Collapse (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meghan Dwan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The rise of urban living, particularly in the Southern Levant, often reflects a shift towards market economies and removed relationships with food– the transition from direct to indirect relationships with herding domesticated livestock. However, questions remain regarding if this transition from “direct” to “indirect” translated to all aspects of food...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Itzel Chagoya Ayala.

This is an abstract from the "The Classic-Postclassic Transition in Oaxaca" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cerro Jazmín fue una importante urbe del Formativo tardío en el Valle de Nochixtlán, Mixteca Alta, Oaxaca. La ubicación del Cerro Jazmín fue estratégica como nodo entre los Valles de Oaxaca, la Mixteca Baja, Puebla y la Cuenca de México, lo que convirtió al Cerro Jazmín en una ciudad accesible, y a su vez, influenciada por los cambios...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dan Penny. Tegan Hall.

The demise of Angkor and its city-region offers insights into the vulnerability of giant low-density cities to climate extremes. At Angkor, the iterative growth of massive, convoluted and intractable infrastructural networks progressively decreased the resilience of the settlement to changing circumstances by restricting or removing adaptive strategies. The nature and consequences of the water crises in Angkor between the 13th and the 16th centuries has been revealed by a combination of remote...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arkadiusz Marciniak.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A new form of husbandry developed by the Neolithic settlers of Europe provided solid foundations for their unprecedented growth and sustainability. Its constituting elements comprised the secondary product’s mode of exploitation, the effective adaptation of major domesticates to different environmental and ecological zones, and changes in their genomes....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacklyn Rumberger. Sarah Barber. Arthur Joyce. Tosha Dupras. Stacie King.

This study reports on diet and mobility among people living in the lower Río Verde Valley, Oaxaca, Mexico, during the Late Classic (AD 500-800) and Early Postclassic (AD 800-1200) periods, specifically focusing on how political and social collapse affected subsistence practices, diet, and human migration. Archaeological evidence suggests that Río Viejo, the region’s largest urban center before AD 800, experienced multiple periods of political fragmentation and instability during its long...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marieka Arksey.

Over the past three years, investigations of over fifty ritual cave sites across the country of Belize by the Las Cuevas Archaeological Reconnaissance Project and the Belize Cave Research Project have yielded surprising findings: at least nine of the caves have modifications or construction directly outside of the entrances. These modifications took place for the first and only time during the Late Classic, a centuries-long period characterized by droughts, overpopulation, the failure of Maya...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabrielle Perry. Arthur Joyce. Akira Ichikawa.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent fieldwork has investigated the Late Classic and Postclassic occupation at the floodplain site of Río Viejo in Oaxaca, Mexico. The residential features uncovered detailed domestic life in the settlement after political decentralization. Though causal factors for the Late Classic political decline at Río Viejo are yet to be confirmed, archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kara Larson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The site of Tell el-Hesi was an Early Bronze Age III (2900-2500 B.C.E.) urban community located in the peripheral region of the Northern Negev Desert in the Southern Levant. Notably, the occupation was short-lived (ca. 100-150 years) and rapidly abandoned before the end of the EB III period, demarcated by drier environmental conditions. Unlike most urban...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yasmine Flynn-Arajdal. Christina Halperin. Carolyn Freiwald. Katherine Miller Wolf. Miriam Salas.

This is an abstract from the "The Movement of People and Ideas in Eastern Mesoamerica during the Ninth and Tenth Centuries CE: A Multidisciplinary Approach Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Fifty years ago, Maya scholars argued that peoples from the Gulf Coast invaded and settled several sites in the Southern Maya Lowlands in the ninth century, including the site of Ucanal. These invasions were thought to have led to the collapse of Southern...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brittany Fullen.

This is an abstract from the "Seeing Wari through the Lens of the Everyday: Results from the Patipampa Sector of Huari" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Continuing excavations at the domestic sector of Huari in 2018 (re)opened several structures whose occupation spanned the end of the Middle Horizon. The collapse of the Wari empire is not well understood, and the perspective these quotidian examples provide will help us continue to untangle what...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jaime Awe. Julie Hoggarth. Christophe Helmke. Jim Aimers.

The discovery of cultural remains on or above the floors of rooms and courtyards at several Maya sites has been interpreted by some archaeologists as problematic deposits, defacto refuse, or as evidence for rapid abandonment. Investigations in the Belize River valley have recorded similar deposits at several surface and subterranean sites. Our regional and contextual approach to the study of these remains, coupled with ethnohistoric and ethnographic information provide limited support for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexei Vranich.

This is an abstract from the "A New Horizon: Reassessing the Andean Middle Horizon (AD 600–1000) and Rethinking the Andean State" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The manner in which a polity collapses reveals a crucial facet of the relationship between the residents of the site and the surrounding population. For example, a brief, destructive end could indicate an adversarial relationship that boils over into a violent outbreak against an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mara Reyes. Lilian Corzo. Rocio Albarrán.

This is an abstract from the "The Movement of People and Ideas in Eastern Mesoamerica during the Ninth and Tenth Centuries CE: A Multidisciplinary Approach Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. El sureste del Petén está conformado por una diversidad de paisajes geográficos y ambientales que permitieron el desarrollo de asentamientos prehispánicos claramente jerarquizados desde épocas muy tempranas hasta muy tardías, incluyendo los dos siglos que...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stryder Hellewell.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Late Bronze Age (LBA) Greece, c. 1200 B.C.E. was a period of fiery transformation. During this final phase of the Bronze Age, the Mycenaean civilization was at its height. Greece was comprised of highly stratified palace-states and city-states, each with its own government structure. To understand the nature of the political decline experienced widely...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kenichiro Tsukamoto.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents the result of excavations at the palace of El Palmar, Campeche, Mexico. During the 2022 field season, we conducted horizontal and stratigraphic excavations at Structure S21-2, which closes the south end of the palace. With four other range structures, Structure S21-1 forms Plaza G, the most restricted gathering space at the site. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Snetsinger. Maxime Lamoureux-St-Hilaire.

Settlement abandonment studies are crucial for understanding the archaeological record, as they yield the key to decipher the context of on-floor deposits, or assemblages. We advocate the use of a behavioral-contextual method for studying on-floor assemblages for ascribing them to one of several categories of abandonment. This behavioral-contextual approach examines the vertical and horizontal architectural contexts of artifacts, the relative completeness of vessels, and the represented vessel...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah E. Adcock.

In this paper, I explore how viewing collapse as a social and political phenomenon might change how we interpret the collapse of the Hittite empire in Turkey at the end of the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1200 BC). To this end, I consider the implications of changes and continuities in animal management at two sites in central Turkey following the collapse of the Hittite empire. The end of the Late Bronze Age was characterized by significant political and economic disruption throughout the eastern...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ishbel Torres.

This is an abstract from the "The Classic-Postclassic Transition in Oaxaca" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Classic and Postclassic periods, Río Viejo maintained continual occupation by various groups, leading to significant societal, ritual, environmental, economic, and political changes in the region. The site's prominent position in human development facilitated the expansion of inhabitants' worldviews, resulting in the creation of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arlen Chase. Diane Chase.

Excavations within various locales at Caracol, Belize have recovered artifactual materials on the floors of epicentral stone buildings that were associated with the latest occupation of the site epicenter. These deposits are the result of both "de facto" refuse and rapid short-term abandonment processes. In many cases, complete vessels and other artefactual remains were recovered from the floors of Caracol’s epicentral buildings. Other terminal deposits comprise thin sheet-like layers of broken...

DOCUMENT Citation Only João Cascalheira.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In recent years, knowledge of the processes involved in the disappearance of the Neanderthals and the successful expansion of our species across Eurasia has substantially increased. Still, the spatiotemporal variability of the presumed mechanisms behind Neanderthals’ demise makes evaluating the replacement at a continental scale very challenging. Iberiaa,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara Stark.

In south-central and southern Veracruz settlement pattern data document a collapse of previous settlement systems and many cultural traditions. Some regions reorganized and some likely were re-populated in part by migrants from highland regions. The timings of collapse in these lowland regions are poorly defined, but variation seems likely. Causes have received little attention because the extent of changes has not been recognized. Likewise, possible consequences are still to be investigated....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Brite.

The deltas of the Aral Sea lie within an internal drainage basin where critical water resources are prone to unpredictable change. The nature of this resource landscape discourages the emergence of enduring centralized states and was a key factor that led to the peripheral status of the deltas in world history. Nevertheless, complex social institutions did develop there in the early 1st millennium B.C. – late 1st millennium A.D., and these were based on especially diverse and flexible economic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Akira Ichikawa.

This is an abstract from the "The Classic-Postclassic Transition in Oaxaca" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The collapse of ruling institutions at the end of the Classic period around 800 CE is widely regarded as one of the most complex topics within Mesoamerican archaeology. The Proyecto Rio Verde (PRV) is investigating the role of climate change and human impact on the environment in the collapse of the Rio Viejo polity in the lower Rio Verde...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justine Shaw.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the course of three field seasons, eight round foundation braces supporting perishable pole-and-thatch buildings were excavated in the Cochuah region of west-central Quintana Roo, Mexico. Dating to the period immediately after the region was largely abandoned during what is known as the “Maya collapse,” the structures reveal small populations living...

DOCUMENT Citation Only R.G. Matson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. What archaeological knowledge might be significant in our climate emergency? I examine this question using climate “triage.” Optimistically, climate warming restricted to a 2°C increase would allow humans to adapt without destroying the global connections that support the modern economic system. A somewhat greater temperature increase could allow some...