Bioarchaeology/Skeletal Analysis (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zhuldyz Tashmanbetova. Paula Doumani Dupuy. Galymzhan Kiyasbek. Reed Coil. Aidyn Zhuniskhanov.

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. The period prior to the emergence of agriculture and pastoralism is one of the most understudied and least deciphered time periods in Eurasian steppe archaeology. A shortage of stratified or well-preserved early Holocene campsites means that our knowledge of this period heavily relies on lithic assemblages not always with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Keitlyn Alcantara.

Narratives of Aztec grandeur dominate portrayals of Late Postclassic (AD 1325-1519) Mesoamerica. While imperial influence spread rapidly and thoroughly throughout the central valleys, Tlaxcallan appears as a rift in imperial control, resisting the encircling empire. Aztec narratives relegate Tlaxcallan to the peripheries, downplaying Tlaxcaltecas as one-dimensional barbaric enemies, unconquered by choice. In contrast, ethnohistoric accounts from within Tlaxcallan emphasize a state that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Teegan Boyd. Roxanne Mayoral. James Brady. Michele Bleuze.

This is an abstract from the "Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Subterranean" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Commingled, fragmentary assemblages of skeletal remains present many complications for analysis; however, there is still much information to be gleaned from the study of them. An example of this is the skeletal assemblage from Cueva de Sangre in Guatemala, an extensive, 3.5km long cave system; its use has been ceramically dated from the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Schaefer. Sloan Williams. Nicola Sharratt.

Using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) to obtain segmented cortisol levels, these cortisol levels can reconstruct periods of heightened month-to-month duress leading up to death. Segmented cortisol levels provide a more nuanced understanding of stress variation through biocultural change and lived experiences in antiquity. This study aims to reconstruct periods of duress through assaying endogenous cortisol in archaeological hair (n=11) from the site of Estuquiña and investigate the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cheryl Anderson.

This is an abstract from the "Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Debra L. Martin" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Throughout her career Debra Martin has utilized an innovative, multidisciplinary, and theoretical approach to bioarchaeology. One of her most significant contributions to archaeology has been her pioneering work on violence, utilizing social theory and current methodologies in order to interpret the skeletal evidence. Her...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sofía Pacheco-Forés.

This is an abstract from the "Journeying to the South, from Mimbres (New Mexico) to Malpaso (Zacatecas) and Beyond: Papers in Honor of Ben A. Nelson" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ritual violence has a long time-depth within Mesoamerica. While archaeologists and ethnohistorians have studied the political and cosmological significance of this practice extensively, less is understood about how or why particular individuals were targeted for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Coburn.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Migration and integration has always been a key link between the continent and the Japanese archipelago. This is especially significant during the later stage of the Jomon period throughout the Kofun period. This is seen in a number of different ways, from ceramic production and development through metal working. Recently, there has been a bigger push to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Lagia.

The capacity of humans to contribute positively even long after death includes not only donations and institutions but also one’s own body. The human body and its parts provide the opportunity to bridge time in archaeological and forensic contexts and appreciate human history. In 1996-7 this capacity was aptly evaluated by the scientific committee of the Wiener Laboratory of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens and the foundation of the modern human skeletal reference collection...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chris Dudar.

Since the inception of the Repatriation Office at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in 1991, the documentation of Native American skeletal remains has been accomplished by the Repatriation Osteology Lab. The need for a computerized data entry system was recognized as a critical component to the success of this process along with a structured database for data access and management. The resulting software interface and SQL relational database, called Osteoware, is available to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lauren Hosek.

This is an abstract from the "Life and Death in Medieval Central Europe" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ninth and tenth centuries in Central Europe have historically been characterized by political consolidations around Christian leadership. As Christianity gained influence in the region, conversion altered far more than religious beliefs: political landscapes, material culture, and bodies were also transformed. The skeletal remains and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Brady. Ann Scott.

This is an abstract from the "Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Subterranean" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Petexbatun Regional Cave Survey, working for three seasons from 1990 – 1993, was the largest cave project ever conducted in the Maya area. While investigating 22 caves and 11 km of passage, the survey collected a large assemblage of human skeletal material that had the potential for clarifying the nature of human remains in caves....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara Mills.

This is an abstract from the "Multiscale Data and the History of Human Development in the US Southwest" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Most archaeological research on sustainability focuses on how human groups maintained adequate access to food resources, especially during climatic downturns. In this paper, we look beyond food resources to examine evidence for cotton production and distribution and ritual textile production, which formed the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marija Edinborough. Kevan Edinborough.

We use anthropological data and a new statistical method to determine if there is a significant change to the health of people found in the Danube Gorges, Serbia (c. 9500–5500 BC), following the arrival of the Neolithic. A gross anatomical study of porotic hyperostosis and cribra orbitalia was undertaken on 113 individuals. The results show a high prevalence of porotic hyperostosis (89%) and a lower prevalence of cribra orbitalia (13%). 1308 teeth deriving from 89 individuals were examined for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Scherer.

This is an abstract from the "Landscapes of Death: Placemaking and Postmortem Agencies" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For decades, scholars have recognized ties between the Central Mexican metropolis of Teotihuacan and the Maya city of Tikal, particularly in the wake of a poorly understood event in AD 378. At Tikal, the strongest evidence for that connection comes from the southern edge of the site center, within a precinct centered around an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Holly Long.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cultural cranial modification is practiced in many cultures and has been interpreted to signify different facets of identity. In 2022, a surface collection from Sector A of the pre-Hispanic cemetery of CuzCuz revealed 12 complete adult crania with cultural cranial modification. These crania were discovered out of context—looted from their original...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Darlington.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Artificial cranial modification is a social identity marker that was practiced throughout Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, including in the Postclassic Aztatlán tradition of West Mexico. Modified human crania from Tizapán el Alto (Jalisco) and Amapa (Nayarit) are assessed to identify cranial modification trends that may indicate a shared ideology at Aztatlán...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rona Ikehara-Quebral. Michael Pietrusewsky. Michele Toomay Douglas.

Cultural flattening of the posterior skull, rare in the Mariana Islands, was recently observed in multiple human skeletons from a Latte Period site in Guam. Prior to this study, only one case of possible artificial cranial modification was reported for this region. The cranium of a young adult female from Songsong Village, Rota, was described as having "asymmetrical deformation in the occipital region consistent with artificial shaping practices." In a review of the ethnohistoric literature,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jordi Rivera Prince.

This is an abstract from the "Negotiating Watery Worlds: Impacts and Implications of the Use of Watercraft in Small-Scale Societies" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. On the North Coast of Peru, archaeological evidence suggests artisanal fishers have used caballito de totora (reed) boats for over 3,000 years. In the modern-day fishing and surfing town of Huanchaco in the Moche Valley, these crescent-shaped boats are still used daily for gathering...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ana Rincon Jaramillo. Juliana Gomez Mejia.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Four funerary urns from the archaeological site Matecaña (Pereira, Risaralda, Colombia) were analyzed to understand the cremation mortuary practice during the Early period (1000 BC–600 AD). This archaeological record does not count with direct descendants and is under the stewardship of the Universidad de Caldas, which follows adequate processes to allow a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Cerezo-Román. Megan Walsh. Jane Buikstra.

This is an abstract from the "The Bioarchaeology of the Phaleron Cemetery, Archaic Greece: Current Research and Insights" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, we reconstruct cremation mortuary practices from the Archaic site of Phaleron (ca. 750–480 BCE) located in Athens, Greece. We build on performance theory and issues of identities to answer two main research questions: (1) How was the identity(ies) of the cremated individuals at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Cerezo-Román. Megan Walsh. Jane Buikstra.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, we provide preliminary results for reconstructing cremation mortuary practices from the Archaic site of Phaleron (ca. 750–480 BCE), located in Athens, Greece. We build on performance theory and embodiment ideas to answer two main research questions: (1) Who were the cremated individuals? and (2) How were cremation mortuary rituals performed?...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Cerezo-Román.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We examine cremation mortuary practices from Saki Tzul and Mayahak Cab Pek, two rock shelters located in the Maya Mountains of southern Belize. The sites date from 12,000-3700 cal B.P. spanning the Late Pleistocene to the Late Holocene. We build on performance theory and issues of identities to look at the life course of the individuals and the different...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eleanor King.

This is an abstract from the "Sessions in Honor of Dr. Fred Valdez Jr. and His Contributions to Archaeology, Part 1" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite working in large prehispanic Maya city centers such as Rio Azul, Fred Valdez to this day maintains that his strongest interest lies in small Maya communities and households. He is happiest when exploring how the average Maya lived, away from the pomp and circumstance of the ruling classes. My...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carolyn Freiwald.

This is an abstract from the "Making and Breaking Boundaries in the Maya Lowlands: Alliance and Conflict across the Guatemala–Belize Border" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Present day conversations about migration focus on borders and limiting population movement with the presence of police, harsh regulations, and walls. This paper examines the concept of migration in the Maya region and what the past decade of isotope geochemistry research tells...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stanley Serafin.

This is an abstract from the "Black as Night, Dark as Death: Bioarchaeology of the Mesoamerican Subterranean" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cenotes are prominent features of the landscape of the Yucatan Peninsula. Among Maya populations, cenotes served, and continue to serve, varied purposes. Mayapán, a regional Postclassic (ca. 1150-1450 AD) Maya capital and urban center on the northwestern plains of the Yucatan Peninsula, contains a large...