Island Archaeology (Other Keyword)
1-17 (17 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper underscores “ambiguity” and duality as pervasive factors in archaeological research through a case study of coarse earthenware from La Soye, Dominica. Within this framework, I concentrate my approach on syncretic foodways and ceramic productions, which blend, confound, and subvert straight-forward interpretations. Using the material culture as a...
The Assumption of Insular Marginality: The Curious Case of Isla Cedros, Baja California (2015)
What about islands inspires us to think of them as places on ‘the edge?’ The idea of an island is often more remote than the reality. The word itself conjures up notions of loneliness and isolation. Some islands are inextricably linked, to other islands and/or the adjacent mainland, while the nonpareil isolation of Rapa Nui is legendary. Lying off the Pacific Coast of Baja California, Isla Cedros presents a strange combination of these factors. The island supported a large resident...
Colonization of the Land of Stone Money: Resolving the Unclear Origins of Early Settlements of Yap, Western Caroline Islands (2017)
The prehistoric colonization of remote islands in Micronesia represents some of the most significant series of diasporas in human history. While archaeological and genetic research is shedding new light on the origins and timing of what were clearly multiple and chronologically disparate entries into the western and eastern Micronesian archipelagoes, many of these colonizing ventures are poorly understood. This is particularly true of Yap in the Western Caroline Islands. Unlike the Palau and the...
The comparative archaeology of the Channel Islands (2015)
Brian Fagan’s long fascination with the sea and sailing gives special resonance to his studies of coastal communities and human adaptation. In Before California he studied the Chumash peoples and the prehistoric settlement of the Channel Islands of the Santa Barbara Channel. In recognition of Brian’s evocation of broad-scale cross-cultural comparisons, the postglacial communities of the Californian Channel Islands are here contrasted with patterns of settlement and social change in the Channel...
Evidence of Exchange in Precolumbian Ceramics from Isla Colon, Bocas del Toro, Panama (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Materials in Movement in the Isthmo-Colombian Area" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Isla Colon, the largest island in the Bocas del Toro archipelago on Panama’s northwest coast, has a unique density of archaeological features in the region. Sitio Drago, the largest site yet found on the island, includes ceremonial and settlement mounds and a diverse and sizable assemblage of subsistence remains and cultural materials....
Hippos, Cows and CAARI: Alan Simmons’ impact on Cypriot Archaeology (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Pushing the Envelope, Chasing Stone Age Sailors and Early Agriculture: Papers in Honor of the Career of Alan H. Simmons" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. When Alan Simmons first arrived on Cyprus in 1985, the Cypriot Neolithic was considered a poorly understood and uninteresting backwater lagging behind the developments of the Levant mainland. IN the mid-1908s, The Khirokitia Culture (KC) was thought to be the first...
Human and Environmental Histories of the Rat Islands, Western Aleutians, Alaska: The 2014-2015 Research Season (2015)
Our multidisciplinary research team is beginning to model the role of humans in shaping the characteristics of existing southern Bering Sea and North Pacific terrestrial and marine ecologies in the Western Aleutians. During this past research season, we defined new cultural loci, acquired on and off-site pollen/tephra cores, and surveyed the coastal zone on areas of Kiska, Segula, and Little Sitkin Islands. The cultural occupations span Aleut prehistory and the World War II Japanese occupation....
Maritime Lifeways and Technological Choices of the Englefield Culture (7000-5600 cal BP) in Southern Patagonia: Insights from Obsidian and Bone Tool Analysis (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Otway Sea and Strait of Magellan region in Southern Patagonia witnessed the emergence of maritime lifeways approximately 7,000 to 5,600 years ago, leading to the establishment of the 'Englefield Culture.' This culture is characterized by its bone and lithic technology, notably the use of green obsidian. Our research is dedicated to reconstructing the...
Multigenerational, Multipurpose Landscapes and Seascapes in the Western Aleutian Islands (2017)
The landscape and seascape surrounding tiny Corvie Bay (400m wide) on southern Kiska Island in the western Aleutian Islands were occupied by the Qax̂un for 3,000 years. During their use of the area, they transformed the surrounding seas and lands from narrowly defined water tracks and lightly encamped places to deeply imbued, intensively inhabited, and probably owned sea and land spaces. This same pattern of imbuement, use, and ownership was reenacted throughout the western Aleutians over the...
The Nicaraguan Rise and the Problem of Early Peopling of the Greater Antilles (2015)
This presentation examines the patterns of interaction in the Greater Antilles at the time of early migrations, the sources of those population movements and the reasons behind them, with a special focus on the probable links between Lower Central America and the Western Caribbean, in light of recent research results from several academic fields, such as archaeology; aDNA studies; physical anthropology; toponomastics. It investigates developments that made possible such long distance maritime...
No Man or Woman is an Island Revisited: The Social Construction of Small Island Space (2015)
The construction of space usually begins with the georeferencing of physical boundaries. As such, space becomes an external container that affects the structure of it contents. This paper explores the construction of space from the perspective of the individual. It begins by recognizing the minimal distance of face-to-face interactions and expands outward from there. The first step is to reject three-dimensional space and to situate the individual in an n-dimensional space. Production,...
“Place for a Walrus to Haul Out”: Marine Mammals and Polynya Archaeology in Northern Foxe Basin, Nunavut, Arctic Canada (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Across Inuit Nunangat (the traditional Inuit territories of what is now Canada), the Little Ice Age (LIA) climate change episode likely resulted in significant changes in seasonal sea-ice abundance, thereby affecting relatively delicate coastal food webs. In this paper, we present the results-to-date of recent survey and excavation at Uglit (NfHd-1), a...
The Revolutionary Quash (2020)
This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This is the story of one small man with huge responsibilities. Quash was one of Butler’s enslaved people on Little St Simons Island, Georgia during the antebellum period. Even under the thumb of overseer Roswell King, Quash managed to gain his own form of autonomy, lived in his own house that was much larger than a traditional slave dwelling, on his own island. During the spring of...
Site-Based Survey at S'Urachi: Deep History, Thick Shrubs and Historical Connections in West Central Sardinia (2016)
The nurage of S’Urachi is a Bronze Age stone monument that has served a central place in the landscape of west-Central Sardinia for millennia. Since 2013, the archaeological site has been the subject of an ongoing investigation into the daily lives of local inhabitants living around the nuraghe from the Bronze Age through the Roman period. The project—a joint effort of an international team funded by Brown Universtiy and the Comune di San Vero Milis—has investigated the immediate surroundings of...
Small Island Water Security: considering how the past can help secure a safer future (2015)
Water security is the capacity of a population to safeguard sustainable access to adequate quantities of acceptable quality water for sustaining livelihoods. Small islands can often face particularly problematic issues surrounding water security with the impacts of precipitation variability and relative sea level change keenly felt on islands with limited rain catchment and fast draining hydrological systems. This paper explores some archaeological case studies on small islands from the...
Small, But Not Insignificant: Human Subsistence, Ecology, and Land Use on Anacapa Island, California (2015)
Anacapa Island (2.9 km2) is the second smallest of California’s Channel Islands and has limited freshwater and terrestrial biodiversity. Called ‘Anayapax, a word meaning deception or mirage, by the Chumash, archaeologists have long speculated that the island was occupied seasonally or as a stopover by people based on the mainland or other islands. Here, we focus on our recent archaeological research at CA-ANI-2 and other Anacapa sites. Occupied between about 3130 and 2750 cal BP, CA-ANI-2...
Small-Scale Agriculture and Localized Food Processing: Overview of a Post-Emancipation Communal Sugar (and Mango) Processing Platform on Providencia Island, Colombia (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sugar production was integral to European colonization during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but the archaeology of sugar has almost exclusively focused on industrial-level, surplus, and profit centered production at large plantations. This has resulted in a lack of data related to small-scale productive activities centered on localized sales and...