Monumentality (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Keith Prufer.

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. Major evolutionary transitions in sociality are premised on the formation of cooperative groups and transformation of the collective group into an entity. Prior to the development of institutions, the kin group was the primary locus of cooperation and was limited largely by environmental and physical constraints....

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 Julie Hoggarth.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Royal palaces in the Maya lowlands served various purposes as the primary locale of royal domestic life. Still, their architectural configurations suggest they also served as an outlet for semi-public activities as well. The architectural configuration of the royal palace at Baking Pot suggests both administrative activities in the public-facing areas, in...

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 Ezekia Mtetwa.

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. Great Zimbabwe, the major civilization south of the pyramids, had a vibrant metallurgical industry within the urban center, but the most significant iron production was located in the hinterland. Here, extensive clusters of natural draft furnaces—some with unique rectangular morphologies—alongside abundant tap...

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 Carlos Chiriboga.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Until a decade ago, the site of El Tintal had been sporadically investigated by researchers working in the Central Karstic Uplands of Northcentral Petén. Most research in the immediate region focused on the emerging complexity identified at Nakbé and the imposing Late Preclassic monumentality of El Mirador. However, beginning in 2014, over ten years of...

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Virginia Arieta Baizabal.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Los trabajos pioneros de investigadores como Matthew Stirling y Michael Coe, y, más recientemente, las exhaustivas investigaciones del Proyecto Arqueológico San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán (PASLT) bajo la dirección de Ann Cyphers, consolidaron el reconocimiento de San Lorenzo, Veracruz como la primera capital olmeca. Esta ponencia presenta una nueva fase en la...

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...

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Eklund. Jargalan Burentogtokh. William Gardner.

This is an abstract from the "Steppe by Steppe: Advances in the Archaeology of Eastern Eurasia" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For mobile pastoralists, monuments are places of permanence and stability in a landscape inhabited and perceived through movement. It is within these monumental spaces that dispersed peoples gather as a community, and through secular and ritual activities, organize and reaffirm social bonds and institutions, and maintain...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Eklund.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Monument construction has long been associated with the rise of early civilizations and states. Recent trends in anthropological archaeology have also identified the crucial role of monuments in processes of social integration among small, mobile populations. This poster will present results from a detailed geophysical and geochemical study of these...

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....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jemima Georges.

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. Nixtun-Ch’ich’ in Petén, Guatemala was heavily occupied in the Middle Preclassic (800-300 BC) and Late Preclassic (300 BC-AD 200) periods. The site was abandoned in the Early Classic period (AD 200-600), then reoccupied in the Late/Terminal Classic (AD 600-930) and Postclassic period (AD 930-1525). Excavations at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Pluckhahn. Kendal Jackson. Jaime Rogers. Victor Thompson. Carey Garland.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although archaeologists commonly situate the value of our field in its capacity to identify broad-scale patterning in human societies over the long term, critiques of the essentialism and linearity of social evolution led many to abandon this goal in favor of shorter-term, local histories. Drawing from calls for a “process archaeology” that recognizes...

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yuko Shiratori.

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. Classic Maya kings were often considered sacred and divine and at the top of the hierarchy of kingdoms. On monuments and decorated vessels, they were depicted as super-human beings, different from other members of society. The royal dynasties of Classic period Petén disappeared from the archaeological eye by the...

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alejandro Figueroa. Whitney Goodwin. Brigitte Kovacevich. Michael Callaghan. Christopher Roos.

This is an abstract from the "Holtun: Investigations at a Preclassic Maya Center" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper we present the results of an exploratory program aimed at providing multi-component soil sampling and analysis of plaster floor surfaces at the Maya site of Holtun, Guatemala. Our research sampled three different plaza settings at the site: the monumental E-Group plaza, an elite residential patio adjacent to the E-Group...

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...

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...