Archaic (Other Keyword)
376-400 (452 Records)
The Truman Road Site (23SC924), St. Charles County, Missouri, features a diversity of material remains and a long periods of occupation mostly occurring during the Late Archaic (3000 – 2500 BC) and Middle Woodland (100 BC – AD 500). For this region of prehistoric Missouri, ceramics and chert constitute the main evidence for understanding trade and cultural dynamics. Despite its relative ubiquity among sites, ochre has rarely been considered in such studies. Recognizing that this material is a...
Seismic Survey of Poverty Point Mound A (2018)
Poverty Point is a UNESCO World Heritage Site known for its monumental earthworks. The largest and most significant feature on the site, Mound A, is over 21 meters high and 200 meters long. Currently, it is believed to have been built in three months at most. This supports the idea that there was a central leader directing its construction, a more socio-politically complex society than previous hunter-gatherer populations in North America. Evidence of stratigraphic layering, however, is an...
Shell Heaps as Indicators of Resource Management (2018)
The Neolithic Revolution of the 9th millennium BC marks the period when forager groups independently experimented with the management and, in some instances, the domestication of terrestrial plants and animals. However, global evidence for human consumption and management of gastropods predates the Neolithic Revolution, indicating that terrestrial and aquatic snails were an important resource for human societies during the Holocene. Abundant deposits of aquatic snails are reported from...
Shell Middens: Foodways at Dogan Point and Other Hudson River Sites (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research focuses on reanalyzing the Dogan Point site and other Archaic shell midden sites along the lower Hudson River. The Dogan point site has a shell component with calibrated dates ranging from 7919 B.P. and 2343 B.P., and a non shell component with calibrated dates ranging from 3261 B.P. and 473 B.P. Dogan Point was originally investigated by Louis...
Shell Rings and Settlement Organization in the Coastal American Southeast: New Insights from Remotely Sensed Data (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2018, we identified over 50 new potential shell rings in Beaufort County, SC using LiDAR and automated feature extraction algorithms. Further analysis of this data has confirmed the archaeological nature of several of these deposits. This poster details further analysis of these features. We find that the majority of these rings are significantly smaller...
Shellscapes and Kinscapes: A Social Network Analysis of the Southern Northwest Coast (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Social network analyses in archaeology have been successfully used to examine the connections between diverse social actors in the past. These studies have largely focused on the relationships between humans and other humans, typically using cultural materials as proxies for people....
A Shoshonean Prayerstone Hypothesis: Ritual Cartography of Great Basin Incised Stones (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The prayerstone hypothesis, grounded in Southern Paiute oral history, holds that selected incised stone artifacts were votive offerings deliberately emplaced where spiritual power (puha) was known to reside, accompanying prayers for personal power and expressing thanks for prayers answered. Proposing significant and long-term linkages between Great Basin...
Site Clustering Parallels Initial Domestication in Eastern North America (2018)
Dense human settlements often emerge following a shift to agricultural economies, yet researchers still debate the underlying cause of this pattern. One driver may be what is known in ecology as an Allee effect, a positive relationship between population density and per capita utility. Allee effects may emerge with economies of scale such as those created by some forms of intensified food acquisition and production. Thus, in an Allee-like setting, individuals belonging to larger groups enjoy the...
Sites, Non-sites, and Landscapes: Changing Land-Use Patterns in Wild Horse Draw and Vicinity, Trans-Pecos 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. The University of Texas at El Paso 2014 summer archeological field school was hosted by the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo at Chilicote Ranch near Valentine, Texas. Students conducted a pedestrian sample survey focused on the cuestas and mesas between the Sierra Vieja and Wild Horse Draw. The survey identified 95 sites and a number of non-sites;...
Skiles Shelter (41VV165): A Closer Look at a Long-Term Earth Oven Facility (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Skiles Shelter (41VV165) is located at the mouth of Eagle Nest Canyon, roughly 250 meters northwest from the Rio Grande in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas. Skiles Shelter is characterized by a fading panel of Pecos River Style rock art, numerous bedrock milling features, and a massive burned rock midden (BRM) accumulation of fire cracked rock...
Small Mammal Isotopes as Proxies for Climate over the Holocene Period on the Eastern Snake River Plain, Idaho (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Reconstructing the prehistoric environment is vital to our understanding of past human use and occupation of a landscape. While many reconstructions, typically based on chemical and biological signatures found in sediment and ice cores, are available, we currently lack suitable records for Idaho’s eastern Snake River Plain. This is mainly due to the scarcity...
The Smell of Power: The Apishapa Pilgrimage Trail (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Technique and Interpretation in the Archaeology of Rock Art" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Abstract rock art formed part of a pilgrimage trail that led from the lower Apishapa Canyon to the Spanish Peaks near Trinidad, Colorado. Hunter/gatherer ethnography from the Great Basin makes sense of abstract engravings in the canyon at sites such as Cramer, Canterbury, and Snake Blakeslee. The Apishapa Canyon leads from...
Some Remarks on Early Social Complexity in the Central Andes (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Dedication, Collaboration, and Vision, Part II: Papers in Honor of Tom D. Dillehay" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The well-known protohistoric Inca Empire of the late fifteenth century had achieved a remarkable degree of social complexity preceded by a similar expansive state some 500 years earlier. The lack of pre-European writing systems, however, obscures access to these earlier social formations. Thus, the social...
Soul Expression: Speech-Breath in Pecos River Style Rock Art (2018)
Pecos River style rock art was produced in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas and Coahuila, Mexico during the Archaic beginning around 2700 BC. This style is characterized by finely executed anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figures arranged in highly-ordered, complex compositions. Pecos River style anthropomorphs are frequently portrayed with a series of dots emanating upwards from an open mouth. Zoomorphic figures of felines and deer are also represented with this pictographic...
Sourcing Preceramic obsidian from Las Estacas, Morelos, and Yuzanu 36, Oaxaca (2018)
Understanding of long-distance exchange during the Mesoamerican Preceramic suffers from a limited range of materials whose source locations can be determined relative to later periods. Obsidian is one of the few materials that can provide evidence for long-distance exchange through geochemical analysis, although relatively few sourcing studies have been carried out on Preceramic obsidian. In this paper, we report recent pXRF results from obsidian recovered at two Preceramic sites: Las Estacas,...
Space and Settlement Across the Painted Desert: Comparing the Land Use Patterns of Preceramic Groups at Petrified Forest National Park (2015)
Although preceramic archaeological sites containing evidence of maize farming were first identified at Petrified Forest National Park (PEFO) in the 1980s, archaeologists have conducted little research on preceramic Basketmaker sites at PEFO. Several radiocarbon dates on maize falling in the first millennium BC from preceramic habitation sites have shifted researchers perspectives on the preceramic occupation Petrified Forest. Recent archaeological survey on Petrified Forest National Park...
Spatial Arrangement of the Northern Archaic Component at the McDonald Creek Site, Central Alaska (2021)
This is an abstract from the "McDonald Creek and Blair Lakes: Late Pleistocene-Holocene Human Activity in the Tanana Flats of Central Alaska" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. McDonald Creek is a multicomponent campsite located in the central Tanana Valley south of Fairbanks, Alaska. In addition to late Pleistocene components, archaeological excavations at the site have uncovered a productive Northern Archaic occupation dating to the middle Holocene....
Spatial Pattern of δ18O Water Isotope in the Argentinean Central West: Their Potential to Model Human Mobility at Archaeological Scale (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents the δ18O isotopes results based on a new southern Mendoza water sampling. Using GIS the δ18O isotope information from water sources is modeled in regional isoscapes. With this baseline we discuss human mobility, analyzing three archaeological cases. In total 92 water source samples from rivers, creeks, springs, snow, lagoons, and water...
Stable Isotope Analysis of Dental Serial Sections Suggests Delayed Weaning among Archaic Foragers of the Andean Altiplano (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Previous research identifies delayed weaning as a behavioral adaptation to life at high altitude in the Andean and Tibetan highlands. This research examines the stable isotope chemistry of dental serial sections in Archaic period forager populations of the high Andes in the Lake Titicaca Basin to estimate weaning ages and the potential onset of delayed...
Strategies and Tools for Managing Change. What Lithic Artefacts Tell about Neandertals and First Anatomically Modern Humans in Liguria (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in the Prehistory of Liguria and Neighboring Regions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Liguria is an arch of land overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, with mountain areas, very rare coastal planes and steeply sloping valleys. In spite of this peculiar orography this region represented an important passageway between France and central-northern Italy, allowing the diffusion of human groups, ideas, artefacts...
Stratigraphy and Chronology at Las Capas, an Early Agricultural Period Site in the Tucson Basin (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Constructing Chronologies I: Stratification and Correlation" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper discusses the stratigraphic chronology for the Las Capas site in the Tucson Basin, southern Arizona. Las Capas was inhabited by early farmers during the Late Archaic/Early Agricultural period (EAP), which dates from about 2100 cal BC to cal AD 50. Maize and canal irrigation were introduced during this interval....
The Strength of Deep Ties: Obsidian Provenance Suggests Long-Distance Cooperation over Six Millennia in Numu Territory (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Scholars have suggested that economies of scale gained from cooperative hunting fueled the evolution of human sociality. This model anticipates inflated levels of cooperation during group-hunting events in comparison to other contexts. To evaluate this prediction, we examine the provenance of 395 obsidian projectile points from the large communal hunting...
The Struggle Was Real: The End of the Archaic and the Onset of the Intermediate Indian Period in Eastern Subarctic North America (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The transition between the end of the Archaic and the Intermediate Indian Period in the Eastern Subarctic of North America was marked by significant changes in just about all dimensions of Amerindian life—technology, raw material use, exchange networks, social organization, architecture, burial customs, settlement patterns, and subsistence strategies. These...
Style Versus Occupation II: A Broader View of the Narrow Stemmed Tradition in Southern New England (2017)
Artifact types are often used as markers of social boundedness or "ethnicity" although the relationship between typology and culture remains a very complex and poorly understood issue. Projectile points from the Narrow-stemmed Tradition (also called the Small Stemmed Tradition) are ubiquitous in southern New England and can rarely be attributed to a single component Native American archaeological site. Attempts have been made to seriate this style of point with varying success, given its style...
Submerged Prehistoric Archaeology: Tackling the Issues of Scale and Context on the Gulf of Mexico Outer Continental Shelf (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The northwestern Gulf of Mexico outer continental shelf (OCS) includes approximately 38,660,700 acres of submerged land under federal permitting authority, which are in turn subject to Section 106-compliant archaeological survey. Both historic and prehistoric resources must be identified. While historic shipwrecks can occur in any water depth, sea-level curve...