Monumentality (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Roscoe. Alice R. Kelley.

Although some attention has been given to the possibility that circular, semi-circular, and U-shaped piles of shell in southeastern North America represent monumental architecture (e.g., Thompson and Pluckhahn 2012), little attention has been afforded to the possibility that large shell middens of the eastern North American coast might be monumental constructions. Here, using an argument drawn from New Guinea ethnography, we hypothesize that some Maine middens were not simply rubbish heaps, but...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Verónica Vázquez López. Hannah Zanotto. Kazuo Aoyama. 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. Pajonal is a Middle Preclassic site situated between La Venta and Aguada Fénix in Tabasco, Mexico. The site has a spatial layout similar to La Venta, formed by an elongated plaza with an E Group at its center, several structures to the east and west edges,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marc Levine. Alex E. Badillo. Scott Hammerstedt. Amanda Regnier. Marcus Winter.

Ongoing scholarly debate concerning the function, meaning, and history of Monte Albán’s Main Plaza have important ramifications for our understanding of sociopolitical, economic, and religious life at the Zapotec capital. Although previous investigations have targeted many of the buildings that surround the plaza, none have focused explicitly on the plaza itself. This paper presents the preliminary results of the Proyecto Geofísico de Monte Albán (PGMA), a non-invasive study of the entire Main...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zachary Nissen.

Previous research suggests that the ancient Maya city of Aventura, Belize thrived during the Terminal Classic to Early Postclassic periods (800 – 1100 CE). During this period, occupants of the city constructed up to 27 buildings within the confines of the site’s A plaza. This paper presents the results of the 2017 test excavations of a sample of the A plaza buildings. Maya plazas are typically conceived of as large open places for ritual and political performance. However, these excavation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Brown.

This is an abstract from the "After the Feline Cult: Social Dynamics and Cultural Reinvention after Chavín" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The breakdown of Chavín interregional networks at the end of the Early Horizon had variable outcomes for high-altitude ceremonial centers in the Central Andes of Pasco, Peru. Within the Chaupihuaranga Canyon, neighboring mountaintop monuments have distinct sociohistorical trajectories that complicate temporal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Harold Mytum.

European hillforts contrast greatly in scale and complexity, and different regions of the continent have experienced varied historiographies of research. Using a few key examples to illustrate the different approaches to hillfort monumentality, this paper addresses the contrasting emphases on function and meaning seen in such studies. Particular focus will be placed on three aspects, through the theoretical lens of structure and agency: the role of earthwork construction in the creation of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zoe Rawski.

The site of Early Xunantunich in modern day Belize provides the opportunity for a uniquely detailed case study in Preclassic Maya architecture. Thanks to a lack of Classic Period overburden, the Mopan Valley Preclassic Project has been able to conduct extensive excavations of early architecture at the site, documenting important ritual activities from this early time period which likely played a key role in the development of sociopolitical complexity in the region. This paper focuses on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Collins.

Over four consecutive field seasons, the Proyecto de Interaccion Politica del Centro de Yucatan investigated the plaza and several buildings in Yaxuná’s E-group, granting new insight into the site’s origins and development from a modest ceremonial complex into a monumental urban center. Excavations over the east-west centerline of the plaza generated data on several distinct commemorative events spanning 11 floor phases. Nonetheless, each of the observed traditions is fraught with continuities...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Darcy Mathews.

Archaeologists do not think of the peoples of the Northwest Coast as monumental stone builders, yet current research indicates that the enhancement and demarcation of critical resource sites entailed both the massive movement of stone and the building of stone monuments. The Coast Salish peoples built remarkable numbers of burial cairns and mounds, using stones cleared from important and valuable root crop fields to then inscribe the landscape with their ancestral dead. Their Heiltsuk neighbors...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yumi Huntington. John Warner.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. How does architectural construction relate to the surrounding landscape and a broader cosmological framework? This paper discusses the relationships among architecture, geography, and cosmology at the site of Jatanca in the Jequetepeque Valley on the northern coast of Peru. This site was occupied mainly during the Late Formative Period (approximately 500 BCE...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jayur Mehta. Elizabeth Chamberlain.

Resilience is the ability of complex systems to adapt to change in the wake of disturbance. Here, we describe the relationship of natural deltaic land evolution and anthropogenic monument construction using a case study of Ellesly Mound, an earthen monument located in the Lafourche subdelta of the Mississippi Delta. Borehole and LIDAR data show that Ellesly mound is situated above naturally deposited crevasse sediments underlain by organic-rich facies indicating a relatively low-lying vegetated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emma Jones. Zoe Doubles. Esmeralda Ferrales. Kenzie May. Jason King.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Golden Eagle site (11C120), Calhoun County, IL, is located on the edge of the Deer Plain Terrace, 8 km upstream of the confluence of the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers. First documented by William McAdams in the late nineteenth century, Golden Eagle is the only Illinois River Valley mound site to include a ditch-and-embankment enclosure. The site is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dita Auzina.

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. Large stone and earth mounds of Cascal de Flor de Pino in the Caribbean of Nicaragua, which were built between 4 BC and AD 9, are unique in the region and have been suggested as a sign of social stratification and inequality. Indeed, reaching more than 30 m in diameter and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Terry Powis. George Micheletti. Norbert Stanchly. Kaitlin Crow. Sheldon Skaggs.

In the Middle Preclassic (900-300 BC), physical evidence of the increasing complexity of Maya society can be found in the form of monumental public architecture. However, the origins of temple building are poorly understood during this time period, especially in the Belize Valley. At the site of Pacbitun we have been exploring the initial purpose of public architecture as constructions to bring likeminded communities together for ritual, ceremonial, and/or social functions. Archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric McLay.

Clam gardens represent monumental coastal landscapes constructed by Northwest Coast hunter-gather-fisher peoples over the past 1000 years. The slow, laborious movement of boulders and cobbles to build up rock-walled intertidal terraces not only created new productive shellfish habitat for greater food security, but transformed social and political relations over peoples’ rights to lands, foreshore and access to shellfish at a regional scale. As large-scale community works, clam gardens must be...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tia Watkins. Jaime Awe. Claire Ebert.

This is an abstract from the "The Preclassic Landscape in the Mopan Valley, Belize" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Late Preclassic period (~300 BC–AD 300) witnessed some of the most important changes in social and political roles in the Maya lowlands when an emergent elite class began to use art and architecture to publicly display their elevated status in society. Recent archaeological research at the hilltop center of Xunantunich, located in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Margo Schwadron.

The Ten Thousand Islands, Everglades, Florida contain an impressive maritime landscape, composed of entire islands constructed and terraformed with shell midden. These shell work sites are the tangible and complex vestiges of hunter-fisher-gatherer communities. Shell work formations include extensive complexes of mounds and features. Similarities in temporal and spatial patterning among shell islands suggest that communities were interrelated across a broad region. Shell work islands and their...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Eklund.

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. Tim Ingold’s (1993) work “The Temporality of the Landscape” introduced us to the concept of taskscapes, in which an array of tasks, overlapping and interlocking, work to create a specific place in the larger landscape. I am now introducing another innovative “scape,” one used...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kendall Hills.

This is an abstract from the "The Current State of Archaeological Research across Southeast Asia" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological research in Cambodia was traditionally relatively narrow in scope. Our knowledge of the Khmer Empire (9th to 15th century CE ) has been primarily informed via two lines of evidence: epigraphic sources, especially in the form of temple inscriptions, and art historical analysis of monumental architecture....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jarrod Burks.

This is an abstract from the "Monumental Surveys: New Insights from Landscape-Scale Geophysics" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The problem with monumental earthwork sites in Ohio is that they are, well, monumental in scale! These large sites, many topping 50 ha in area, are a major challenge for geophysical surveys because they simply require too much time to completely survey. However, recent advances in instrumentation and computers is making it...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandra Flores. Jarrod Burks.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ohio is home to a significant number of precontact period earthworks—mounds and enclosures—many of which have been affected by plowing to various degrees. While magnetometer surveys have produced remarkable images of earthwork ditches and embankments in the Middle Ohio Valley, few other instrument types have been employed. For this study, magnetometry,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara Mills. Kelsey Hanson.

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. In 2006, Lynne Sebastian synthesized political models used for Chaco society and argued that past interpretations were too heavily reliant on outdated models that stressed hierarchy and neo-evolutionary typologies. She especially drew on Susan McIntosh’s (1999) book “Beyond Chiefdoms: Pathways to Complexity...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Seth Grooms.

This is an abstract from the "*SE Not Your Father’s Poverty Point: Rewriting Old Narratives through New Research" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent findings from Poverty Point and contemporary sites are changing our understanding of the Late Archaic Southeast. Here, I summarize recent research at the Jaketown site in Mississippi and discuss how our findings fit within the broader context of the Poverty Point phenomenon. Chronostratigraphic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jarrod Burks.

Ohio is home to hundreds of Woodland period (ca. 300 BC- AD 400) earthwork sites. Most contain mounds and ditch-and-embankment enclosures in geometric shapes. Site size and complexity varies widely, from small, lone circles (often surrounding a mound) in the Early Woodland to the mega-large Middle Woodland Newark Earthworks. How and why earthwork construction moved from small to massive are enduring questions yet to be solved. Recent magnetic survey in southern Ohio at two sites of moderate...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Lesh.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Originally the only known underground gallery between Building A and the Circular Plaza of Chavín de Huántar, the Caracoles gallery was long thought by Professor John Rick of Stanford University to be one of multiple chambers due to its three wall ducts, each exiting at an unknown location. This paper illustrates the methods developed for exploring these and...