Bioarchaeology/Skeletal Analysis (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michele Buzon. Katie Whitmore. Claire Sigworth. Mohamed Faroug Ali.

This is an abstract from the "The Future of Bioarchaeology in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Public outreach and community engagement has become a larger focus of efforts in recent years for the Tombos Archaeological Project. Field seasons regularly include public lectures for adults in the community and children at the Tombos elementary school. We produced a pamphlet with information on the Tombos site (English/Arabic). We also...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicole Burt.

The history of physical anthropology contains figures and movements that improperly used science to hurt or diminish other groups or was utilized by such movements after publication. This haunted past can manifest as a bumpy future for modern practitioners working under a shadow of racial typology, eugenics, and other horrific applications of their science. Anthropologists continue to be haunted where our peers in anatomy or biology are not, due in part, to our theoretical approach as a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Debra Martin.

This is an abstract from the "From Individual Bodies to Bodies of Social Theory: Exploring Ontologies of the Americas" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Pueblo oral tradition, a persistent narrative exists regarding malevolent forces that commit transgressions while inhabiting the corporeal bodies of community members. Referred to as witches (although this is not a term Pueblo people would use) they bring about crop failures through droughts, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Ordoñez. Tamara Landivar. Lourdes Torres.

There are many collections of Tsantsas around the world. These shrunken heads were created by the Shuar and Achuar peoples of the Ecuadorian and Peruvian amazon until the mid-20th century. Though most of these museum collections have a known provenience, the individual histories and the authenticity of some of the heads has been contested. Similar questions have risen for Tsantsas held at the Pumapungo Ethnographic museum in the city of Cuenca, Ecuador. Using the approach of museum...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jason Laffoon. William Pestle.

Stable isotope analysis is one of the most effective tools for paleodietary reconstruction and has been widely applied to a vast array of archaeological contexts including the Caribbean region. This region, however, possesses a particularly complex isotopic ecology, including both a large number of isotopically variable food sources and a high degree of isotopic overlap between different food groups. As such, to date, most regional paleodietary studies have been limited to descriptive and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam Zimmer.

This is an abstract from the "The Future Is Fluid...and So Was the Past: Challenging the 'Normative' in Archaeological Interpretations" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Anatomical skeletal collections have often been framed as encompassing "the poorest of the poor" or the most marginalized of a given society. This framework has shaped the way that these collections have been studied for decades. A queered understanding of how these collections were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Toussaint.

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. Any aspect of human social life worth studying, whether in the past or present, is a complex product of history, biology, culture, and agency. Gender is a prime and important example of just such a topic. It requires a high degree of nuance to understand and describe gender constructs in a contemporary society, and studies of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christina Torres.

This is an abstract from the "The Marking and Making of Social Persons: Embodied Understandings in the Archaeologies of Childhood and Adolescence" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent conversations about body modification demonstrate that alterations to human form are experiential and are not solely oriented towards a final product. In thinking of prehistoric head shaping practices—practices engaged in with the bodies of infants—archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cristina Verdugo. Lars Fehren-Schmitz. James Brady.

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. As bioarchaeological interest in the question of ancient Maya ritual violence developed in the 1960s, it was generally recognized that sacrifice and related violent practices occurred within the social context of ritual. It should be expected, then, that caves would produce sacrificial osteological assemblages since they are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Terren Proctor.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The colonization of the Americas by the Spanish presents a unique context for exploring structural violence. The rapacious extractivism practiced by the colonizers led to the immeasurable destruction of indigenous communities, particularly those working as tributary labor. At the nexus of the colonial mining industry were the mercury mines of Santa Bárbara in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andre Strauss. Domingo Carlos Salazar-Garcia. Márcia Arcuri. Rui Murrieta. Walter Alva.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We analyzed 73 human bone/tooth samples from the following archaeological sites of the Lambayeque Valley, North Peru: Huaca Rajada, Huaca Zarpán, Huaca Santa Rosa, Huaca El Pueblo, Huaca El Chorro, Huaca El Triunfo, Huaca Saltur and Huaca Ventarrón. The associated material culture indicates that this sample encompasses a deep and continuous time transect going...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Averi Jones.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. On July 4, 1884, two outlaws known as Rattlesnake Jake and Longhaired Owens came to Lewistown, Montana, and caused a shoot-out that forever changed the town's history. Immediately following the shoot-out, folklore surrounding the Independence Day event rapidly developed, inspiring ghost tours, reenactments, and parades. With only 17 eyewitness accounts to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Raúl López. Gloria Hernández.

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 II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Conventional inferences of Maya mobility have been based on cultural exchange. The isotopic composition measured in human skeletal remains provides a direct measure of past peoples’ movements. Founded on published isotopic datasets across the Maya area,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sophia Barrett. Samantha Mackertich. Kathryn Baustian.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A circular stone tomb at the site of Tell Abraq (UAE) on the southern coast of the Arabian Gulf was used as a mortuary feature for approximately 200 years (2200-2000BC) during the Bronze Age. Both adults and children were buried in the 6 meter wide tomb, causing significant admixture or commingling of the remains. This research reassessed the demography of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Estela Martínez Mora.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological research conducted since 2010 at Conjunto Norte Rancho Aserradero (CNRA) has provided information on an elite settlement on the outskirts of the Tamtoc Rector Center in the Huasteca Potosina. The various funerary contexts studied, from the erection offering of the main building to the rich individual burials, provide data on funerary...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Snyder. Natasha P. Vang. Tiffiny A. Tung.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Stable isotope analysis can illuminate aspects about a population’s diet and migration patterns otherwise unavailable through skeletal analysis. The population for this study is a mass burial at the site of Huari-Mongachayoq, excavated by Francisco Solano in the 1980s. The skeletons date to the second half of the Andean Late Intermediate Period, ca. 1275 –...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amandine Flammang. Margot Serra.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Prehispanic open sepulcher collective funerary contexts are ubiquitous in the landscape of the Andean highlands. Their study has mostly focused on their architecture and setting, including their role in ancestor worship. Even though some still contain significant material and human remains, very few of these monuments have been thoroughly excavated, mainly...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Plew. Louisa Daggers.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Zooarchaeological Methods" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Guyana’s shell midden complex, which stretches across its northwestern coast, documents more than 7,500 years of human land use. Traditional interpretations of the middens have assumed a degree of environmental constancy save for fluctuating Holocene sea levels associated with species found in marine and brackish waters. This study provides a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aurelien Tafani. Andrea Vianello. Robert H. Tykot. Emanuela Gualdi.

This contribution aims at gaining on the life history of individuals buried in northeastern Italy between the fifth and the seventh centuries AD. Elemental analysis of human and animal remains provides data on the evolution of diet and mobility at a time of significant social changes. Our research strategy, based on a preliminary histological study on teeth and bones and on serial sampling, gives us the opportunity to observe these variations at the level of the individual. Thus, this research...

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

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 Estuquiña is a Late Intermediate Period (AD 1100-1476) site in the Osmore drainage near the modern city of Moquegua in southern Peru. This time period is characterized by regional socio-political decentralization and transition of imperial polities throughout much of Andean South America. Previous research on human remains from the site...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dilpreet Basanti.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper uses micro-CT and funerary taphonomy to reconstruct ancient Aksumite burials (50-400 AD). Aksum, in northern Ethiopia, was the capital of an ancient polity that spread across the northern Horn of Africa and became a major power in the Indian Ocean trade. The most notable remains of the ancient capital are its towering funerary stelae and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matt Peeples.

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. Many recent archaeological approaches to formally reconstructing past regional networks have relied on either spatial data (travel costs or features such as roads/trails) or patterns in material culture similarities and distributions. Spatial distance and material patterns are clearly often related to each other...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Molly Zuckerman.

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. Despite extensive clinical documentation of the psychosocially and physically debilitating effects of treponematosis (e.g., yaws) and intensive investigations into the disease’s ancient burden in the Americas, physical impairment as well as disability and health-related caregiving have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Corinne Taylor. Megan Perry. Robert Tykot.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Breastfeeding and weaning practices can impact a child’s immune system development and nutritional status and cause long-term health effects. Here we explore the potential relationship between the weaning process and childhood frailty in a late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century land-owning family in coastal North Carolina. The 10 individuals recovered...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dilpreet Basanti.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents micro-CT histological data on bone samples from Aksum’s Stelae Park cemetery (AD 50–400). Aksum was the capital of an ancient polity (AD 50–800) that spread across the northern Horn of Africa and was a major global power in the Indian Ocean trade. The most notable lasting remains of the ancient capital are its towering funerary...