Quantitative and Spatial Analysis (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sebastian Salgado-Flores.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the last several decades, research in anthracology (the study of charcoal recovered from archaeological sites) has become increasingly relevant to our understanding of human-environment dynamics. The field’s understanding of human fuelwood collection is currently based on a model guided by the “Principle of Least Effort,” which expects wood gatherers to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Josephine Thompson. Carlos Morales. Richard Hansen. Ross Ensley.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Multidisciplinary Investigations in the Mirador Basin, Guatemala" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A new model of Preclassic settlement patterns has emerged with the use of lidar to document a large-scale landscape in northern Guatemala. These patterns include highly sophisticated man-made hydrographic features, monolithic transportation networks, extensive residential complexes, and monumental civic complexes...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Austin Cross. Johnnie Sabin.

Site visibility has long been an issue for late Pleistocene/early Holocene research in the southeastern United States, partially due to modern forest cover and partially due to large portions of the Southeast having been submerged by more than 80 meters of sea level rise.  However, a large number of Late Paleoindian/Early Archaic Bolen artifacts have been discovered in Jefferson and Taylor counties in northern Florida, including dozens from underwater sites that were inundated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julie Field. John Dudgeon. Christopher Roos. Amy Commendador. Rebecca Hazard.

This is an abstract from the "Geospatial Studies in the Archaeology of Oceania" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Previous GIS-based analyses (2017) by the authors have identified the ranges of several classes of terrestrial fauna that would inhabited the island of Viti Levu in prehistory. The ranges and habits of reptiles (giant tortoises, iguanas, and snakes), flightless birds (megapodes and giant pigeons), and bat and seabird colonies intersect in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Munson. Jonathan Scholnick. Lorena Paiz Aragon.

Inequality is a prominent and persistent feature of all large-scale human societies that has significant impacts on everyday life. Variation in material wealth and social capital as well as differential access to specialized knowledge and other resources directly impacts household quality of life (QOL) within ancient and contemporary communities. For the ancient Maya, the establishment of political institutions centered on divine rulership significantly contributed to QOL changes during the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert J. DiNapoli. Terry L. Hunt. Carl P. Lipo.

Pre-European contact Rapa Nui (Easter Island) society is well-known for its substantial investment in monumental architecture, including over 300 platforms (ahu) and almost 1000 statues (moai). Recent theoretical and empirical research on the island suggests that ahu and moai were focal points for competitive and cooperative signaling by relatively small-scale communities dispersed across on the island. Evaluation of this hypothesis, however, requires the measurement of the amount of energy...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meghann Vance.

This is an abstract from the "The Paleoindian Southwest" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation provides a summary of what is currently known for the Lime Ridge Clovis site, as well as more recent data on Clovis sites, or components thereof, from Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, Utah. The data are fleeting, but suggest a trend comparable to the adjacent Nevada and Arizona regions for diminished size and boldness in blade...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Abigail Gancz.

The Shawnee-Minisink Site is one of the most spatially intact Paleoindian sites in eastern North America. Located in the Upper Delaware Valley of Pennsylvania, the site includes an occupation area spanning 60 x 95m which dates to circa 12,900 CalBP. Over 18,000 point-provenienced lithics have been excavated from a 360 meter-squared area. The lithic artifacts consist primarily of the local black flint as well as of various exotic cherts. Because it is well dated, spatially intact, and likely...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kirsty Escalante.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological looting in the Maya area has been an enduring concern for over 60 years. While many individual archaeological projects have worked diligently to record looting within their respective project areas, the recent application of lidar in archaeology facilitates the large-scale study of illicit digging in the forested Maya region for the first...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Whitehead.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. UAV data collection has become increasingly common in North American archaeology. This presentation will give an overview of the state of the art in UAV data collection, technologies, and processing methodologies. All fronts in UAV data collection are progressing at an ever increasing pace, making staying up-to-date almost impossible for most archaeologists....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Heilen. Shelby Manney.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Most archaeological investigations in the United States and other countries must comply with preservation laws, if on government property or supported by government funding. Academic and cultural resource management (CRM) studies have explored various social, temporal, and environmental contexts and produce an ever-increasing volume of archaeological data....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rudolf Cesaretti.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeology of the Postclassic (c. AD 900-1520) Basin of Mexico (BOM) is among the most intensively studied in the New World. In spite of this, longstanding questions about population dynamics and social change remain unresolved due to the persistent gaps and coarse resolution of its regional-scale ceramic chronology. Ongoing fieldwork and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chris McCabe. Rod Mather. Timothy Ives.

In 2017 the Rhode Island Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission teamed up with the University of Rhode Island’s Applied History Laboratory to develop a Geographic Information System (GIS) incorporating the state’s complex assortment of archaeological and historical sites. With support from the National Park Service, their objective is to collect and share the stories of Rhode Island by creating a fully operational and sustainable geospatial database of known archaeological sites and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tawny Tibbits. Marieka Brouwer Burg. Eleanor Harrison-Buck.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Ground Stone Studies in the Eastern Maya Lowlands" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Granite was a preferred raw material for ground stone tool production in many parts of the Maya Lowlands. However, granite outcrops are spatially restricted within the Maya Mountains of Belize, and access to this material was limited. The movement of raw and/or finished tools would have required various mechanisms of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joel Grossman.

This is an abstract from the "The Legacies of Archaeologists in the Andes: Second Symposium, the Institutionalization and Internationalization of Andean Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper reports programmatic recommendations, an advanced seminar series in archaeology, and field tests in geophysics undertaken during a consultancy with the Peruvian Institute of Culture (INC) in October 1982. The invited international program...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexander Rosa. Michael Kolb. Scott Kirk. William Balco.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. After the Norman conquest of Sicily, the newfound rulers of the island found themselves greatly outnumbered in a land where a majority of the population had converted to Islam. Under these conditions, many of the technological and artistic innovations brought to the island by the Arabs continued under the new, Christian regime. Of particular interest to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Evangelos Dimopoulos. Irina Velsko. Evan Irving Pease. Laurent Frantz. Greger Larson.

This is an abstract from the "HumAnE Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Genetic species identification of archaeological specimens is difficult due to low DNA content and degradation. Yet specific and accurate identification of microbes is essential not only for identifying how diseases affect human health, but also the health of domesticated animals. Therefore, we created a method for identifying microbes via aDNA, that quantifies the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Allison.

This is an abstract from the "Attention to Detail: A Pragmatic Career of Research, Mentoring, and Service, Papers in Honor of Keith Kintigh" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Among Keith Kintigh’s many contributions to archaeology was his emphasis on understanding the connections among quantitative methods, archaeological problems, and what archaeologists can reasonably infer from their data. In both publications and in the classroom, he demonstrated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Davies. Jessica Thompson.

This is an abstract from the "Developing Paleolithic Excavation Methods for the Twenty-First Century" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Piece-plotting, or point proveniencing, is a common practice in field archaeology. These data are important for intrasite spatial analysis and evaluating site formation processes. More detailed data collection requires more time and effort, leading to different decisions about size cutoffs between projects. Factors...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Harris.

A Bayesian model of Distribution Regression using a Mean Embedding Ridge Regression (MERR) algorithm is developed to address two primary shortcomings of current Archaeological Predictive Modeling (APM) practice; 1) neglecting the richness of archaeological landforms by collapsing a site to a single point or observation; and 2) disregarding the implicit and explicit uncertainty of archaeological data, predictions, and model parameters. This research addresses the first hurdle by developing a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Scholnick.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper examines the role of workshop organization in the emergence of shared stylistic conventions of Colonial-era Massachusetts gravestones. Deetz and Dethlefsen argued that changes in the stylistic motifs carved on New England gravestones show reflect changing attitudes towards death (1967), and that certain motifs diffuse through space and time...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Varley.

This is an abstract from the "Etruscan Centralization to Medieval Marginalization: Shifts in Settlement and Mortuary Traditions at San Giuliano, Italy" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Every space humans inhabit tells a story about the cultural values, social norms, and lives of those who utilized the space. This paper focuses on the archaeological remains of a medieval fortification and presumed castle located in Barbarano Romano, Italy, atop the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Smeeks.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Social actors interact with their material environment rather than simply reacting to it; they manipulate the meanings of, or meaningfully constitute, material culture according to their own needs and interests. As such, people use material culture to communicate and negotiate self-identity, as well as group affiliation and dissociation, and leaders can...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Allaun D'Lopez. Ismael Sánchez-Morales.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Paleoindian presence south of the modern geo-political US-Mexico border is relatively poorly understood when compared to that of the rest of North America. A notable exception to this gap in knowledge surrounds the work at Fin del Mundo in Sonora, Mexico. This northern Mexican site is the subject of extensive survey and excavation, revealing the only known...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Suzanne Pilaar Birch.

This is an abstract from the "Defining and Measuring Diversity in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While identifying and defining diversity in material culture studies, bioarchaeological assemblages, and site distribution has long been de rigeur, the advent and development of stable isotope analysis in archaeology since the publication of Leonard & Jones' seminal 1989 volume provides yet another layer of complexity in archaeological...