contact period (Other Keyword)
226-250 (327 Records)
Much of the archaeological research done in the interior deserts of Australia has focused on rockshelter sites, primarily because of intact stratigraphy and better preservation than in open air contexts. However, ethnographic studies of local Martu populations have demonstrated that people rarely lived in rockshelters or caves, particularly during the wet season when populations focused around reliable soaks and clay pans. Therefore, it is necessary to study the distribution of archaeological...
Precontact Indigenous Fire Stewardship: From the Valley to the Forest (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Future Directions for Archaeology and Heritage Research in the Willamette Valley, Oregon" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Indigenous peoples lived in the Willamette Valley and adjacent highly productive upland forests for millennia and successfully coexisted with the region’s fire regimes. Like today, wildfires posed a threat to past societies and their livelihoods. Precontact Indigenous peoples of the Willamette...
The Process of Interpretation: The Antiquity of the Namurlanjanyngku and Post-Contact History in Yanyuwa Country, Northern Australia (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. The search for meaning in rock art has been the focus of scholarly attention and debate for decades. A common feature that unites many of these studies is what the enquiry produces – for example, what a motif represents. However, studies focussing on the processes by which meaning is generated are, comparatively speaking, fewer...
Proposed Historical Origins of the Tablita Dance of the Rio Grande Pueblos (2018)
The Tablita Dance, commonly known as the Corn Dance, is a well-known event among the Rio Grande Pueblos where, in connection with saint’s days, it is performed during the growing season. The corn dance may occur at other times as well, but without a linkage to the village patron saint. A number of diverse factors, however, indicate that this dance as known today is a post-Hispanic aspect of Pueblo ceremonialism. In addition to the dance’s obvious link to the Catholic patron saint of each...
Provenance and Power: Decolonizing Powhatan's Mantle (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Deep History, Colonial Narratives, and Decolonization in the Native Chesapeake" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Popularly known as “Powhatan’s Mantle,” the shell-decorated and sewn animal skins are an iconic object of material culture from seventeenth-century Virginia. On display in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England, we argue that the Mantle’s provenance and possible links to Indigenous cosmology have been...
Pueblo de Indios: Syncretic Art and Architecture in the Negotiation of Indigenous Identity (2018)
In the years immediately following the conquest of the Aztec empire by the Spanish crown, there was a period of transition in which acculturation, adaptation, and/or adoption of new configurations of political powers, religion, and social structures ushered in the Colonial period in Mexico. One of the results of the encounter between indigenous and Spanish cultures is the syncretism that developed in the art and religious architecture of this region. Studies of syncretic art in colonial Mexico...
pXRF in the Colca Valley: Experimenting with a Nondestructive Chemical Discrimination of Ceramic Fragments (2018)
The choice of clay and pigment sources for ceramic production in the Andes has the potential to convey complex information about the resilience and persistence of Inca social structure in the Colca Valley throughout the imposition of Spanish imperialism. Prior to the Spanish invasion, ceramics in the Colca Valley were likely primarily produced by a handful of specialized communities which would have widely distributed their products. It is therefore expected that there would be a standardization...
The Quivira Connections (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although it was visited by three Spanish expeditions, knowledge of Quivira quickly became enshrouded in myth. Nevertheless, early documentary evidence suggests that the land of the ancestral Wichita was extensive, heavily populated, and an important source of bison products for both the Greater Southwest and the Southeast. At the western end, a...
Quivira in a New Light (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Quivira Revisited" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The identification of the "great settlement" visited by Juan de Oñate in 1601 has led to a wholesale revision of our understanding of protohistoric archaeology in Kansas. Instead of clusters of villages, the habitation sites of the Great Bend Aspect are large towns that contained thousands of residents. Sites of this scale require the use of remote sensing...
Radiocarbon and Historical Archaeology in Iroquoia: Bringing Near-Calendar Dating Precision to Iroquoian Chronology with Radiocarbon – Methods, Issues and Potential (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Dating Iroquoia: Advancing Radiocarbon Chronologies in Northeastern North America" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper outlines the aims and methods of the Dating Iroquoia project by which we propose to achieve calendar chronological precision from radiocarbon for Iroquoian sites at, or better than, the level of individual settlement spans – i.e. calendar resolution at the level of approximately one to two...
Re-Rediscovering Iliniwek Village: Utilizing Material Culture to Better Understand Early Trade Along the Mississippi River. (2019)
This is an abstract from the "From Iliniwek to Ste Genevieve: Early Commerce along the Mississippi" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Iliniwek Village State Historic Site is the location of a large contact period Peoria Village of up to 8000 people. First encountered by Marquette and Joliet, the village was discovered from a path seen off the Mississippi River in 1673. Lost and forgotten, the site was rediscovered in 1984 and due to its unique...
Reanalyzing "The Rise": A Gobernador Phase Navajo Habitation Site in Northwest New Mexico. (2018)
In 2003, a master’s thesis project examined a multicomponent Navajo habitation site dating to the 17th-18th centuries in the Dinétah region of northwest New Mexico. The initial survey program carried out a number of activities, including site mapping, surface collection, and artifact analyses; however, certain questions were left unanswered. A new phase of research initiated in the summer of 2017 aims to better characterize the site and explore the possibility of a pastoral adaptation on the...
Recent research about the Chiapanec and the Central Depression of Chiapas, Mexico, during the Postclassic period (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Five years of survey and excavations are providing data regarding Postclassic and Contact-period Central Chiapas, allowing new proposals regarding the functioning of the Chiapanec polity. This study presents an analysis of the distribution of the population near ancient Chiapan, the capital of the Chiapanec polity at the time of the arrival of the...
The Recipes of Disaster in Northern Iroquoia: Integrating Digital Image Analysis into Petrographic Practice (2018)
European contact with Northern Iroquoian communities brought about a series of direct and indirect consequences. These involved European-disease epidemics and a series of migrations that moved people across the landscape as refugees, captives, or conquerors. Ceramic petrography offers a way for archaeologists to understand the impacts such demographic upheavals can have on technological systems. Iroquoian potters often use a recurrent set of rock and sand types that homogenize the paste-type...
Recognizing Post-Columbian Indigenous Sites in California’s Colonial Hinterlands (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Recognizing and Recording Post-1492 Indigenous Sites in North American Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Land-use patterns of seasonally mobile hunter-gatherers present a particular set of challenges to archaeological recognition of post-1492 indigenous residential sites in the colonial hinterlands of California. The relatively short duration of site use, frequent re-use of sites episodically occupied in...
Reconsidering the Impacts of Late Mississippian Chiefdoms on Early Spanish Entradas: A View from Western North Carolina (2024)
This is an abstract from the "*SE The State of Theory in Southeastern Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Late Mississippian world was populated with several chiefly polities competing for regional dominance in a constantly shifting socio-political landscape. In the mid-sixteenth century, two Spanish entradas, led by Hernando de Soto and Juan Pardo, would become entangled in this competitive landscape, attempting to bring late Medieval...
Reconstructing Vanished Midwestern Wetlands: Insights from the Aquatic Fauna of the Middle Grant Creek Site (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Wetlands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The same glacial processes that produced Lake Michigan in midwestern North America also produced numerous wetlands of many types at the southern end of the lake. A diverse wetland matrix of smaller lakes, rivers, streams, ponds, marshes, swamps, bogs, and fens was once found throughout the region. Many of these wetlands have been destroyed or altered by urban...
Rediscovering Assil: An Ethnohistoric Salinan Village (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Evidence of a large site in southern Monterey County, California, is likely the ethnohistoric village of Assil, chiefly capital of a district of the same name. Part of the site is submerged by the waters of Lake San Antonio. The site played a crucial role in an 1818 battle between the Yokuts invaders and the Spanish with their Salinan allies. The village...
Refining Haudenosaunee Site Sequences in the Cayuga Lake Region (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, I refine fifteenth- and sixteenth-century village relocation sequences for Haudenosaunee sites located on both the eastern and western sides of Cayuga Lake (in what is today central New York State). This area is the traditional homeland of the Cayuga Nation. First, I present information on Cayuga sites, including data on settlement types and...
Reflecting on the History and Use of Rectangular Obsidian "Mirrors" from Central Mexico: Reinterpreting Old Museum Collections (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper highlights the relevance and potential of collections-based research through a case study of rectangular obsidian "mirrors" from Central Mexico, typically associated with the Aztec, housed at the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). To date these highly polished obsidian objects are found exclusively in museum...
Refuse Disposal and Activity Area Patterns in a Fur Trade Period Pithouse on the Nechako Plateau, British Columbia (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Excavations in a 19th century housepit revealed a simple stratigraphy allowing distinctions to be made between the artifact assemblages of the roof-fill and those of the house interior. It was found that lithic debitage was most common in interior living spaces, and seemingly still usable trade goods occur in the roof zone. These results are contrary to...
Reimagining Creole. The Deep History of Mixed Identities in the Windward Islands, Lesser Antilles (2018)
The Lesser Antilles are known as an arena of to- and froing of peoples from different areas of the insular Caribbean and coastal mainland areas of south America during its entire pre-colonial history. Migration, and intensive networks of human mobility and exchange of goods and ideas have created diverse ethnic/cultural communities across these small islands. These, coupled with constantly shifting alliances among the various peoples have resulted in what can only be described as Creole...
Reimagining Non-Representational Rock Art through Proto-Historical Indigenous Cartographic Traditions (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Art and Archaeology of the West: Papers in Honor of Lawrence L. Loendorf" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. When confronted with apparently non-representational forms at prehistoric rock art sites, North American researchers tend to categorize such imagery as abstract symbols, shamanic art, or entoptic phenomena. Drawing on research in the field of historical geography and utilizing a direct-historical,...
The Religious Network in the Early Spanish Colonialism in Asia: A Comparative Study of Seventeenth-Century Church Sites in Archaeological Contexts (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Evangelization of China and Japan was one of the missions of Spanish colonial projects in Asia, and churches, as critical monuments in colonial landscapes, could be an access to investigate European colonial activities. However, unlike the rich studies of missionary archaeology in the Americas, although some church sites have been excavated or documented...
Representing Historical Culture on the Big and Small Screen: Success and Challenges from the Algonquian Chesapeake (2019)
This is an abstract from the "From Tomb Raider to Indiana Jones: Pitfalls and Potential Promise of Archaeology in Pop Culture" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In what ways can archaeology and historical anthropology contribute to popular media representations of the past, and what responsibility do consultants have to ensure accurate portrayals of the peoples and cultures they study? For projects that combine dramatic performance, scholars and...