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 Adam Benfer.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Living hundreds of years, ceiba trees (Ceiba pentandra) have long functioned as monuments to ancestral spirits, cosmological order, and chiefly authority among Indigenous populations throughout Central America. While these giant trees are often cosmologically charged and considered sacred or divine, there is substantial variety within Indigenous...

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 Full-Text Ben Nelson. John Millhauser. Denise To.

Fieldwork from the 1997 season at Los Pilarillos.

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 Archie Robson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Engraved slate plaques are a distinctive feature of the Late Neolithic and Chalcolithic of the west and south-west of the Iberian Peninsula, largely recovered from megalithic tombs, as well as diverse mortuary and non-mortuary contexts. More than a century of research has investigated their form, function, distribution, and evolution across the fourth and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Jennings.

This is an abstract from the "Cooperative and Noncooperative Transitions in the Archaeological Record" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In recent years, archaeologists have noted an oscillation between more pluralistic and more autocratic forms of governance in the same societies. This paper argues that our understanding of these transitions has been hampered by oversimplified models of political complexity. Decision-making today is often...

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 Christina Halperin.

This is an abstract from the "Cooperative and Noncooperative Transitions in the Archaeological Record" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Governance during the Classic period in the Maya Lowlands was heavily based on the institutions and relationships surrounding divine kingship, which was characterized by paramount rulers and their hierarchical relations with other political officials and the populace. This paper examines changes to this governing...

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 Daniel Garner.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. On the outskirts of the city of Laramie, Wyoming sits a circular stone feature known as a medicine wheel. Despite being near the University of Wyoming (UW), it remained unknown until a UW archaeologist encountered it while hiking. Those who know about this medicine wheel have assumed that it was built after the 1960s as part of the new age spiritual...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica MacLellan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Suchilapan Archaeological Project investigates the relationship between the development of monumental architecture and the transition to sedentary life in Formative period Mesoamerica (c. 2000 BC - AD 300). Through excavation, radiocarbon dating, and ceramic analysis, we are building a chronology for multiple early ceremonial centers clustered along...

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...