Archaic (Other Keyword)
351-375 (574 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Complex Fisher-Hunter-Gatherers of North America" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Societal complexity, once a stalwart of archaeological research, has become increasingly difficult to define as archaeologists increasingly look at its various aspects, including entrenched authority, monumental architecture, and economic specialization as rising independently of one another. To date, long-distance exchange among...
Neural Nets for Style: A Method for the Examination of Material Culture Variation (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The cause of morphological variation in material culture has long been debated. This investigation into archaic projectile point variation from the Gault site in central Texas looks through the lens of social learning to suggest that different teaching and learning strategies represent the root cause of variation. These strategies may in turn reflect part of...
New Approaches to Old Questions: Current Research Objectives for the Green River Valley Shell Midden Archaic, Kentucky, USA (2018)
The Green River Valley Archaic shell middens (ca. 10,000 to 3000 BP) located in west-central Kentucky have a long research history dating back more than 100 years to C. B. Moore’s work. Previous research programs have focused on mortuary analysis, subsistence, formation processes, and settlement patterns, laying the groundwork for future researchers to conduct more detailed analyses using newly developed methods (e.g., GIS, isotopic analysis). In this paper, we expand on previous research of the...
New Data on Archaic Period Chronology and Raw Material Variation from a Stratified Archaic Site in the Appalachian Summit Region (2018)
Excavations completed by AECOM documented deeply stratified Archaic deposits at the Weatherman Site (31YC31) in the Appalachian Summit Region of North Carolina. This site is located at 2,500 feet above sea level (10 miles north of Mt. Mitchell, the tallest peak east of the Mississippi River) and is situated in the floodplain of the South Toe River, which flows west to become the Nolichucky River and eventually the Tennessee River. The youngest Archaic component at the Weatherman Site is a Late...
New Dates for Bonfire Shelter, a Multicomponent Rockshelter in West Texas (2021)
This is an abstract from the "The Big Bend Complex: Landscapes of History" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bonfire Shelter is a well-known but imperfectly understood multicomponent rockshelter site located in a short tributary canyon of the Rio Grande in West Texas. The site is particularly known for three “bone beds” deposited between about 14,000 and 2,500 BP, two of which appear to represent mass bison kills. Three years of renewed investigation...
New Developments with the Shield-Bearing Warrior Motif in the Rocky Mountains (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Painting the Past: Interpretive Approaches in Global Rock Art Research" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The shield-bearing warrior, a widely recognized rock art motif on the Northwestern Plains, has a more complex pedigree than archeologists originally recognized. Examples in northcentral Montana are radiocarbon dated to the Late Archaic while other sites in southwestern Montana may date to the same time. Adding to the...
New England’s submerged pre-Contact history: identifying an intact Archaic site in Salem, Massachusetts (2015)
A portion of Salem Harbor in Massachusetts was investigated during a cultural resource management project in 2009/2010. The underwater reconnaissance included a remote sensing survey using a Klein 3.5 kHz sub-bottom profiler. An acoustic basement was recognized at approximately two meters below the sea bed, and was hypothesized to be an organic layer potentially representative of a buried land surface below marine sediment. Vibratory cores were used to ground truth the potential buried land...
New Evidence for Poverty Point’s Complex Developmental History (2018)
Magnetic survey at Poverty Point reveals new information about ritual facilities, ridge construction and use, and a complex developmental history that included both planned and organic growth. Thirty-eight circles (diameters range from 8 to 66 m with a mean of 35 m) in the plaza are interpreted as ritual facilities. Targeted excavation in four circles encountered large postholes in three but the fourth consists of pits. Magnetic images suggest closely spaced postholes in many circles, possibly...
New Evidence from the Hokfv-Mocvse Shell Ring (5000–4800 cal BP) on the Emergence of Ring Sites on the South Atlantic Coast (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Coastal Environments in Archaeology: Ancient Life, Lore, and Landscapes" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Circular and arcuate shell rings along the South Atlantic coasts are the vestiges of some of the earliest known villages in North America. Most rings date to the Late Archaic period (5000–3000 BP) and are often associated with early pottery production, providing important insights into Indigenous economies,...
New Evidence of the Earliest Domestic Dogs in the Americas (2018)
While the arrival of domesticated dogs with an initial human migration has been the most reasonable explanation for their presence in the Americas, evidence for Paleoindian dogs has proven elusive. Here, we present the identification and direct radiocarbon dating of an isolated dog burial from Stilwell II, an Early Archaic site in the Lower Illinois River Valley. We also present new direct radiocarbon dates for two dogs from the nearby Archaic Koster site. These dates confirm that the Stilwell...
A New History of the Jaketown Site (2024)
This is an abstract from the "*SE Not Your Father’s Poverty Point: Rewriting Old Narratives through New Research" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent findings from Poverty Point and contemporary sites are changing our understanding of the Late Archaic Southeast. Here, I summarize recent research at the Jaketown site in Mississippi and discuss how our findings fit within the broader context of the Poverty Point phenomenon. Chronostratigraphic...
New Insights into Poverty Point Exchange through Lead Isotopic Analysis of Galena (2024)
This is an abstract from the "*SE Not Your Father’s Poverty Point: Rewriting Old Narratives through New Research" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The mineral galena is well established as a raw material used by prehistoric peoples of eastern North America from the Late Archaic through Mississippian periods. In the lower Mississippi River Valley, numerous specimens have been recovered at sites occupied by groups associated with the Poverty Point...
New Investigations at Russell Cave, Alabama (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Russell Cave (1Ja181), located in Jackson County, Alabama, contains one of the longest prehistoric occupational sequences known in the southeastern U.S., spanning approximately 9,000 years. Excavations were conducted by the Chattanooga Chapter of the Tennessee Archaeological Society (1953-1955) the Smithsonian Institute in conjunction with the National...
New Perspectives on Bonfire Shelter, Texas (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. Bonfire Shelter contains an extensive stratified record of human prehistory in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of Southwest Texas, and a correspondingly long history of competing interpretations of that record. The initial investigations of the site in the 1960s led to the announcement of the earliest...
Nondestructive Provenance of the Watson Brake (16OU175) Lithics (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The lithic assemblage at the middle archaic (7000–4000 BP) site called Watson Brake (16OU175) has been identified visually as coming from exclusively local raw materials that are generally small, beige-to-tan gravels. These local gravel sources are found nearby the site in underlying terrace deposits and resemble those materials used by the inhabitants of...
Obsidian Artifacts at 48PA551: Using Obsidian to Address Land Tenure Strategies among Hunter-Gatherers of the Rocky Mountains (2023)
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. This research uses obsidian data from a single site in the GYE to test existing land tenure and territoriality models based on the sourcing and subsequent movement of obsidian. While on a spectrum, existing studies have generally polarized between two major schools of thought. These perspectives diverge over whether...
Obsidian Procurement Patterns in the Strawberry Mountain Wilderness (2018)
Cultural resources in wilderness areas can be difficult to manage due to a lack of dedicated funding and few undertakings which trigger survey through the National Historic Preservation Act. After a series of extensive wildfires in the 1990s the Malheur National Forest surveyed much of the Strawberry Mountain Wilderness Area using volunteers from the Forest Service's Passport In Time program. Crews documented several extensive obsidian dominated lithic scatter sites. The debitage and other...
Obsidian Sourcing and the Origins of the Black Mountain Redoubt Site, Wyoming (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Projectile points are one of the few artifacts present on the surface of archaeological sites that may also serve as a diagnostic of the site’s relative age. A shift in the archaeological record can be seen through changes in projectile point technologies between the Late Archaic and the Historic periods in northwest Wyoming. The exact causes of these changes...
Obsidian Trade vs. Direct Acquisition: A View from Central California (2018)
Geochemical sourcing of lithic artifacts has proven to be a useful analytical tool for the studies of trade and mobility in the archaeological record. However, it is difficult to distinguish lithic material acquired through exchange from material acquired directly from the source. Economic models of lithic reduction suggest that material procured for the purpose of exchange may be treated differently than material procured for personal consumption. I compare obsidian source profiles and lithic...
Of Longhouses and Lineages: Evaluation of Transformations in Maritime Archaic Social Organization in the Far Northeast (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Kin, Clan, and House: Social Relatedness in the Archaeology of North American Societies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The social organization of Maritime Archaic groups of Newfoundland and Labrador is notoriously difficult to assess due to poor preservational environments, challenging logistics of working in the Subarctic, and a paucity of research directly applicable to such questions; however, a long chronological...
"One of These Things Is (Not?) Like the Other:" A Reassessment of Middle and Late Archaic Projectile Point Types in the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains (2016)
Many Archaic projectile points from the Rocky Mountains and the Great Plains are poorly defined stylistically and chronologically, particularly in contrast to those from the earlier Paleoindian Period. As a result, we suspect that projectile points are often classified as different types based solely on geographic location and not necessarily on variation in the point style or technological characteristics. Stemmed points in the Middle Archaic are called Duncan or Hanna in the north and Pinto in...
Origins and Tenacity of Myth: Part II—Ethnography (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Painting the Past: Interpretive Approaches in Global Rock Art Research" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Hunter-gatherer artists of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas produced Pecos River style (PRS) rock art as early as 5,500 years ago. In 2016, Boyd identified patterns in PRS murals similar to the mythologies of the ancient Nahua (Aztec) and the present-day Huichol (Wixárika). She advanced the hypothesis...
Origins and Tenacity of Myth: Part I—Archaeology (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Painting the Past: Interpretive Approaches in Global Rock Art Research" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Origins and Tenacity of Myth is a comprehensive study of Pecos River style (PRS) pictographs in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of Texas funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. It is a collaborative project between Texas State University and Shumla Archaeological Center. This presentation addresses the...
The Osceola Mudflow: Dropping into the Valley and Standing Up Next to the Mountain in Southern Puget Sound (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. On the Northwest Coast of North America cultural processes are intertwined with the natural environment. Five thousand six hundred years ago, a collapse on the northeast slope of Mount təqʷuʔməʔ [Rainier] caused the massive Osceola Mudflow (OM) event and transformed the landscape. In Lushootseed teachings, the Changer genre of stories distinguishes...
The Ostra Collecting Station Site: A Virtual Reconstruction (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Virtual reality is a tool that can be used to enhance archeological analyses. My research explores using excavation data to develop a 3D immersive and interactive simulated environment representative of an archaeological site. Incorporating virtual reality in site analyses provides an interface where data can be used to test various hypotheses and can be...