Archaic (Other Keyword)
251-275 (452 Records)
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...
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...
Networks of Exchange in the Late Archaic Southeast: Copper and Crematory Practices (2019)
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 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...