Monumentality (Other Keyword)

1-25 (81 Records)

3D Photogrammetry and Woodland Mud Glyphs from 19th Unnamed Cave, Alabama (2019)
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...


Approaching Monument Diversity in the Woodland Societies of the Central Scioto Valley (2018)
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...


An Archaeological History of the Tamaylacha (Jubones) River Basin, circa First Millennium BCE (2021)
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...


Archaeological Investigations in El Paraíso. A Late Preceramic Architectural Complex in Lima – Peru (2018)
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...


Building Community: The Heuneburg Hillfort as Monument and Metaphor (2015)
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...


Building, Burying, Tearing Down: The Role of Destruction in Mississippian Mound Building (2019)
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...


The Change and Chronology of Preceramic Mound-building Practices at the Cruz Verde Site in the Chicama Valley, Peru (2018)
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...


Co-residence in Hunter-Gatherer Groups: New Insights from the Southern Florida Interior (2019)
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...


Commemorating the Preclassic Monumental Construction at Tayasal, Guatemala (2018)
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...


Complexity, Rituality, and the Origins of Paquimé (Casas Grandes), Chihuahua (2021)
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...


Creating a New World: Large-Scale Landscape Modifications at Aguada Fenix, Mexico (2023)
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...


Deep Histories and Persistent Places: Repetitive Mound-Building and Mimesis in the Jama Valley Landscape, Coastal Ecuador (2018)
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’...


The Delgerkhaan uul Survey: Preliminary Results (2023)
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...


Determining the Biographies of the Indonesian Standing Stones at Harvest Preserve, Iowa City, Iowa (2021)
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...


The Discovery of California Megalithic Structures: The Geology and Geomorphology of the Artificial (2023)
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...


Elite Stronghold or Communal Defense? Investigating a Late Bronze-Early Iron Age Cyclopean Fortress in Kvemo Kartli, Southern Georgia (2019)
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...


Emergence of Place: the Great Circle of Fort Center, Glades County, Florida (2015)
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,...


Experiencing Monumentalism in the Late Archaic Cajamarca Highlands of Peru (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Jason Toohey.

This is an abstract from the "Humble Houses to Magnificent Monuments: Papers in Honor of Jerry D. Moore" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A group of people came together in the early third millennium BCE to construct a large circular plaza bounded by concentric walls of free-standing megaliths. This Late Archaic period, 18 m diameter plaza is located near the summit of the site of Callacpuma in the Cajamarca Basin and has been the subject of mapping...


Experiencing Yaxhom: Materiality, Memory, and Monumentality in the Puuc Hills of Yucatan (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only William Ringle. Gabriel Tun Ayora.

Research conducted at the ancient Maya site of Yaxhom has identified very early monumental architecture next to one of the most fertile tracts in the Puuc region of northern Yucatan. A third field season, reported on here, carried out further mapping and testing of the urban center to determine the extent of accompanying Formative architecture. We wished to test whether the platform served to mark place for a population with minimal investment in residential architecture or whether it formed...


Exploring the Pre-Classic Roots of Hohokam Platform Mounds: New Evidence from La Plaza (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Garraty. Travis Cureton. Erik Steinbach. Paula Scott.

This is an abstract from the "WHY PLATFORM MOUNDS? PART 1: MOUND DEVELOPMENT AND CASE STUDIES" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent archaeological and historical investigations at the Hohokam site of La Plaza revealed robust evidence that a platform mound once stood in the north part of Arizona State University’s Tempe campus. Recently obtained archaeological evidence suggests that the mound was built during the middle-late Sedentary period (ca....


From Building to Connecting: Shifting Portraits of Complexity in Ancient Aksumite Monument Construction (50–400 AD) (2018)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Dil Basanti.

This paper looks at how network theory and materiality may challenge progressive evolutionary models of complexity. Archaeologists working on the African continent have long argued against neoevolutionary models of complexity, advocating instead for understandings that promote dynamism and fluidity. However, the spectre of neoevolution still claims the public imagination: bigger still seems to be better even if we agree it really shouldn’t be. This paper aids in complicating these views by...


Gathering Relations in an Aqueous World: Monumentality, Ontology, and the Belle Glade Landscape (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Nathan Lawres. Matthew Colvin.

Recent research on Pre-Contact South Florida has reinforced the notion that the peoples dwelling in the region inhabited a past material world much different from our own and from neighboring areas. In particular, the hydrologic characteristics of a subtropical landscape centered on the Lake Okeechobee basin are one of the central features of both the epistemology and ontology reflected in the earliest monumental architecture in the region. Yet these worldviews and worlds were not static...


Geospatial Analysis of Tumuli in the North Central Anatolian Plateau (2018)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Paige Paulsen.

The tumulus fields – landscapes heavily modified by monumental burial mounds – of Central Anatolia provide an opening to investigate how the tumuli reflect and create places of collective memory, territorial identity, and the social order. This project takes the Iron Age tumuli of the Kanak Su Basin in Yozgat, Turkey as a case study and uses a GIS approach based on available evidence: their location from archaeological surveys, and a small number of excavated mounds. This paper investigates the...


How Monumental Architecture Directs Movement: Defensive and Hydrological Features at Muralla de León (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Bracken.

This is an abstract from the "Manifesting Movement Materially: Broadening the Mesoamerican View" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Tracking patterns of everyday movement by individuals within a local population offers deep insight into the spatialized social structure of the group, providing information such as who interacts with whom, which areas are public and which are private, and the tightness or openness of different social circles. Like most...


Identifying the First Public and Domestic Constructions at Pacbitun, Belize (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Terry Powis. George Micheletti. Matthew Tarleton. Gary Owenby. Nicaela Cartagena.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Investigations in Plazas A and B of the site core at Pacbitun indicate that initial occupation began in the early Middle Preclassic period (900–600 BC). At this time, a small agricultural community was established in Plaza B beginning with a few domestic structures built just above bedrock. These early domiciles would also function as workshops for the...