aDNA (Other Keyword)
1-19 (19 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While mounting evidence suggests that the Aztatlán tradition in west Mexico was a major cosmopolitan region during the Postclassic period (AD 900-1521), archaeologists have characterized items and beliefs as being culturally distinct from the rest of Mesoamerica. Recently, endogenous and exogenous material culture distribution has been interpreted as the...
Ancient mtDNA: both Amazonian and Andean migrants in western Puerto Rico by late Saladoid times (2016)
The Machuca archaeological site in western Puerto Rico is found in the Añasco river flood-plain, next to one of the presumed ancient mouths of the river, less than half a kilometer east of the shoreline. The first burial was found in a fetal position together with ceramic remains of the Late Saladoid or Cuevas period. Radiocarbon dating on bone collagen placed the burial at AD 550 to 660 (2-sigma calibration) whereas that on charred material found inside one of the pots placed it at AD 650 to...
Beautiful Virgins and Male War Captives: The Role of Sex Attribution in Ancient Maya Human Sacrifice at Midnight Terror Cave, Belize (2017)
The prurient element in the popular notion of the Maya sacrifice of "beautiful virgins" during the first half of the twentieth century (Frost and Arnold 1909; Willard 1926) appears to have made researchers wary of the topic of gender in study of human sacrifice. The interest in human sacrifice arose in the 1990s at the same time as the formulation of the warfare hypothesis for the collapse of Maya civilization (Demerast 1990) so that models of human sacrifice tended to assume that victims were...
Beyond Kinship Trees: Capturing the Social Tapestry in European Prehistory (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While kinship studies based on ancient DNA (aDNA) data have been instrumental in reconstructing biological relationships in European prehistory, they often overlook the complex web of social interactions that shaped prehistoric communities. This interdisciplinary investigation delves into the rich tapestry of social dynamics that characterized European...
Bioarchaeological Research at Castillo de Huarmey, Peru (2017)
The Wari imperial mausoleum, discovered in 2012-13 at the site of Castillo de Huarmey, Peru brought to light remains of 64 individuals buried within the main chamber underneath and additional seven in the contexts directly associated with the mausoleum. The upper layers of the building also yielded a collection of human and animal remains. The collection of human remains brings a unique set of data for bioarchaeologists. The research performed so far include standard analyses like taphonomy,...
The Bridge River Dogs: A Comprehensive interpretation of aDNA and stable isotopes analysis obtained from dog remains (2016)
Excavations at the Bridge River site have been on-going since 2003, increasing our understanding of the communities that inhabited the Middle Fraser Canyon, British Columbia, over 1,000 years ago. The most recent excavation at Housepit 54 in the summer of 2014 supplied further data regarding relationships between people and their dogs. Dogs are well documented in the Middle Fraser Canyon through both archaeological excavations and traditional knowledge. A household's possession of a dog has been...
Exploring Migration and Kinship of the Ancient Maya through Isotopes and aDNA in NW Belize (2017)
As a uniquely sustained archaeological research program that has annually excavated in the Rio Bravo Conservation and Management Area for 25 years, the Programme for Belize Archaeological Project (PfBAP) offers a wealth of knowledge for bioarchaeological research. This paper examines ancient Maya burials from northwestern Belize, spanning the Late Preclassic (250 BCE – 250 CE) to the Terminal Classic (850 – 950 CE). Detailed here are stable isotope, ancient DNA, and osteological analyses from a...
How to use DNA analysis to assess health in the past. Applications for New World soft-tissues. (2015)
Human remains can offer many insights into our past culture, especially about our attitudes to death. However, how we lived is a much larger question. Whilst paleopathology can give us some understanding of the diseases that affected our ancestors, DNA evidence can give us so much more. Mummification, either artificial or natural, of human remains is highly variable, for example frozen ice-mummies such as the Tyrolean Iceman have a very different thermal history to heat desiccated mummies such...
The Human-Mediated Evolution of Cattle and Its Impact on Cattle-Based Agriculture in the Neolithic of the Polish Lowlands (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cattle were the most important domesticated animal in the Neolithic of the Polish lowlands. The paper will explore the character of human-mediated evolution of cattle following rapid development of Neolithic groups in the region, the need of adaptation to new ecological niches and the strain caused by climate change and human induced environmental pressure. It...
The Impact of Fishing and Transportation Technologies on Nineteenth-Century Fisheries and Fish Supply in New Orleans, Louisiana (2024)
This is an abstract from the "*SE New Orleans and Its Environs: Historical Archaeology and Environmental Precarity" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper examines fish supply in late nineteenth-century New Orleans to understand how new fishing and transportation technologies transformed fish trade networks in the Gulf of Mexico and beyond. Previous research has demonstrated temporal and geographic shifts in the city’s fish supply, and we...
Mobility and Migration as Ecological Processes in Ancient Eurasia (2018)
New research in the field of aDNA has re-invigorated debates about migrations across Eurasia in prehistory. Emerging data in this field demands that we interrogate how mobility and migration from an ecological and demographic perspective, since these factors influence our interpretation of the still emerging genetic data. In this paper I present the archaeological conditions of the Eurasian steppe ca. 3000-2000 BCE applied to a spatial model with the goal of generating a more complex...
Paleogenetic analysis of the Eneolithic (4900 – 2750 calBC) Trypillian Culture from Verteba Cave, Ukraine (2016)
In this presentation, we make use of high-resolution paleogenetic data to better understand the peoples of the agropastoral Tripolye Culture. Verteba Cave is the only known site with associated Trypillian human remains. Here, we explore population origins and the Tripolye people’s relationship with local populations from the greater Carpathian and Dnieper regions, as well as possible connections to peoples from the Near East. Our motivation for this study derives from several unknowns....
Paleopathology and the History of Tuberculosis: New Results from Ancient South America (2015)
This paper will first examine skeletal evidence for disseminated TB in the Americas prior to the Era of Exploration. We then consider this American tuberculosis in the context of traditional models and more recent molecular evolutionary models based on contemporary Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex strain variation. The most parsimonious current global history for TB places its origin in Africa, then spreading to South and Southeast Asia. Subsequent dispersal to Europe and increased virulence...
Pre-Columbian Human Mobility and Interaction in the Caribbean: A Zooarchaeological and Ancient DNA Study of Guinea Pigs (2015)
Current zooarchaeological records indicate that humans introduced domestic guinea pig from South America to the Caribbean islands around AD 600. Using zooarchaeological and ancient DNA datasets from domestic guinea pig remains in the Caribbean, we address human mobility and interaction between the islands of the Caribbean and South America during the second half of the Ceramic Age (ca. AD 600-1500). We present new data regarding the continental origins of pre-Columbian guinea pig in the...
Slavery and the subaltern: bioarchaeological analyses of Viking Age Swedish populations (2016)
The definition of slavery during the long Scandinavian Viking Age (AD c.750–1100) is far from simple. In recent years scholars have pointed out that the terminology for slaves, and the attitudes towards unfree labourers, found in Icelandic Sagas, on rune stones or in law codes, actually reflect a significant variation in social rank. Even though slaves and the slave trade constituted an important and determining element in the Scandinavian economy during this time, a material culture clearly...
Sweet aDNA O'Mine: The Rise and Fall of Ice Sheets and the Arctic Peopling from Beringia (2016)
The peopling of the North American Arctic was made possible after the full retreat of the Laurentide ice sheet. The archaeological record supports multiple migrations beginning approximately 6,000 years BP, thousands of years after the initial colonization of the Americas. Modern Iñupiat/Inuit peoples are the descendants of a recent (~800 ybp) and rapid (<200 years) migration by the Neo-Eskimo Thule. The Thule brought with them specialized technological developments adapted for the exploitation...
A Synthesis of Archaeological, Genetic, and Spatial Data in Studying Medieval Families: An Example from the Vanished Village of Gać, Poland (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Life and Death in Medieval Central Europe" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In our paper, we aim to demonstrate the use of spatial, genetic, and archaeological data in family studies by using a Medieval cemetery in Gać as our case study. An international team of archaeologists and anthropologists have partially recovered and examined a cemetery situated in the now-vanished village of Gać over three seasons, as part of a...
Using Archaeological and Genomic Data to Investigate the Evolutionary History of Celiac Disease (2017)
The Neolithic Transition brought with it a number of changes in the relationships that people had with animals, plants and pathogens. Increasing proximity to domesticated and commensal animals, and larger, denser communities shifted the disease ecologies of these communities and resulted in an increasing number of disease vectors. I use ancient and modern DNA to look at the effects that these new dietary and epidemiological trends had on people in the past and the genomic legacies of the...
Welcome to My Nightmare - Ancient DNA from Pacific Islands (2016)
Recent reports of ancient DNA recovery from samples that are 10s if not 100s of thousands of years old attest to the amazing developments in aDNA technology in recent years. Unfortunately, most aDNA from the Pacific Islands is poorly preserved and highly degraded. Despite the relatively short history of settlement on many Pacific Islands, ancient DNA is often difficult, if not impossible, to obtain from archaeological samples recovered from Pacific sites. Still, we are able to recover aDNA...