ancient DNA (Other Keyword)
101-125 (205 Records)
Ancient DNA (aDNA) methodologies have rapidly developed over the past three decades, and today these tools provide a powerful means to investigate a wide range of archaeological inquiries, including human evolution, animal and plant domestication, and paleoenvironmental reconstructions. In this talk, I will summarize general approaches in paleogenomics research, focusing on concerns and questions from archaeologists. To demonstrate how state-of-the-art paleogenomic techniques can contribute to...
Genetic and ZooMS Identification of Marine Mammal Bone from Norse Sites in Iceland and Greenland: Insights into Historic Ecology and Norse Economies (2018)
Evidence from Arctic and North Atlantic archaeological sites shows marine mammals were frequently used by Norse settlers in Greenland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands. Archaeofaunal assemblages often yield a wealth of complete bones, however, species-level identification is not possible for heavily fragmented specimens. Therefore, specific details about marine mammal utilization are often unquantified and marine species identification largely remains unverified. This paper reveals utility of ZooMS...
Genetic Change in South Patagonia over Seven Millennia (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Increasing the Accessibility of Ancient DNA within Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. South Patagonia, the austral extreme of South America, has been inhabited for at least 12,600 years. Following European contact, five ethnic groups of hunter-gatherers (Yámana, Kawéskar, Selk’nam, Haush, and Aónikenk) were documented. They based their subsistence on two broad strategies optimized for maritime or terrestrial...
Genetic data from the Transbay Man (2015)
We present genetic evidence isolated from the remains of the Transbay Man. We compare extracted genomic data to other available gneomic data, placing the Transbay Man in an evolutionary context with other human populations, including previously sequenced Amerindian remains. We discuss the challenges of working with preserved genetic material from warm and wet locations such as the San Francisco Bay Area. SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology...
The Genetic History and Diffusion Routes of Early Maize in North America (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Frontiers of Plant Domestication" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological and genetic evidence from modern and ancient maize (Zea mays) samples indicate that maize initially reached the southwestern United States (U.S.) by around 4,000 years ago via a highland Mexican route, followed by a second introduction via the Pacific coast, around 2,000 years ago. However, maize diffusion routes northward from the...
Genetic Identity and Relationships in the Southwest United States and Mexico (2018)
The prehistoric occupants of the Southwestern United States and Mexico have many similarities, including maize agriculture and the Uto-Aztecan language family. A genetic relationship, potentially due to migration between the regions, has been investigated through mitochondrial DNA analysis. However, limited modern and ancient samples, a focus on the hypervariable region of the mitogenome, and limited samples from intermediate regions between the Valley of Mexico and the cultural complexes in the...
Genetic impact of slavery abolition in Mauritius: Ancient DNA data from Le Morne and Bois Marchand cemeteries (2015)
From a demographic point of view, the island of Mauritius can be considered a multicultural melting-pot derived from forced and free labor, as it was there where the British conducted the 'Great Experiment' to replace slaves with indentured workers after abolition. Despite the huge potential that Mauritius offers for studying admixed populations, it has remained uncharacterized from a genetic perspective until now. Several genetic markers have been analyzed in the current Mauritius population...
Genetic Insights into Indo-European Origins (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Wheels, Horses, Babies and Bathwaters: Celebrating the Impact of David W. Anthony on the Study of Prehistory" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient genomic data has provided important new clues that help to address the more than 200-year-old problem of the origin of Indo-European languages. Beginning in 2015, a series of papers have shown that Yamnaya steppe pastoralists--who spread over the steppes north of the...
The Genetic Prehistory of the Andean Highlands 7,000 Years BP though European Contact (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Ancient DNA in Service of Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The peopling of the Andean highlands above 2500m in elevation was a complex process that included cultural, biological and genetic adaptations. Here we present a time series of ancient whole genomes from the Andes of Peru, dating back to 7,000 calendar years before present (BP), and compare them to 64 new genome-wide genetic variation datasets from...
The Genetic Prehistory of the New World Arctic (2015)
The New World Arctic, the last region of the Americas to be populated by humans, has a relatively well-researched archaeology. However, there is no consensus on how the different Arctic traditions were genetically related to one another. We present genome-wide sequence data from ancient and present-day humans from Greenland, Arctic Canada, Alaska, Aleutian Islands, and Siberia, contributing new perspectives to the debate of cultural versus genetic replacement in the New World Arctic. We show...
Genetic Species Identification of Large Birds from the Dadiwan Neolithic Site in Northern China (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We present information and insight drawn from the Neolithic of northern China (ca. 8,000 – 5,000 BP) about the manner by which large, meaty birds (including potential precursors of the domestic chicken) were drawn into the human biome. Long before they were essential staples, they (along with a range of different, but similar birds) were an occasional, and...
Genetic Variation and Sociocultural Dynamics in Two Early Christian Cemeteries from Kulubnarti (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Ancient DNA in Service of Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Skeletal remains from two contemporaneous Early Christian Period (550–800 CE) cemeteries at Kulubnarti in Sudanese Nubia have been the subject of a decades-long biocultural research program. Craniometric and dental analyses have suggested biological similarity between members of the "R" and "S" cemetery communities, while analyses of health and...
Genome Sequencing of Ancient Dogs in the Americas to Understand Their Demographic History (2018)
Several ancient DNA studies have been conducted on dogs in the Americas, yet all have focused on the mitochondrial genome. In this study, we sequenced 79 complete mitochondrial genomes (mitogenomes) and seven nuclear genomes of ancient dogs from more than twenty archaeological sites, ranging in age from 10,000 to 800 years before present (ybp) to gain insight into the population history of dogs in the Americas. We compared the ancient dogs’ mitogenomes and nuclear genomes to those of modern dogs...
Genome-wide Ancient DNA from Historical Siberia as a Lens on Yeniseian Population History (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Ancient DNA in Service of Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The relevance of ancient DNA to debates in language prehistory is a noteworthy strand in Eurasian archaeogenetic research, where much effort has gone towards relating these data to Indo-European. We relate new genome-wide ancient DNA data from a historical Siberian individual to Yeniseian, an enigmatic and isolated language "microfamily" at the...
Genomic Data from Paquimé: Understanding the Cultural and Genetic Ties of the Site (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Paquimé, located in the Casas Grandes region of Northern Mexico, presents a rich cultural tradition with ties to populations to the South and North. Ancient mitochondrial DNA from Paquime’s occupants has not provided evidence of large-scale in-migration that led to the fluorescence of the site, as some scholars have hypothesized. This paper focuses on...
The Genomic Formation of Central and South Asia (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Ancient DNA in Service of Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper serves as an example of how ancient DNA (aDNA) data can provide new insight into large-scale population transformations of archaeological cultures. The details of population transformation through time in Central and South Asia have been unclear due to the lack of aDNA. To address this gap, we generated genome-wide data from 500 ancient...
Ghost of the Navigator: Tracking Initial Human Population Dispersal to the Palauan Archipelago (2016)
While Micronesia was one of the last geographical areas to be colonized by humans prehistorically, the timing, direction, and origins of initial settlement in many ways still remains unclear. The Chelechol ra Orrak site in Palau, which contains the oldest known human remains in Micronesia, (dating back to at least 2800 BP)—and that is one of only two burial sites in the Pacific Islands to pre-date 2500 BP —provides an excellent opportunity for direct study of population dispersals into the...
Hidden Hybrids: Camels and Cultural Blending in Ancient Near East (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant) (2017)
This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Two species from different domestication centres – the Bactrian camel from central Asia and the Dromedary from Arabia – were deliberately brought together and bred to create new, more powerful, animals. Larger than both parents and double the strength of its contributory species, the hybrid camel was the world’s first engineered hybrid transportation. Creating the hybrid camel required...
Homenaje a Clavos: Reflections on My and Other's Use of the Work of Charles Standish (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Thinking Big in the Andes: Papers in Honor of Charles Stanish" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this talk, I reflect on the work of Charles Vandalay Stanish, and how his work has been imported and exported by scholars around the world. I focus in particular on how I have utilized Chip's obra in my own life.
How to Choose Samples for aDNA: Bioarchaeological Best Practices for Sampling Human Remains (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Ancient DNA in Service of Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent methodological advances have rapidly increased the pace and scale of ancient DNA (aDNA) studies, prompting widespread sampling in museum collections and raising ethical concerns about inter-lab competition, treatment of human remains, and the research questions being addressed. Another key issue is selection of material that will be destroyed...
Identifying Seventeenth-Century Africans and High-Status Englishmen at Jamestown, Virginia (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Increasing the Accessibility of Ancient DNA within Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Emerging investigative techniques and access to reference skeletal series and comparative databases allow enhanced interpretation and recognition of individuals in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake region for which few documentary sources or identifying artifacts exist. As part of a pilot study of burials from Jamestown,...
The Impact of Climate Dynamics and Cultural Change on the Demography and Population Structure of Pre-Columbian Populations in the Atacama (2017)
Archaeological studies in the Central Andes have pointed at the temporal coincidence of climatic fluctuations and episodes of cultural transition throughout the pre-Columbian period. Although most scholars explain the connection between environmental and cultural changes by the impact of climatic alterations on the capacities of the ecosystems inhabited by pre-Columbian cultures, direct evidence for assumed demographic consequences has been missing so far. Desert margin areas, as we find them at...
Imperial Impact: Population Dynamics and Political Landscapes of Inner Asia under the First Steppe Empire (2023)
This is an abstract from the "From the Altai to the Arctic: New Results and New Directions in the Archaeology of North and Inner Asia" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper integrates survey, mortuary, and genetic research into a multidisciplinary and multiscalar consideration of the impact that large political regimes like empires have on the social landscapes of individual communities and whole regions. In the case of the first steppe empire...
Importation of Salted Atlantic Cod (Gadus morhua) into San Francisco, California during the Gold Rush-Era (ca. 1849-1855) (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Records from the Gold Rush San Francisco Bay Area indicate that food items were imported to offset the depletion of once abundant wild food sources. Fish were a large part of human diets during the Gold Rush, and while we know that Pacific cod (Gadus macrocephalus) were fished later in the 19th century, it is unclear whether they were fished during the Gold...
Improving Radiocarbon Dating with Ancient DNA Analysis (2017)
Recent advances in ancient DNA (aDNA) analysis have helped to shed new light on long-standing archaeological questions. Researchers can now study how elites and commoners may have been genetically related, the genetic heritage of the first migrants to a particular area, how ancient populations are related to modern groups, and more. While such revelations have been of critical importance to archaeology, results from recent analyses have implicated that ancient DNA analyses can also be applied to...