Bioarchaeology/Skeletal Analysis (Other Keyword)
351-375 (487 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Approaches to Cultural and Biological Complexity in Mexico at the Time of Spanish Conquest" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cultural processes connected the various regions throughout Mesoamerica. Increased long-distance trade, political alliances, imperial conquest, and spread of religious ideology in the Valley of Mexico facilitated more migration over time. City nucleation to important economic, political, and...
Postmarital Residence Patterns of Late Archaic Hunter-Gatherers from the Loma Sandia (41LK28) Site, Live Oak County, Texas: An Analysis Using 87Sr/86Sr (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists researching hunter-gatherers in the Texas Coastal Plains (TCP) and Central Texas have noted differences between sexes in carbon and nitrogen isotope studies. One explanation offered for these differences is due to mate exchange, specifically patrilocality. Evidence for hunter-gatherer patrilocality in Texas also comes from the ethnographic...
Postmortem Rituals: Skeletal Manipulation of a Late Antiquity Burial in Portugal (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Freixo Archaeology Project was initiated in 2015 to investigate the nature of Roman Imperial occupation in the Iberian Peninsula with an interest in the symbolic and ideological reuse of sacred space. Freixo is located within the Municipality of Redondo in southeastern Portugal, where a sixteenth-century Christian church overlays an ancient Roman...
Practicing Communities and Experimental Bioarchaeology: A Look at the Tiwanaku (AD 500–1100) and Their Descendant Communities in Bolivia (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Communities of Practice in the Ancient Andes: Thinking through Knowledge Transmission and Community Making in and beyond Craft Production" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Using ethnographic interviews and experimental (bio)archaeology, over 20 individuals participated in this research to look for movement similarities between their modern labor and tasks their Tiwanaku ancestors likely performed, as shown by skeletal...
Pre-Inca to Inca Demographic Shifts in the South Central Andes Using Stature Estimation (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During times of social upheaval, such as the implementation of new imperial rule, major demographic changes can occur in populations. One osteological aspect that can be scored are changes in stature through time due to new stressors, inequalities, immigrations or migrations, and/or other such phenomena. This study aims to discover if there were major...
Prehistoric Weapon Perimortem Damage Documentation (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the 2016 – 2017 academic year a Humboldt State University Anthropology Graduate Student recreated a macuahuitl, a wooden club with obsidian blades, and used it on two pig heads for a use-wear analysis of the obsidian. The pig heads were partially de-fleshed and frozen to be added to the university’s zooarchaeology collection. This allowed for the...
Preliminary Findings from the Cemetery at the Medieval Ilibalyk Site in Southeast Kazakhstan (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Ilibalyk (Usharal) site in southeastern Kazakhstan is the location of an ongoing excavation of a medieval (13th-14th centuries CE) Christian cemetery and settlement. Ilibalyk was located along the trans-continental trade networks often called the Silk Roads. Many trade goods from across Eurasia have been found in association with burials at Ilibalyk....
A Preliminary Multi-isotope Assessment of Precolumbian Humans from Panama (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Advances and New Perspectives in the Isthmo-Colombian Area" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study presents data on the first multi-isotope analysis of precolombian humans in Panama. We use carbon (δ13C), nitrogen (δ15N), oxygen (δ18O), and strontium (87Sr/86Sr) isotopes to determine the diets and mobility patterns of individuals from seven archaeological sites: Cerro Mangote, Sitio Sierra, and Cerro Juan Díaz in...
Preliminary Report of SUNY-Buffalo Investigations at La Quemada, Zacatecas, 1987 and 1988 Seasons (1989)
Fieldwork from the 1987 and 1988 seasons at La Quemada
Preliminary Results of Skeletal Analysis from the Early Muslim Period Cemetery of Bukhara (Uzbekistan) (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bukhara (in modern Uzbekistan) was a center of learning, power, and innovation during the “Lost Enlightenment” of the late first and early second millennium CE in Central Asia. At the same time, the metropolis faced crises familiar to city-dwellers today, such as controversial land use policies and outbreaks of infectious disease. In the summer of 2022,...
Preliminary Study of Dental Health among Coastal Population at the Site of the Santo Domingo Cemetery in Huarmey, Peru (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent archaeological excavations at the prehispanic cemetery of Santo Domingo in Huarmey (Peru) suggests that it was associated with the settlement of El Campanario. Based on the ceramic styles recovered at the site, the cemetery was likely utilized during the second half of the Middle Horizon (AD 800–1000) and the Late Intermediate Period (AD 1000–1400). In...
Primary or Secondary Deposition: Midnight Terror Cave Operation V (2018)
Two chambers in Midnight Terror Cave, Belize show undeniable evidence of Maya child sacrifice. Operation V and Operation VIII are the deepest darkest chambers of the cave where some of the most important of ancient Maya rites were performed including human sacrifice. In 2009 Ann Scott proposed that sacrifices occurred in Operation VIII and, during ritual cleaning of this public space in preparation for a new ceremony, the bones were taken from their primary deposition site and moved to Operation...
Probable Pathological Evidence of Adult Scurvy, Dating Back to about 200 B.C. in Yuci, Shanxi, China (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Scurvy is a disease resulting from inadequate intake of vitamin C. This can happen to all age groups but has a relatively high prevalence in children and subadults. Subadult scurvy has been studied thoroughly over the past decades; however, little research has been done on adult scurvy. This is because scurvy presents ambiguously in adults; in addition, scurvy...
Problematic at Best: Assigning Sex to Prehistoric Remains with Consistency (2018)
Historically, the sex of prehistoric human skeletal remains has been visually assessed by researchers who are (hopefully) knowledgeable about the population being examined. However, methods of assigning sex can be largely subjective and often lead to inconsistent results. In this study, we consider human skeletal remains from the Medio period (A.D. 1200–1475) from Paquimé, a site in northern Chihuahua, Mexico, that was the economic and political center of the Casas Grandes region. The sexes of...
Processing Personhood: Mortuary Activity from the Middle to Late Woodland in the Lower Illinois River Valley (2018)
While archaeological engagement with the body as a locus of embodied agency has proliferated in recent years, this study is the first to rigorously apply theories of personhood to the lengthy burial rituals documented within interment facilities of Woodland burial mounds from the North American Midcontinent. This study aims to explore conceptions of the body, dividuality, embodiment, and personhood through the analysis of skeletal material from the Middle Woodland Gibson Mounds Site (n=19) and...
Project Bibliography (2008)
no description provided
Puberty in Precontact Illinois: An Evaluation of Pubertal Timing in Middle and Late Woodland Native American Adolescents (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The timing of life-cycle stages in ancient populations has important implications for population dynamics and social identity; it may also serve as an indicator of broader health and social processes. This study of Woodland adolescents is the first assessment of pubertal development in precontact Native Americans and demonstrates that Shapland and Lewis’s...
Public Outreach and Community Engagement with the Tombos Archaeological Project in Sudan. (2019)
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...
Public Perception of the Ethics of Physical Anthropology (2018)
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...
Pueblo Warriors, Witches and Cannibals: Indigenous Concepts of Corporeality and the Biorchaeological Record (2019)
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...
Putting Heads Together: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Museum Archaeology of the National Tsantsa Collection at the Pumapungo Museum, Cuenca (2018)
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...
Quantitative Paleodietary Reconstruction with Complex Foodwebs: An Isotopic Case Study from the Caribbean (2018)
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...
Queer (Re)Collections: How Anatomical Collections Obscure Identities (2019)
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...
Queer Eye for the Dead Guy: The Influence of Debra Martin on a Bioarchaeological Investigation of Gender beyond the Binary (2021)
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...
The Question of Sacrifice: Examining Maya Mortuary Practices through the Lens of Midnight Terror Cave (2021)
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...