Monumentality (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jan Simek. Stephen Alvarez. Alan Cressler. Jordan Schafer.

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 production of 3D models with photogrammetry has seen some recent application in rock art studies as a means of documenting sites and presenting them to the public. However, the use of photogrammetric models as data sources for discovery and analysis has received little attention. In this paper, we present work at 19th...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniela Triadan. Takeshi Inomata.

This is an abstract from the "Aguada Fénix and the Middle Usumacinta Region: Interregional Interactions and Social Transformations in the Middle Preclassic Period" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The recently discovered site of Aguada Fenix in eastern Tabasco, Mexico is one of the largest monumental constructions in Mesoamerica. It was built in a standardized architectural pattern that we call the Middle Formative Usumacinta Pattern (MFU). Its...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Everhart.

The Woodland societies of the central Scioto Valley are renowned for various aspects of their ceremonial practices. Among the better known are craft production of ornate works from exotic materials and the erection of vast monumental landscapes. Those construction practices led to monuments with an incredible diversity of form, scale, and organization. This variability is yet difficult to explain, with the existing explanations differing widely and being inter-related with various other social...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Luis Sanchez.

This is an abstract from the "Centralizing Central America: New Evidence, Fresh Perspectives, and Working on New Paradigms" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Trabajos pormenorizados a nivel de forma-función para la caracterización de actividades y espacios sociales son raros en las investigaciones arqueológicas intra-sitio en el Valle Central de Costa Rica, incluyendo asentamientos complejos y con construcciones monumentales características del 750...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Miriam Domínguez.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Innovations in Ecuadorian Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The earliest written descriptions of the Tamaylacha (Jubones) River and its surroundings were penned by the priest Pedro Arias Dávila (1582) during his journey(s) through Cañari territory. These were followed by the accounts of Francisco José de Caldas who joined the research expedition of von Humboldt and Bonpland in 1804, the accounts by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jose Narvaez.

El Paraíso architectonic complex is located in the lower section of the Chillon River Valley, less than 2 km from the Pacific Ocean, in Lima, the capital city of Peru. It is composed by 14 structures, or huacas, distributed in an area of 47 hectares, in a rural place named Chuquitanta. The site is recognized as one of the earliest expressions of monumental architecture and social complexity in Peru since the works of Frédéric Engel in the 1960’s and Jeffrey Quilter in the 1980’s. Since 2015, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Stauffer.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Geoarchaeology and Environmental Archaeology Perspectives on Earthen-Built Constructions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. First detected by Charles Bareis in 1969 in Cahokia’s Ramey Field tract, Mound 17 (the Bareis Mound) was partially exposed beneath artificially mixed plaza fills, immediately west of the palisade wall that bounds the eastern extremity of the site core. Following an analysis of Bareis’s...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bettina Arnold. Manuel Fernandez Goetz.

Walls are assumed to serve as systems of containment and protection in response to social divisiveness but they may also serve to reduce or mask conflict within a society. Their physical form may be entirely expedient, largely symbolic, or some combination of the two. Early Iron Age settlements in west-central Europe were often situated on promontories with wall and ditch systems encircling portions of the occupied terrain but because of the daunting task of excavating such hillfort sites, which...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Craig Shapiro.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Analyses of lidar datasets have allowed archaeologists to expand the study of archaeological landscapes to study extensively human-modified environments at regional scales with more advanced geospatial methods. In Sāmoa, lidar reveals networks of ditches, terraces, and other earthen- and stone-monumental architectural features which extend from the coast...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Nelson. Tamira K. Brennan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With their consistent themes of mantle construction, summit use, burning, and burial, earthen monuments of the Mississippi period conveyed shared meanings between people across wide geographical areas. Exceptions to these broader patterns, however, convey meanings that are steeped in local histories and the communities that create those histories. Drawing on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kazuho Shoji. Takayuki Omori. Vanessa La Rosa.

Excavations in 2016 and 2017 at the Cruz Verde site which is located in the coastal area of the Chicama Valley, revealed a stratified record of preceramic mound-building practices. These practices are constituted by various mortuary contexts and are particularly noted for their use of architectural reconstruction, an activity repeated from around 4000 cal. BC ~1900 cal. BC divided into two phases, the CV-1 phase and the CV-2 phase. We conducted a stratigraphic examination of these contexts, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Colvin.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In recent years, there has been a resurgence in interest of co-residence among hunter-gatherers, chiefly in relation to how groups solve collective action problems. The southern Florida interior can greatly contribute to these ongoing discussions with many multi-mound complexes exhibiting periods of monument construction and varying degrees of co-residence...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yuko Shiratori. Timothy Pugh.

Research into the Main Group at Tayasal, Guatemala, revealed that the Postclassic inhabitants re-occupied areas and buildings that were constructed during the Preclassic period. Most of those buildings in the Main Group stand on a massive elevated platform, which was also constructed during the Preclassic period. The Preclassic period was the period during which the construction of monumental architecture such as E-groups and Triadic Group occurred at numerous sites including Tayasal. It was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thatcher Seltzer-Rogers.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological investigations in the prehispanic American Southwest/Northwest Mexico region have provided rich insight into the development of sociopolitically complex polities in the Phoenix Basin, Chaco Canyon, Rio Grande valley, and northwestern Chihuahua. In all of these places, sociopolitical complexity is linked to the development of and elite control...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gloria Lara-Pinto.

This is an abstract from the "The Problem of the Monument: Widening Perspectives on Monumentality in the Archaeology of the Isthmo-Colombian Area" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A couple of years ago some good meaning citizens offered to donate complete ceramic pieces along with other objects they had “collected” from their properties to the regional campus of my university in southern Honduras. These same local citizens declared themselves a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniela Triadan. Takeshi Inomata.

This is an abstract from the "2023 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Timothy Beach Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The recently discovered site of Aguada Fenix in eastern Tabasco, Mexico, is one of the largest monumental constructions in Mesoamerica. It dates to the beginning of the early Middle Preclassic, around 1100 BC. The main complex consists of a rectangular plateau with an E-Group at its center and is delimited by 20 large...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Zeidler.

This paper explores the notions of ‘material memory’ and human agency in deep time as expressed in the repetitive reconstruction of earthen platform mounds over some three millennia in the Jama Valley of coastal Manabí Province, Ecuador. Empirical evidence of repetitive mound-building is presented over a long stratigraphic record extending from approximately 2030 BCE to about 1260 CE, and special emphasis is given to the site of San Isidro, a major civic-ceremonial site and ‘persistent place’...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joshua Wright. William Honeychurch. Chunag Amartuvshin. Sarah Pleuger.

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. The paper reports on a full coverage intensive survey of a water rich region in the Southeast Gobi desert, Mongolia, which with the support of many excavations provide a robust chronological framework from the mid-Holocene to the historic Manchu period. Archaeological survey recorded...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Corinne Watts.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There are numerous megaliths on the islands of Indonesia, including the island of Flores where their constructions date to 2500-1000 BCE. Some of the stones that comprise these megaliths have been trafficked to other countries in recent years. In the early 2000s an Iowa City collector purchased a set of 50 of these standing stones from a location or locations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Janes.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The recent discovery of megalithic structures on the central coast of California was accomplished by geologic analysis of mounds and stone piles on the crest of Tomales Point in the Point Reyes National Seashore. These features were generally ignored by both geologists and archaeologists because at a distance they look like bedrock outcrops. However, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tomos Evans.

This is an abstract from the "Taphonomy in Focus: Current Approaches to Site Formation and Social Stratigraphy" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Ìjẹ̀bú Kingdom (southern Nigeria) was for centuries involved in far-reaching trade networks – with the inland and coastal Yorùbá ìlú (city-states), European merchants from various nations, and eventually the British Lagos Colony following its establishment in 1862. During this period, the Ìjẹ̀bú...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jason Ur.

This is an abstract from the "States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives." session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The “early states” of ancient Mesopotamia are factoids and straw men. Mesopotamia appears in textbooks as the prime example of the world’s earliest pristine states, and the flourishing of recent scholarship on the variability of other centralized large polities has often been via the juxtaposition of that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nathaniel Erb-Satullo.

This is an abstract from the "The South Caucasus Region: Crossroads of Societies & Polities. An Assessment of Research Perspectives in Post-Soviet Times" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Emerging after a Middle Bronze Age, which is defined by massive kurgan burials and a lack of permanent settlements, cyclopean fortresses of the South Caucasus represent the product of a significant amount of coordinated labor. However, much is unclear about the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Colvin.

In South Florida, earthen enclosures represent some of the earliest and largest communal monuments. At around 300 meters in diameter, Fort Center in Glades County, Florida contains one of the largest enclosures in the entire Southeast. As the earliest recorded earthwork at Fort Center, I argue the construction of the Great Circle acts as a trigger and anchor for coalescence and the establishment of place. Since this event occurs during a period of long term fisher-hunter-gatherer practices,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Suárez Calderón.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The settlement of Java is a Precolumbian socioceremonial center located on a hilltop in the Coto Brus Valley, in Southern Costa Rica. An intensive survey of the site revealed that the main occupation of the site occurred several centuries earlier than previously thought. Java is one of the largest settlements from the Aguas Buenas period, with an area of...