Bioarchaeology/Skeletal Analysis (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nelda Issa Marengo. José Osorio León. Francisco Pérez Ruíz.

This is an abstract from the "New Perspectives on Ritual Violence and Related Human Body Treatments in Ancient Mesoamerica" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human skeletal assemblages from Chichen Itza and its surrounding regions are complex, which makes Chichen Itza a prime location to study mortuary practices. The complexity stems most likely from Chichen Itza’s multicultural relationships with other groups not only within the Yucatán Peninsula...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melanie Miller. Sabrina Agarwal. Carl Langebaek.

The Muisca inhabited a large territory in Northern South America (within present-day Colombia) and are often presented as a "classic chiefdom society." The roots of these interpretations can be traced back to European historical documents discussing Muisca socio-political life, which emphasized the role of social status and hierarchy within Muisca culture. The Muisca in particular have been held captive by the recordings of historical authors, and social structures observed through a European...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kevin Cabrera.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bioarchaeology engages with past behaviors to answer sex and gender roles that are influenced by biological and cultural components leading to social presentation of the individual. The skeletal sample for this study focuses on 55 individuals from Copan, Honduras by incorporating available mortuary data, ceramic phases, dental development, physiological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabrielle Marsh.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Gender archaeology came late to South American prehistory, and in particular, the Andes, where ethnographic and historical data have stressed a long history of dual, yet complementary, gender categories. Yet, given the diversity of lifeways and numerous shifts in the sociopolitical terrain of the region, gender is a crucial lens through which to examine...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Toussaint.

This is an abstract from the "Women of Violence: Warriors, Aggressors, and Perpetrators of Violence" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mierzanowice Culture (~2400–1600 BCE) communities in the Central European Early Bronze Age buried their dead in a formalized and gendered manner, in which males and females typically assumed mirror-opposite orientations in their respective graves. Furthermore, the archetypal "warrior" grave—whether simply an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carolyn Freiwald. John Walden. Rick Smith.

This is an abstract from the "“The Center and the Edge”: How the Archaeology of Belize Is Foundational for Understanding the Ancient Maya, Part II" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Emerging genomic and isotopic approaches have opened new doors to reconstructing diet, mobility, kinship, demography, and identity in the past and have the potential to transform our understanding of the ancient Maya world. These methods offer ways to reconstruct where...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kylie Williamson. George Kamenov. Neill Wallis. John Krigbaum.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. River Styx, a Middle Woodland (ca. AD 100-300) ceremonial center located in North Central Florida, is currently the only known site in prehistoric Florida where cremation was the sole form of deposition of human remains. Previous analysis of material remains from the site indicate extra-local connections up into the Ohio Hopewell and Great Lakes regions. To...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeremy Wilson. Grace Bocko. Olivia Messenger.

This is an abstract from the "The Bethel Cemetery Relocation Project: Historical, Osteological, and Material Culture Analyses of a Nineteenth-Century Indiana Cemetery" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Building on our prior paleodemographic research as part of the Bethel Cemetery Relocation Project, this study examines the patterns of dental disease and rates of decayed, missing, and filled teeth (DMFT) across the three periods of interment and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachael Byrd.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. People who migrate are forced to adapt, interact and re-organize themselves in dynamic ways not yet fully understood. This study tests three archaeological migration models spanning 3,500 years of agricultural village occupation in the Southwest United States (US) involving migration into uninhabited landscapes, internal frontiers, and diaspora. Following the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessi Spencer. Kaleigh Best. Mark Wagner.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. St. Henry’s Catholic Cemetery (11S1742) in East St. Louis, IL, was interring largely German and Irish individuals from 1866 to 1908. As part of growing urbanization and societal sanitation concerns, the cemetery was closed and buried individuals were supposedly relocated by 1926. By 1951, the Illinois National Guard Armory was constructed on the site and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Verenice Heredia Espinoza.

This is an abstract from the "From the Underworld to the Heavens: Expanding the Study of Central Jalisco’s Past" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Los regímenes de propiedad prehispánicos son un tema poco tratado en el Occidente Mesoamericano. Generalmente se asume que una élite controlaba la tierra mientras el resto de la población la trabajaba y tributaba sus frutos, o bien que las tierras eran comunales donde grupos corporativos tuvieron...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Heaney.

This is an abstract from the "Ethical Dilemmas in the Study and Care of Human Remains beyond North America" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1965, the Smithsonian’s first Hall of Physical Anthropology opened with a “Skull Wall” whose 160 crania of “Peruvian Indians” visualized how the world’s population “exploded in historic times.” The wall came down in advance of NAGPRA, followed by other ancestors and human remains displayed in American...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Vera Tiesler. Guilhem Olivier.

This is an abstract from the "Sacrificial and Autosacrifice Instruments in Mesoamerica: Symbolism and Technology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this talk, we shall analyze sacrificial knives in Mesoamerica’s (bio) archaeological record, among written sources, and iconography. Our survey emphasizes the diversity of cutting weaponry through time and cultural spheres. By combining forensic evidence with the material study of sacrificial knives,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yong Jun Kim. Nilesh Jadhav. Eun Jin Woo. Dong Hoon Shin. Vasant Shinde.

The number of Harappan cemeteries so far systematically surveyed is far less than that of contemporary settlements. Necropolis site at Rakhigarhi (India) was reported earlier but in small scale investigation. Our investigation for the last three seasons (2013 to 2016) was thus designed for improving this lacuna. We first classified each burial and analyzed statistically. The Harappan people practiced rather humble burial custom, but few were found differently and these burials look more...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Vera Tiesler. Virginia Miller.

This is an abstract from the "New Perspectives on Ritual Violence and Related Human Body Treatments in Ancient Mesoamerica" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Among late Maya religious complexes, Chichen Itza stands as a monumental landmark. Among the enigmatic aspects of Chichen’s ceremonial innovations count skull racks, where the heads of sacrificed victims were exhibited in rows. It was the first Mesoamerican city to erect a permanent, decorated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Ward. Mara Stumpf. Sara Juengst.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Ecuadorian Formative Period (3800-300 BC) is known for the creation of ceramics, a transition towards agriculture, and the development of sedentary settlements along the Pacific coast. These social and economic changes were often associated with declines in health, as people ate less varied agricultural diets and increasingly encountered pathogens...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emilie Cobb. Jess Beck. Colin Quinn. Horia Ciugudean.

Copper and gold resources from Southwestern Transylvania played a critical role in the emergence of inequality in European Late Prehistory. Communities in this metal-rich landscape, however, remain poorly understood. Though the highly visible tombs in the Apuseni Mountains where these communities buried some of their dead have been known to local archaeologists for decades, very little is known about the backdrop of health and disease in the region. Here, we present one of the first...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jana Meyer.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology, Cultural Heritage, and Public Education at Tijeras Pueblo, New Mexico" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Tijeras Pueblo is a Pueblo IV site in Central New Mexico located on a natural travel route between the Western Great Plains and the Rio Grande Valley, which likely facilitated frequent contact between different cultural groups. This study addresses two interconnected research goals: first, to examine...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joanna Wysocka. Beata Drupka. Paige Lynch. Marcin Krzepkowski.

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. Studying living conditions of any population in the past using indirect indicators such as skeletal lesions is challenging, as their occurrence can be connected and influenced by different factors such as individuals’ immune systems. However, porous skeletal lesions (porotic hyperostosis, cribra orbitalia), and linear enamel hypoplasias (LEH),...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Moles.

This is an abstract from the "Households at Aventura: Life and Community Longevity at an Ancient Maya City" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human remains are found in a variety of contexts at Aventura: as primary burials below the floors of houses, as secondary burials or caches also below the floors, and even in middens. The preservation of the bone is very poor and therefore the recovery of individuals is often less than 25%. This sometimes makes...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katie Taylor. Cheryl Anderson. Debra Martin.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research investigates the use of heritable nonmetric traits as a means for assessing population variation and biological relatedness within an archaeological sample using the human skeletal tomb assemblage from the Bronze Age site of Tell Abraq (2100-2000BC). A total of 410 individuals representing all ages and both sexes were interred in the tomb. An...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katelyn Frederick.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sex estimation is a key component of the biological profile used in skeletal studies for bioarchaeology and forensic anthropology. In the crucial need for non-pelvic sex estimation methods, Albanese (2008) introduced a new method that implements measurements between three newly defined landmarks on the proximal femur. These landmarks create a triangle which...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandra Bybee.

In 2014, Cultural Resource Analysts, Inc., conducted the archaeological relocation of graves from the Evansville State Hospital Cemetery. At the request of Beam, Longest, and Neff, LLC, on behalf of the City of Evansville and the Indiana Department of Transportation, the graves of 31 individuals who were patients at the reform-era hospital between circa 1890 and 1928 were relocated in advance of construction of a pedestrian bridge. The population consisted primarily of young to middle adults,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jose Marrero Rosado.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, we present a rescue project at the Cementerio Santa Maria Magdalena de Pazzi, in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Our project seeks to recover the human remains found on a public trail, initially associated with a 19th-century epidemic mass grave. Following initial surveys and excavations, a complex multi used history of the site has emerged. Here,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Madeleine Philips.

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Basque Archaeology: Current Research and Future Directions" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Popular conceptions of the settlement of the American West have long been associated with stoic cowboys, resolute homesteaders, and even California’s tenacious Miner Forty-Niners. These archetypes are representative the vast region’s development through the utilization of its abundant natural...