endemic warfare and drought during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Located ~100 km north of Cahokia, the largest precolumbian polity in North America, the CIRV was composed of smaller settlements that...
Defensive or Ritual Networks? A Preliminary Geospatial Analysis of Cerro Prieto Espinal in the Jequetepeque Valley, Peru (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mountainsides formed powerful spaces for ritual, defense, and settlement, and Andean communities often considered them the very embodiments of their animate ancestors or wak’as. However, they remain understudied within the North Coast region despite their proliferation during the Late Moche and Late Intermediate Periods. This paper presents a preliminary...
Depopulation and Massacres: Bioarchaeological Evidence of Violence within the Ancestral Pueblo of the Southwest Region of North America (2015)
This paper investigates forensic data within the Southwest region of the United States for indicators of violence, conflict, and warfare related events. The main focus is the Mesa Verde region of the Southwest and other sites inhabited by the Ancestral Pueblo. In this area, I examine forensic evidence supportive of trophy-killing and cannibalism; both have documented evidence at other sites in the Southwest area. Different types of trauma, such as, cut marks and blunt force trauma are also...