Communities of Practice (Other Keyword)

101-125 (125 Records)

Ramey on the Frontier: A Pilot Study of Select Ramey Incised Technology from Cahokia’s Southern Neighbors (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Anthony Farace.

This is an abstract from the "Step by Step: Tracing World Potting Traditions through Ceramic Petrography" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cahokia’s influence on the archaeological cultures of the upper Central Mississippi River Valley (CMRV) has often been described as less prominent than processes taking place in the northern hinterlands. Although few examples are found at each site, Ramey Incised jars are found in many early and middle...


Reconstructing the Chaîne Opératoire of Inka and Local Pottery from Pachcamac, Peru Using Compositional Analyses and X-Radiography (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only James Davenport. Marie-Claude Boileau.

This is an abstract from the "Alfareros deste Inga: Pottery Production, Distribution and Exchange in the Tawantinsuyu" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the Inka Empire (Tawantinsuyu), Inka polychrome pottery was used for state-sponsored purposes. This pottery was not produced solely in the imperial core and distributed to provincial contexts, but rather was produced by a diverse range of potters recruited from subject populations across the...


Regional Variation Among Ancestral Pueblo Water Jars: A Geometric Morphometric Approach (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathleen Barvick.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pottery in the US Southwest has long been studied for the insights it provides into social identity. Differences in construction may suggest differences in conceptions of the correct way to make a ceramic vessel; when studied through the lens of practice theory, variation in form speaks to alternate communities of practice and may show boundaries in...


Residential Trajectories of Commoner, Elite, and Noble Spaces at Actuncan, Belize (2018)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Kara Fulton. David Mixter. Borislava Simova.

This paper summarizes the archaeological investigations of ten residential units at Actuncan that likely represented three distinct social strata: commoner, elite, and noble. We explore the trajectories of these residences from the Preclassic to the Terminal Classic period. Data suggest that although political authority in the Mopan River valley shifted throughout Actuncan’s long occupation, many commoner residences maintained local identities and residential continuity through time. However,...


A Review of the Archaeological Evidence for Smoking across the Americas and Africa (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Mario Zimmermann. Shannon Tushingham.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. At present, smoking is considered one of the largest threats to public health globally. Nonetheless, the inhalation of psychoactive substances after deliberate combustion has deep historical roots. Moreover, current models hold that smoking was invented independently in the Americas and Africa. This paper reviews the archaeological evidence available for...


Ruminations on Puebloan Ethnic Diversity and Ceramic Specialization in the Ancient Western San Juan (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Winston Hurst.

This is an abstract from the "Transcending Modern Boundaries: Recent Investigations of Cultural Landscapes in Southeastern Utah" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Though traditionally perceived as representing two distinct Puebloan subcultures, San Juan Red Ware and Tsegi Orange Ware are best understood as representing a single ceramic tradition whose production geography shifted several times between the eighth and fourteenth centuries,...


Sight Formation Processes: Archaeology of Cultural and Sociohistorical Extromission and “Seeing Together” (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Zach Chase.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite insights from recent archaeologies of the senses, notions persist in the human and social sciences of vision as the invariant individual’s passive reception of a phenomenally “given” world, while cognitivists posit a universal “visual grammar.” In contrast, this paper asks how archaeology might draw on and contribute to the understanding that...


Similarities and Differences Between Upper Gila and Mimbres Valley Ceramics in Southwestern New Mexico (2018)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Gilman. Jakob Sedig.

Although both the Mimbres and the Gila valleys are within the Mimbres region and are not far apart, they seem to have rather major differences in the numbers of rooms per room block, the numbers of room blocks per site, and the designs painted on Mimbres black-on-white pottery. In this poster, we report similarities and differences between Mimbres Valley (MV) and upper Gila/western Mimbres (UGWM) pottery designs. We start by defining and quantifying style elements seemingly more common in the...


The social implications of elk hunting for ancestral Coast Salish communities (2017)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Ewonus.

Field, laboratory and archival archaeological research has helped to reconstruct important parts of the ancestral seasonal landscape in the southern Strait of Georgia. Contextual understanding of place provides a baseline for questions of sociality during the last c. 5000 years prior to the colonial era. Evidence illustrates several of the historical processes through which community identities were brought into focus in the Coast Salish world. As an example, I explore what is known about one of...


Something About Kutau-Bao: Understanding Dominant Obsidian Sources (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Robin Torrence.

This is an abstract from the "2019 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of M. Steven Shackley" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. After c. 50 years of research using a diverse range of geochemical techniques, patterns of movement for obsidian in the Pacific region, dating from the Pleistocene up to the historic period, have been documented comprehensively. Although there are eight high quality obsidian sources, by far the largest quantity of...


Sound Practices in Late Postclassic to Early Colonial Tlaxcallan: Applying a Community of Practice Framework to Investigate Sonic Expression (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Katrina Kosyk.

This is an abstract from the "Music Archaeology's Paradox: Contextual Dependency and Contextual Expressivity" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In archaeological interpretations of Postclassic period central Mexico, sound practices and related assemblages are often conceptualized as unchanging, standardized, and fixed to a common Mesoamerican religious system under the umbrella of Aztec cultural expression. This neglect of other polities’ sound...


The Struggle Within: Effects of Spanish Interaction Intensity on Pueblo Pottery Technology as Revealed through Petrographic Study (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Kari Schleher. Suzanne Eckert.

This is an abstract from the "Step by Step: Tracing World Potting Traditions through Ceramic Petrography" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Spanish intrusion, colonization, and missionization impacted many aspects of life for the Pueblo people. Examination of ceramic technology provides a way to recognize cultural continuity and transformation in Pueblo communities as well as highlighting the role of Indigenous agency in determining the structure of...


Technological Knowledge, Migrations and Ancestral Puebloan Communities of Practice in The Northern Rio Grande of New Mexico (2018)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Agostini.

In the mid-late Classic period (AD 1250 - 1400), Ancestral Pueblo people living on the Pajarito Plateau of New Mexico experienced cultural change due to difficulties in farming during periods of drought. As a result, communities abandoned pre-contact plateau villages to join their Tewa-speaking relatives at the earliest historic period Rio Grande settlements. Oral histories from descendant communities from the 19th and early 20th centuries recount how the remaining members of these communities...


Technologies of Clay: Pottery, Architecture, and the Transformation of Mud in the Atacama Desert (South-Central Andes) (2018)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Estefanía Vidal-Montero. Itací Correa. Liz Vilches. Francisco Gallardo. Mauricio Uribe.

In the Atacama Desert, pottery is one of the main technological changes of the Formative Period (ca. 2700 BP). The initial industry (LCA type) is characterized by a stylistic homogeneity coupled with a wide geographical distribution. Compositional analyses, however, have shown a significant regularity in pastes, suggesting the use of localized sources of raw materials and/or specific production centers—indicative of a well-defined recipe and style. Provenance studies have identified a locus of...


The Timespace of the Pre-Hispanic City of Cerro de Oro (2018)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Francesca Fernandini.

This work uses the concept of timespace (Schatzki 2010) to follow the construction and habitation of the prehispanic city of Cerro de Oro within the lower Cañete valley between ca. 500-900 AD. The concept of timespace assumes that the temporality and spatiality of the social are considered as intertwined elements that form the dynamic infrastructure where social phenomena such as power, social organization or coordinated action are constituted. ...


To Spin and Whorl: Functional and Symbolic Associations of Chancay Weaving Tools (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeffrey Splitstoser. Gabrielle Vail.

This is an abstract from the "Textile Tools and Technologies as Evidence for the Fiber Arts in Precolumbian Societies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological sources suggest that textiles from Chancay culture (ca. 1000-1470), occupying the central coastal region of Peru, were produced in large quantities. While they are ubiquitous in collections all over the world, they remain to be systematically studied, as do the tools that were used to...


Tracing Relationships over Time: Models of Exchange in the Greater Ica Region during the Paracas-Nasca Transition (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Ann Peters.

This is an abstract from the "Developments through Time on the South Coast of Peru: In Memory of Patrick Carmichael" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Research on the "Paracas Necropolis" textile assemblage from the Necropolis of Wari Kayan and comparisons with contemporary artifacts has led to the development of models of artifact production and uses (*chaîne opératoire), with evident implications for models of the social relations of production....


Two Thousand Years of Pot-Making: Exploring Neolithic Ceramic Traditions in SW Calabria, Italy (2018)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Kostalena Michelaki. John Robb.

This poster will examine the degree to which the task of pot-making changed from the Early/Middle (ca. 5700-5000 BCE) to the Late Neolithic (ca. 5000-4000 BCE) periods in SW Calabria, Italy. We will present the manufacturing sequences of all Neolithic wares, based on the results of more than a decade of stylistic, mineralogical, and physico-chemical analyses of ceramics from the sites of Umbro Neolithic and Penitenzeria, as well as the results of laboratory and replicative experiments using...


Understanding Early Archaic Stone Tool Production Practices: A Pilot Study (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Michele Troutman.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Through Funk’s (1993) research into the Upper Susquehanna Valley Region in New York, several important Early Archaic (10,000-8,000BP) archaeological sites were uncovered from Wells Bridge, New York. One of these Early Archaic sites named the Johnsen #3 site contains multiple Kirk horizon occupations in stratified deposits. Early Archaic sites are still rare in...


Understanding Pottery Production at El Campanario (Huarmey-Peru) through Ceramic Paste Analysis and pXRF (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only José L. Peña. Robert H. Tykot.

This is an abstract from the "Scaling Potting Networks: Recent Contributions from Ceramic Petrography " session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The present research focuses on the strategies in the procurement of raw material used in the production of pottery at the El Campanario site during the beginning of the Late Intermediate period (AD 1150–1280). The manufacture of pottery occurred within the domestic areas at this site and while domestic pottery was...


Upper Mississippian Stone Tools and Community Organization (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Sterner.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research investigates community organization as an approach to understanding the shift from typologically complex to a simpler lithic technology after circa A.D. 500 in the Prairie Peninsula. I compare the lithic practice of Upper Mississippian groups settled in western Wisconsin (A.D. 1400-1700) at the La Crosse locality to that of groups in eastern...


The Utility of Communities of Practice in a Spanish Colonial Context (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth E. Straub.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Archaeologists studying colonial contexts know that these periods are often marked by rapid social and demographic change. In the southeastern United States, these changes led to the coalescence of formerly independent peoples. Interestingly, there are also rapid changes in potting practices. While these processes of coalescence...


Viewing Ceramic "Types," "Varieties," and "Modes" from a Practice-Based Perspective: Case Studies from the Greater Southwest (2018)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Judith Habicht-Mauche. Emma Britton.

As a student of Jimmy Griffin and Irving Rouse, much of Stephen Williams’ early archaeological research involved the typological analysis of pottery collections from the American Southeast to reconstruct regional culture history. Later, as Director of the Peabody Museum, he played an important role in facilitating the development of a new generation of archaeological and materials science approaches to pottery analysis at Harvard with the construction of the Putnam Laboratory. This paper uses...


Voices in Conversation: Assessing 36 Years of Demographics in a Professional Archaeology Newsletter (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Samantha Stone. Samuel Burns.

This is an abstract from the "Documenting Demographics in Archaeological Publications and Grants" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Academic research is comparable to a conversation. As in all conversations, certain voices are amplified while others are underrepresented. Much of this academic conversation happens in peer-reviewed journals and academic books, but informal conversations outside of these arenas are often overlooked. We are studying the...


When the desert meets the sea: the annual journey of quitovaquenses to the San Jorge beach as a community of practice (2017)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Selene Yuridia Galindo Cumplido.

This paper presents an ethnographic account of the people of Quitovac, Sonoras yearly journey to the sea. The village is set amidst the Altar desert. Every year the people of this town take a trip to the Sea of Cortés and make the shore a very special place. I present this account from the perspective of communities of practice emphasizing how the activities they undertake are the result of a continual interaction between people and places and between the distinct actors present. I also take...