Archaic (Other Keyword)
326-350 (574 Records)
This is an abstract from the "New Multidisciplinary Research at 48PA551: A Middle Archaic (McKean Complex) Site in Northwest Wyoming" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Site 48PA551 is a widely recognized winter camp originally dated to Middle Archaic (McKean Complex) period. Original investigators described the McKean occupation as a singular unit within a 30-90 cm thick sedimentary stratum beginning at the ground surface. Original radiocarbon dating...
Mea Culpa (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As I have done no comparative study on the subject, I assume that it is relatively unusual to amend one’s dissertation research let alone to point out its flaws. Nevertheless, this is precisely what I am doing in this presentation. While the salient points of my dissertation (The Origin, Development, and Distributions of Western Archaic Textiles, 1970)...
Measuring Ancient Reuse of the Past: Archaic and Woodland Landscape Histories of the St. Johns River Valley, Florida (2018)
The middle St. Johns River valley in northeast Florida was occupied more-or-less continuously beginning at least 9000 years ago. Regional inhabitation by hunter-gatherers involved extensive terraforming of the landscape, including the construction of earthen and shell mounds, in addition to many non-mounded places. Many locations were repeatedly occupied over the millennia, with successive generations modifying or otherwise interacting with existing, often ancient, places. Earlier research took...
Measuring Mobility by Proxy: Use and Maintenance of Lithic Tools in Pennsylvania from Paleoindian to Middle Archaic Times (2018)
Archaic peoples in Pennsylvania were less mobile than their Paleoindian predecessors. One form of evidence supporting this argument is the increased use of local lithic raw materials in the Early and Middle Archaic. The utilization and retouch of unifaces and bifaces is a second form of evidence of mobility. The production of tools designed for long-term use and maintenance is associated with highly mobile groups where maximizing tool use-life reduces transport cost and reduces risk when moving...
Measuring Seasonality in Codakia orbicularis Clams from Lucayan Sites in the Bahamas (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The shells of Codakia orbicularis clams are common at archaeological sites throughout the Bahama archipelago. These clams were harvested as food, and their abundance indicates that they were processed in habitation areas. Previous studies have suggested that the shells record daily, tidal, and seasonal growth sequences that can be used to determine when...
Meat and Potatoes: A Mixed 7,000-Year-Old-Diet (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation examines the diets of 16 prehistoric burials at Soro Mik’aya Patxja, a high-elevation Archaic Period site occupied 7,000 years ago in the Peruvian Andes. Stable carbon and nitrogen isotopes were analyzed to infer the prehistoric hunter-gatherer diets during a period that preceded the domestication of tubers, quinoa, and vicuña. Plants such as...
Meat Production and Animal Sacrifice during the Urbanization of Archaic Rome (2018)
During the Archaic period (8th-6th cent. BCE), Rome underwent rapid urbanization with concomitant social changes. This shift from modest settlement to urban center affected how animals were raised, distributed, and consumed. Namely, large-scale animal sacrifice rituals within the city acted as a new mechanism for distributing meat to the masses, provided by centralized authorities. The increased scale of animal sacrifice in the nascent city would have created new meanings to these rites and led...
Methods, Models, and Movement: Examining Multiple Trace Element Dataset to Explore Past Land use Dynamics (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Differential use of obsidian sources by pre-contact peoples has been used to infer mobility patterns and occupations in the Absaroka mountains, Wyoming. Identifying sources of obsidian involves measuring the relative abundances of trace elements using eXRF and analyzing clusters to differentiate sources. Using a large dataset of 1,842 obsidian artifacts,...
Middle Archaic Mobility and Resource Utilization in the Cumberland Plateau of Southeastern Kentucky (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Sumac Terrace site (15Ls141), located in the Cumberland Plateau, was primarily occupied during the Middle Archaic (6000-4000 CE). The recovery of a large number of exhausted chipped stone tools and debitage from tool maintenance, and the presence of rock-lined hearths and cooking pits, and sheet midden within a relatively small area (20 x 30 m)...
Middle Archaic Period Settlement Patterns and Subsistence Strategies in the lower Salt River Valley of Arizona (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaic period sites are rare in the lower Salt River Valley of south-central Arizona. Logan Simpson Design recently identified two middle Archaic period sites on the Holocene floodplain of the Salt River. Evidence suggests that the two sites were short-term riparian resource procurement and processing locales that were protected from flooding (and...
Middle Archaic Period Subsistence and Resource Use Practices in the Chuska Valley, New Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project: A Multivocal Analysis of the San Juan Basin as a Cultural Landscape" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The recent discovery and investigation of a Middle Archaic period campsite in the southern Chuska Valley has provided substantial insight into the relative importance of various plant and animal resources to the mobile inhabitants of the San Juan Basin region. Data generated from...
Middle Holocene Projectile Points from the Santa Cruz County Coast of Northern Monterey Bay, California. (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Current Insights into Pyrodiversity and Seascape Management on the Central California Coast" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A group of Middle Holocene aged archaeological sites along the Santa Cruz County Coast have produced a large number of chert and obsidian projectile points. Sites SCR-3, SCR-7, SCR-10 and SCR-40 have the same range of point types and materials, and are all within 10 miles radius of each other. ...
Minimally-Invasive Geoarchaeological Investigation of a Sub-marsh and Intertidal Precontact Site in New Hampshire (2018)
Many precontact archaeological sites in New England exhibit poor preservation of organic materials but they occupy relatively stable upland landforms. Conversely, intertidal and submerged sites often contain exceptional organic preservation but exist in or near high-energy and erosive environments. This paper describes minimally-invasive geoarchaeological investigations of an Archaic to Terminal Archaic site in New Hampshire that is buried by salt marsh peat, exposed at a rapidly-eroding...
Miskwabik’s Journey beyond Minong: Copper Production Systems among Hunger-Gatherers in the Northern Lake Superior Basin 4,000–6,000 Years Ago (2023)
This is an abstract from the "From Hard Rock to Heavy Metal: Metal Tool Production and Use by Indigenous Hunter-Gatherers in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past 10,000 years, hunter-gathers in the Lake Superior Basin have utilized primary and secondary deposits of native (elemental) copper in a production and exchange network that spanned across and beyond the North American Midcontinent. The production system that...
The Mississippi Paleoindian and Early Archaic point database redux (2016)
The Mississippi Paleoindian and Archaic Point Survey was initiated in 1968 by archaeologists at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, and due largely to the efforts of Sam McGahey over the next 30 years, grew to include over 2,100 points at the time of his retirement in 2003. The survey was idle for a decade, but was recently reinstituted with the help of numerous avocational "citizen scientists" who share an interest in Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene hunter-gatherers. Intact...
Modeling Hunter-Gatherer Population Dynamics on the Texas Coastal Plain during the Holocene (2018)
A radiocarbon database is used to model prehistoric population dynamics on the Texas Coastal Plain in the context of Holocene climate change. Hunters and gatherers participated in a multifaceted social and ecological system that appears to have been highly resilient to climatic impacts by utilizing multiple ecological zones and participating in wide-ranging social networks for over 6000 years. Climatic fluctuations include a dry middle Holocene and fluctuating but wetter late Holocene. During...
Modeling Preceramic Occupation around the Wetlands of the Low-Lying Coastal Zone (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology and the History of Human-Environment Interaction in the Lower Belize River Watershed" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While the Late Archaic (3400–900 BCE) has received comparably less research attention than the subsequent Maya period, there has been a surge of interest in this important period in the past two decades. In Belize, the majority of Late Archaic or Preceramic finds occur on the surface and...
Modeling the Early History of Maize in the North American Southwest (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Constructing Chronologies II: The Big Picture with Bayes and Beyond" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although originally domesticated in Mexico, the initial adoption and spread of maize (*Zea mays) are key to understanding the forager-to-farmer transition in the North American Southwest. Fundamental to our understanding of this transition is chronology, especially related to the introduction, spread, and use of maize....
The More Things Change, the More They Change: Persistence and Evolution in the Gulf of Maine Archaic Tradition (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Changes in the Land: Archaeological Data from the Northeast" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Gulf of Maine Archaic Tradition has been defined as a persistent technological pattern that spans the Early to Middle Archaic Periods ca. 9,500-6,000 B.P. in the northeast, although sites containing this component have remained poorly documented. It is possible that human population density in New England was low throughout...
Morhiss and Buckeye Knoll Cemetery Sites: A Comparison of Hunter-Gatherer Mortuary Chronologies and Traditions (2023)
This is an abstract from the "The Socioecological Dynamics of Holocene Foragers and Farmers" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Located on the Guadalupe River in Victoria County, Texas, Morhiss (41VT1) and Buckeye Knoll (41VT98) represent two of the oldest and largest hunter-gatherer cemeteries in the United States. Recent accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) dating of 90 burials at the Morhiss site offers unique insights into its mortuary complex. AMS...
Morphometric Analysis and the Investigation of Communities of Stone Toolmakers (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 will explore the usefulness of morphometric analysis when investigating how communities of stone toolmakers are embedded in and help construct their social landscape. Utilizing the concept of communities of practice, I intend to examine the culturally and historically situated nature of stone toolmakers through the analysis of their products....
A Morphometric Comparison of Copper versus Stone Weapon Tips from the Old Copper Culture (2023)
This is an abstract from the "From Hard Rock to Heavy Metal: Metal Tool Production and Use by Indigenous Hunter-Gatherers in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Old Copper Culture in the western North American Great Lakes region is one of the few areas in the world in which people produced both copper and stone weapon tips. However, a robust quantitative comparison of these implements has, to our knowledge, never been conducted....
Moving Earth at Poverty Point: Investigating "Perforators" as Specialized Basket Making Tools (2018)
Studying the development of technological specialization in cultural groups has been an interest of archaeologists for many years because specialization lends itself to the development of specialized labor. Technological specialization was a necessary factor in the building of the mounds and ridges at the late Archaic site at Poverty Point. Yet most of the research done to this point has been focused on the symbolic significance of the mounds and ridges, leaving our understanding of the...
The Narrow Point Tradition and Long-Term Continuity in the Northeast (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Narrow Point tradition extends across a wide area of eastern North America and its signature point type is one of the most frequently found in Archaic contexts in New England. Decades of research on the relationship between Narrow Points and other types of the Late Archaic Period has not yet produced a consensus regarding their use and origins. However,...
Nearshore Paleoceanographic Conditions and Human Adaptation on the Coast of the Atacama Desert (Chile, 25°S) During the Early and Middle Holocene (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Palaeoeconomic and Environmental Reconstructions in Island and Coastal Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The transition period between the Early and Middle Holocene is associated with important changes in climate and human dynamics around the world. The coast of the Atacama Desert (Chile, 25°S) is not an exception. Early Holocene archaeological sites show evidence of a generalized coastal economy that...