Caves and Rockshelters (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Gorden.

Yokuts and Western Mono tribes of central California had close cultural ties. While the Yokuts were the most numerous and the dominant culture, many people were bilingual. They shared themes in their pictographs, petroglyphs, and cupules, which are cultural traits of a ceremonial nature that are archaeologically identifiable, and are generally agreed to have magico-religious significance. Forty-one percent of the paintings in their territory occur in shallow caves and rockshelters, which vary in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen L. Black. Charles Koenig.

Eagle Nest Canyon, a box canyon draining into the Rio Grande in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas, houses Bonfire Shelter, the oldest and southernmost bison jump site in North America. Bonfire was excavated in 1963-64 and again in 1983-1984, leaving open a 3m-deep excavation block. Nearby Eagle Cave was excavated in the 1930s and again in 1963, leaving the central trench unfilled. In 2015-2016, the Ancient Southwest Texas Project of Texas State University re-excavated the 4-meter...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Keith Johnson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Antelope Cave is a large limestone cavern sunk beneath the undulation hills of the Uinkaret Plateau in Northwestern Arizona. Native Americans lived in the cave intermittently for 4000 years during the Archaic and Puebloan periods. This paper focuses on the Basketmaker materials, particularly the sandals, recovered by UCLA archaeologists at Antelope Cave in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kyle Riordan. Julie Field. John Dudgeon.

This poster reports on field-work and laboratory investigations conducted on geoarchaeological samples from Naihehe Cave, located in the Sigatoka river valley of Viti Levu, Fiji. This research employs novel and exploratory methods, including Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), Fourier Transform Infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), and Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) to determine the elemental content of sediment samples and for detailed imagery useful in grain size and shape...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christina Iglesias. James Brady. Guillermo de Anda.

This is an abstract from the "The Subterranean in Mesoamerican Cultural Landscapes" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In June 2022, the Gran Acuífero Maya resumed investigations initiated in 2018 of Las Monjas Sascabera 2 (LMS2), one of 11 sascaberas located south and west of the Las Monjas complex at Chichén Itzá. In the intervening years, rain washed out accumulated soil that had blocked access to the circular, constructed entrance and exposed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Kandel. Boris Gasparyan. Angela Bruch. Anneke ter Schure. Sanne Boessenkool.

This is an abstract from the "Pleistocene Landscapes and Hominin Behavior in the Armenian Highlands" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Our knowledge of plants used by Upper Paleolithic humans is limited by the survival of identifiable plant parts. In this study, we present the results of ancient DNA studies of cave sediments from Aghitu-3 Cave in the Armenian Highlands. The cave contains a detailed record of human settlement and environmental...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aubree Marshall. Gabriela Murphy. Gabriel Wrobel.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Caves Branch Rockshelter (CBR) is a large cemetery site in Central Belize used for burial by a rural Maya community during the Late Preclassic and Early Classic periods (~300 BC–AD 400). The CBR skeletal series is unusual in the region as it is large and appears to comprise a relatively complete mortality profile. However, due to poor preservation,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bryon Schroeder. Devin Pettigrew.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Perishable Weaponry Studies: Developing Perspectives from Dated Contexts to Experimental Analyses" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The arid west Texas region has a wealth of large perishable assemblages offering unexplored research potential. This talk focuses on weapons systems recovered from both recent excavation work and existing collections from this area. We provide an overview of the diversity and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arlys Nicolás Batalla. Astolfo Araujo. Mercedes Okumura. Casimiro Munita.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Maximiano archaeological site consists of a limestone rockshelter embedded in the Brazilian tropical Atlantic Forest of SE Brazil. Excavated in the late 1970s by an amateur archaeologist, this 40 × 5 × 3 m rockshelter setting contains lithics, bone artifacts, and faunal and human remains dating between ~11,712 and 6796 cal yr BP. Located in a region...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeremy Skeens.

Woodpecker Cave (13JH202) provides a unique opportunity to study variation in ceramic technology and resource allocation during the ceramic production process at a Late Woodland East-Central Iowa site. Excavations by the University of Iowa field school spanning six seasons have recovered hundreds of ceramic pottery sherds from Woodpecker Cave, including a modest amount of decorated rim pieces and a large number of undecorated body sherds. Previous typological analyses of the ceramic assemblage...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Slack.

This is an abstract from the "Juukan Gorge: The Story of Destruction, Excavation and Rebuilding" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper discusses the archaeological excavations at Juukan Gorge in 2008 and then in 2014. We present a Late Pleistocene and Holocene chronology for the Gorge (see Slack et al. 2009), indicating that Aboriginal people first occupied the interior of the Hamersley Plateau in Western Australia over 46,000 years ago....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Benedetti. Jonathan Haws. Lukas Friedl.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Paleolithic cave site of Lapa do Picareiro is located on the upper slopes of the Serra de Aire limestone massif (571 m asl) about 100 km northeast of Lisbon, Portugal. The cave is a single chamber (15 × 15 m) with >10 m of sedimentary fill, mostly limestone éboulis clasts and muddy sediment in pore spaces. During the last glacial stage, the cave...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bryan Heisinger.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Skiles Shelter (41VV165) is located at the mouth of Eagle Nest Canyon, roughly 250 meters northwest from the Rio Grande in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas. Skiles Shelter is characterized by a fading panel of Pecos River Style rock art, numerous bedrock milling features, and a massive burned rock midden (BRM) accumulation of fire cracked rock...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Holley Moyes. Dominique Rissolo.

This is an abstract from the "The Subterranean in Mesoamerican Cultural Landscapes" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mapping is one of the most fundamental and important enterprises for cave archaeologists not only for research but also integral to cave management and heritage preservation. Using traditional cartography techniques is often a tedious and long-term project involving numerous field seasons and thousands of measurements. Capturing 3D...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Ward. David Robinson.

Located on the Wind Wolves wildlife preserve in South Central California, there are several spectacular rock art sites. Created by the Native Californians who inhabited the landscape, they have been the focus of a number of studies over the years, but none of these studies concentrated on the sound quality of these spaces. The correlation between the placement of rock/cave art, and the acoustic properties of the space in which it is found, is increasingly being studied under the rubric of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Holley Moyes. Kelsey Hanson. Erin Ray.

Performance theory recognizes that the boundaries between ritual and theatrical performances are often quite blurred, allowing shared methods of analysis between the two. While many have argued for a theater-state among the ancient Maya, few have ventured beyond the large ceremonies conducted in great plazas to consider the more esoteric nature of public, semi-public, and private rites taking place in the natural landscape. Ancient Maya caves were used exclusively as ritual spaces, yet there has...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabrielle Vail.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster examines the implications of imagery identified as relating to Mesaomerican “Flower Worlds” on spindle whorls left in situ in Balankanche’ Caverns by actors who used the caverns in the Terminal Classic period (ninth and tenth centuries) to invoke ritual-mythic time within this underworld space that was seen as the place of human creation and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ted Goebel. Joshua Lynch. Caitlin Doherty.

This is an abstract from the "Current Perspectives on the Western Stemmed Tradition-Clovis Debate in the Far West" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The lack of a comprehensive and sound geochronology of Paleoindian sites in the Great Basin has long been a stumbling block for explaining variability in Western Stemmed points and their relationship with Clovis. Open-air sites are often undatable or present conflicting radiocarbon dates, while...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victoria Pagano.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Eagle Nest Canyon, Texas: Papers in Honor of Jack and Wilmuth Skiles" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper is a condensed summary of master’s thesis “Stories in the Sand: Excavation and Analysis of The Sayles Adobe Terrace (41VV2239) In Eagle Nest Canyon, Langtry, Texas” (Pagano 2019). It presents an overview of the background, methodologies, analyses, and conclusions of work completed at the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kirsten Lopez.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Plant and animal perishable remains are not uncommon in dry cave archaeological contexts, which have made significant contributions to archaeological knowledge in recent years. Textiles (including basketry, cordage, woven, knotted, or plaited products) make up a considerable portion of the perishable archaeological record in these contexts, much of which...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Armando Anzellini. J. Marla Toyne.

This is an abstract from the "Continued Advances in Method and Theory for Commingled Remains" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Funerary contexts of commingled remains generally fall into one of two categories: primary mass burials and secondary reinterments. Each of these commingled contexts has standards of documentation, collection, and inventory that have proven effective in the past. At Diablo Wasi, in the northern Peruvian Andes, the funerary...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gilliane Monnier. Gilbert Tostevin. Goran Pajovic. Mile Bakovic. Nikola Borovinic.

This is an abstract from the "The Late Middle Paleolithic in the Western Balkans: Results from Recent Excavations at Crvena Stijena, Montenegro" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The excavations at Crvena Stijena from 2017–2022 have had two main objectives. The first is to test the Sandgathe/Dibble hypothesis that Neanderthals did not have the ability to make fire; rather, they were dependent on natural occurrences of fire. The testable implication...

DOCUMENT Full-Text César Méndez. Amalia Nuevo-Delaunay.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The early Holocene archaeological record in Patagonia has always been elusive. It is often recorded as layers within multi-component cave sites where archaeological and natural materials accumulate. However ordered the layering, careful the excavation techniques, or large the quantity of radiocarbon dates, such sites are complex to interpret due to site...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pamela Allan. Moira McMenemy. Kelly Brown. Matthew Baker. David Robinson.

For decades, debates have raged over the role of trance in the origination of rock-art. However, there remains almost no direct evidence of the ingestion of trance inducing material at any rock art site world-wide. The site of Pinwheel Cave has a large element thought to represent the opening of the flowering Datura. Dozens of quid, or 'chews' - i.e. masticated fibres of unidentified plant material - are found within the ceiling of the cave. A sample of this was taken and analysed to determine...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Nicolay. Margaret Berrier.

This is an abstract from the "The Subterranean in Mesoamerican Indigenous Culture and Beyond" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Claims for contact between Mesoamerica and the U.S. Southwest predate by centuries the inception of archaeology as a scientific discipline. However, despite such long-standing assumptions and the accumulation of evidence from the archaeological record, including ball courts, copper crotals, cacao, and macaws, as well as...