Bioarchaeology/Skeletal Analysis (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only C. Scott Speal.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient Rome is arguably the quintessential patriarchal society in the western historical tradition, in which the male head of household had the very power of life and death over his wife and children. Cross-culturally, anthropologists have found that those in a position of hierarchical authority generally manipulate socio-political systems to their own...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Edwards. Megan Perry.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The site of Tell Hisban in Jordan was seasonally occupied by nomadic agropastoral tribes for over a thousand years. In the latter half of the 1800s, the Ottoman Empire instituted the Tanzimat, a series of reforms intended to solidify control over the region, including a new system of private land ownership. This new land law conflicted with traditional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joseph Mountjoy. Jill Rhodes.

This is an abstract from the "Coastal Connections: Pacific Coastal Links from Mexico to Ecuador" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Highly unusual tightly wrapped bundle burials of previously cleaned and carefully arranged disarticulated human bones dating to the Middle Formative have been discovered by archaeologists at three sites in western Jalisco, Mexico, one site on the Pacific coastal plain in far northern Sinaloa, Mexico and eroding out of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Novotny.

This is an abstract from the "Embodied Essence: Anthropological, Historical, and Archaeological Perspectives on the Use of Body Parts and Bodily Substances in Religious Beliefs and Practices" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeological record of the ancient Maya reveals many examples of the living returning to human interments to exhume skeletal elements, expose the elements to fire or smoke, or to paint them with red pigment. At the ancient...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leslie Williams. Kendra Weinrich.

This is an abstract from the "The State of the Art in Medieval European Archaeology: New Discoveries, Future Directions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This project investigates lived experience in early medieval Germany by examining degenerative joint disease (DJD) in human skeletal remains from Altenerding, Germany. A 2008 excavation at the Petersbergl site unearthed 128 burials from a 9th century cemetery associated with the Carolingian court...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Krzysztof Makowski. Martha Palma. Ana Fernández.

This is an abstract from the "Beyond the Ancestors: New Approaches to Andean "Open Sepulchers"" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pueblo Viejo-Pucara, main settlement of mitmaqunas, Caringas de Huarochiri, is one of the emblematic cases of funerary behaviors involving the construction and use of open chambers. In most of the cases studied, the two-story structures of 1 m high each story, which fulfill the original function of storage rooms in each...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Karligkioti. 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. The abundance in textual sources and richness of its archaeological record make Athens one of the most studied Greek cities during Classical Antiquity. However, research has focused principally on Athens, leaving much of the periphery of the Classical world largely unexplored. Scholars have mostly...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Witt. Gabriel Prieto. John Verano. Alan Chachapoyas.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This project investigates how rituals of human sacrifice performed by the Chimú Empire (AD 1000/1100-1450/1470) transformed in response to Inca imperialism (AD 1450-1532) in the Moche Valley of Peru. Recent discoveries of hundreds of sacrificial victims in the Moche Valley suggest that ritual violence was used to maintain the sociopolitical and religious...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Snider.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study addresses the contextual importance of human skeletal remains in identifying diachronic changes and constants in mortuary practices from the Mesambria necropolis, on the banks of the Black Sea in modern Nessebar, Bulgaria. Skeletal remains are the central element of mortuary practices but are often excluded from archaeological interpretation,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Scherer.

This is an abstract from the "Decipherment, Digs, and Discourse: Honoring Stephen Houston's Contributions to Maya Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Houston’s "The Life Within" is among the most perceptive and nuanced statements on Classic Maya materials and the animate quality of things. Here, I draw inspiration from this future-classic work to more deeply probe Maya understandings of bone – a material most generally treated by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Soto. Siobhan Clarke. Jamie Inwood. Patrick Roberts. Julio Mercader.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During dental calculus formation, mineralization preserves microbotanical remains. These provide paleoenvironmental and dietary information. However, modern contaminants on archaeological samples overlap with target species thus necessitating decontamination procedures. We present an efficient protocol to avoid the presence of contaminants: a) testing the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Whittemore.

This is an abstract from the "(De)Pathologizing the Past: New Perspectives on Intervention and Modification as Care in the Americas" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Trepanation---creating holes in the cranial vault by boring, scraping, or cutting---has been documented archaeologically in numerous societies worldwide, but it is best-studied in the pre-Hispanic Andes. Early research on trepanation, conducted by Ephraim George Squier and later...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jordi Rivera Prince. Gabriel Prieto.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological excavations and bioarcheological analyses reveal that marine resources and fishing are main form of sustenance on the north coast of Peru – these traditional fishing practices have endured over 3,000 years. Although the degree of reliance on marine resources has shifted from the Initial Period (1500-1200 cal. BC) to present day, traditional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dana Moot.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Investigations in Maya Archaeology, Epigraphy, Bioarchaeology, and Zooarchaeology by the Holmul Archaeological Project in Northeastern Peten, Guatemala" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The distinct styles of fine polychrome vessels produced by 'workshops' of elite artists have been considered one of the defining traits of the Ancient Maya culture during the Late Classic period (550-850 CE). Yet the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ellen Fricano.

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. Deposition of human remains within subterranean spaces held a special cultural significance across Mesoamerica because of the importance of the sacred, animate Earth in Amerindian indigenous cosmology. The skeletal assemblage from Cueva de Sangre near Dos Pilas, Petén, Guatemala is one such example. Though...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Valerie Sgheiza. P. Willey.

A critical question concerning the Point San Jose (PSJ) skeletal remains is the nature of the living population from which the assemblage was derived. We approach this issue indirectly through comparison with other mortality profiles. Here, we report the age, sex, and ancestry of the PSJ skeletal remains, and compare them with those parameters of other groups. The comparative age distributions consist of the 1870 California mortality census, 1870 California living census (as a proxy for a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Herrmann. Christopher Wolfe. Krysten Cruz. Despo Pilides. Yiannis Violaris.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The primary goal of the Ayioi Omoloyites Bioarchaeological Project is to document and interpret the commingled human remains recovered from three Hellenistic to Early Christian rock-cut tombs located south-southwest of the old city walls of Lefkosia, Cyprus. Laboratory research over the past four years has focused on the inventory, assessment, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aliana Schwartz.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Late Classic Copan was a densely populated, socially complex center of ancient Maya political and economic activity. Society was structured around status, residences, and complex demonstrations of identity and lived experiences. Despite these multiplicitous variations in social positions, previous analyses have found high rates of nonspecific stress...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melissa McCarthy.

This is an abstract from the "Exploring Globalization and Colonialism through Archaeology and Bioarchaeology: An NSF REU Sponsored Site on the Caribbean’s Golden Rock (Sint Eustatius)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sint Eustatius (Statia) is a Dutch Caribbean island with historical evidence of three main cultural groups: native people, people of African descent and people of European descent. As a hub of 18th century trade for various colonial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chin-hsin Liu. Coralia Guandique.

Three adjacent, chronologically overlapped, and metallurgically active sites in central Thailand were excavated by the Thailand Archaeometallurgy Project (TAP). This study focuses on dental pathology (caries, calculus, periapical abscessing, antemortem tooth loss, linear enamel hypoplasia) observed on human skeletal remains from Nil Kham Haeng (500 B.C.-A.D. 600) to investigate possible foodways and lifeways of its inhabitants. Among approximately 20 individuals represented, 16 have sufficient...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joseph Effingham. Samantha Blatt.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dental morphology has a long history of use in understanding the biological distance and migrations of past populations. Though distribution of the frequencies of morphological traits of teeth have been documented around the world, variation within Micronesia is the least studied among the peoples of the Pacific, leaving peopling of the region the least...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Leonard. Hannah Plumer-Moodie. Thomas Guderjan. Colleen Hanratty.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The osteological analysis of skeletal remains provides a unique lens for viewing social behaviors within ancient complex societies at the level of the individual as well as the population. The dentition from skeletal remains can be especially useful for answering questions regarding dietary practices as the consumption of specific foods leave identifiable...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joshua Schnell.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Intentional dental modification for aesthetic purposes relating to personal ornamentation and social identity have been widely documented in the Maya region in the form of dental filing and labial drilling for dental inlays. Dental modifications for therapeutic purposes, however, are rarely documented. Though rare, evidence for chipping, scraping, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Blankenship-Sefczek. Joseph Ball.

Classic Maya social status is more complex than an elite verses non-elite dichotomy. Research suggests that a "middle" status group exists. However, the social segment from which they arise is unknown. This study focuses on individuals from the urban center of Buenavista del Cayo who are below the ruling elites in the "middle" rungs of social status, and those from the neighboring farming community of Guerra who are recognized as nonelites. Previous research suggested that no biological affinity...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kyra Miller. Carla Cugini. Anna Dhody. Kimberlee Moran.

This is an abstract from the "The Arch Street Project: Multidisciplinary Research of a Philadelphia Cemetery" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The goal of this project was to determine if the yellow fever virus (YFV) could be detected in historic remains by analyzing the proteins found in the dental pulp of the remains. Typical YF diagnostic techniques rely on blood or liver tissue so when these tissues are not recoverable, YF detection is currently...