Quantitative and Spatial Analysis (Other Keyword)
26-50 (187 Records)
Archaeological investigations at Housepit 54 within the Bridge River site have exposed seventeen discreet floors primarily dating to ca. 1500-1000 cal. B.P. In this poster, we draw data from a subset of the site’s floors in order to address questions about the potential spatial and temporal relationships between the patterning of hearth-centered activity areas by primarily examining variability in lithic artifacts. Faunal remains and other features will also be included in analysis. Using the...
The Chronology of Goat-Springs Pueblo (2018)
The site of Goat Springs Pueblo, in Socorro County, NM, is unusual for a relatively low density of artifacts compared to a large investment in architecture at the site. Consequently, the development of a site chronology is necessary to establish whether the low density of artifacts is attributable to a short period of occupation (or series of short occupations) - despite the considerable investment in architecture - or if another explanation is necessary. Complicating the construction of a...
Climate Change, Economies of Scale, and Population Growth in Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherer Societies: A Case Study from Southwestern Wyoming (2018)
Increasing energy consumption returns, or economies of scale, have been illustrated similarly for modern urban societies and ancient complex societies. However, the relationship between underlying scaling relationships and the development and decline of population and social complexity over the long-term are yet to be investigated. This poster addresses their role in hunter-gatherer societies. Using formal mathematical models from macroeconomics, we examine the long-term variability of economies...
Collective Action, Households, Neighborhoods, and Urban Landscapes: A Multiscalar Perspective on Late Postclassic Urbanism at Tlaxcallan (2021)
This is an abstract from the "The Urban Question: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Investigating the Ancient Mesoamerican City" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Systematic cross-cultural research on premodern cities at the global scale has begun to shed light on the relationships among political-economic strategies at various scales, the sociospatial organization of cities, and the daily lived experience of urban residents and visitors. Drawing on...
Comparing the Performance of Machine Learning and Traditional Approaches to Archaeological Site Modeling and Prediction (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology II (QUANTARCH II)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Site prediction models have helped archaeological resource management in site prospecting, impact mitigation, and information recovery. Beginning in 2009, we developed probability models for the Shoshone National Forest (SNF). These models helped to prioritize inventory of areas burned in wildfires, to rapidly appraise...
A Comparison of Changing Reduction Sequences of Obsidian from the Grandad Site in the Central Sierra, California (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This is an investigation of obsidian chipping waste from the Grandad site, located in the Central Sierra near Mariposa, California based on point types found in deposits that have shown evidence of continuous occupation from 9000 BP to European contact. We searched for evidence of a changing reduction sequence from biface blank characteristics of large...
Contextual Taphonomy in Zooarchaeology: From Refuse Behavior to Site-Occupation Intensity in Levantine Epipaleolithic Camps (2018)
In zooarchaeology, Contextual Taphonomy means the integration of the stratigraphic and contextual data with zooarchaeological and taphonomic data, to clarify the 'life history' of a faunal sub-assemblage in a given context. The approach uses animal remains to explain variability among site features by looking into the differential taphonomic histories of the bones, most importantly in the post-discard stage. Archaeofaunal remains are normally ubiquitous in foragers’ camps and their histories are...
Coverage-Based Rarefaction in Zooarchaeology: Potential and Pitfalls (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Defining and Measuring Diversity in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Zooarchaeologists routinely measure the taxonomic richness of faunal assemblages in order to explore questions related to human subsistence behavior or paleoenvironmental change. A common solution to the well-known sampling issues that attend such analysis is rarefaction, whereby sample size is standardized by rarefying larger assemblages...
Decoding the Molecular Structure of Food Culture (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Thinking about Eating: Theorizing Foodways in Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There are many different ways to approach food and food culture as windows into past lifeways. In this paper we discuss how food plant evidence, landscape data, and new technologies can be combined to provide new approaches that allow the study of webs of communication that can explain variable socioeconomic settings through time...
Dig Until You Find Blood: A Spatial Investigation of Menstrual Seclusion Practice at Deir el-Medina (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ethnographic investigations into menstrual seclusion practices worldwide show that investigating these behaviors is not only fruitful, but also integral in understanding a community’s ideology and social structuring. Texts dating to the New Kingdom and Demotic periods suggest that ancient Egyptians engaged in a menstrual seclusion practice that included a...
Digital Deforestation: DTM Generation with Agisoft Photoscan (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Towards a Standardization of Photogrammetric Methods in Archaeology: A Conversation about 'Best Practices' in An Emerging Methodology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Applying digital photogrammetry to archaeological sites is a well-known approach. Also fairly common is photogrammetry’s combination with low-altitude aerial photography (LAAP) in order to generate three-dimensional data and produce GIS outputs such as...
Digital Dig Kits: Portable Affordable Archaeology for Twenty-First-Century Fieldwork (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent advances in lidar technologies have been profound for archaeology, amplifying the subdiscipline of digital archaeology. However, lidar units, both aerial and terrestrial, have remained cost prohibitive until recent products by Apple including the iPad and iPhone Pro series. These products are among the first consumer electronic devices with built-in...
Directed Movement at Ancient Maya Centers (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Manifesting Movement Materially: Broadening the Mesoamerican View" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Is there a right way to enter a Maya center? A correct order to the viewing and experiencing of the place? How did the physical act of moving through a center inform the understanding of that place, its leaders, oneself? This paper presents the results of several seasons of fieldwork at the Belizean sites of Xunantunich...
The Dirt on Cultural Diversity: Examining Occupation Floor Surfaces in the Moquegua Valley (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Exploring Culture Contact and Diversity in Southern Peru" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The recent rise in the availability of literature on the topic soil chemical analysis has inspired growing interest in evaluating soils at archaeological sites to gain a more detailed picture of the lives and culture of the people that once lived there. Through soil analysis, we can better define areas once used for residential...
Diversity and Lithic Microwear: Quantification, Classification, and Standardization (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Defining and Measuring Diversity in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past decade, lithic microwear analysis has witnessed a shift in how data is collected, moving away from optical microscopy towards a more quantifiable practice. The adoption of surface metrology microscopes, including confocal and focus variation, allows for the measurement of surface roughness or texture, thus distinguishing...
The Diversity of Old Copper Culture Projectile Points (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Defining and Measuring Diversity in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Old Copper Culture (OCC) (4000-1000 B.C.) of the Lake Superior Region of North America features a wide variety of utilitarian tools manufactured from native copper. Here, we assess the technological diversity of copper projectile points found in the region spanning Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota U.S.A., as well as artifacts found...
Divine Food and the Warriors of Curicaueri (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Tzintzuntzan, Capital of the Tarascan Empire: New Perspectives" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the Tarascan cosmovision, feeding the gods daily, especially Curicaueri, was vital because it ensured that the world would continue to function; this food was the human sacrifice. At the foot of the platform, one of the most significant pieces of evidence of this act of surrender to the gods was found, where an enormous...
Domestic Craft Specialization and Social Spatial Organization of Harappa (2018)
The site of Harappa, Pakistan, was a major urban center of the Indus Civilization with over two thousand years of occupation (3700-1700 BCE). The site did not have an obvious civic ceremonial center but was instead multi-nodal with walled sub-divisions. As an aspect of stone tool assemblage analysis at the site, the most functionally relevant attributes of the blade tools were differentially weighted to produce a soft hierarchical clustering classification scheme. These classes are considered...
Early Holocene Site Structure at the Little Steamboat Point 1 Rockshelter, Oregon (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Early Holocene component at Little Steamboat Point 1 (LSP-1) Rockshelter consists of flaked stone tools, debitage, ground stone, fire-affected rock, and abundant animal bones. It indicates suggest that people systematically butchered ~1,000 rabbits and hares, constructed cooking features, occasionally processed plants, and manufactured and discarded stone...
The Effect of Climate Change and Human Predation on the Niche Space of North American Proboscideans (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Bayesian Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Approximately 13,000 years ago, 37 genera of North American megafauna went extinct. Proboscideans, mammoths, and mastodons, specifically, were among the megafauna affected. Today, researchers continue to debate between three hypotheses to explain these North American Pleistocene mass extinctions: (1) human over-hunting, (2) climate change leading to a reduced niche,...
The Effect of Climate Change on the Niche Space of North American Proboscideans (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology I (QUANTARCH I)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Most researchers agree that the extinction events of North American megafauna, including proboscideans, occurred approximately 13,000 years ago. The reason for the demise of these creatures, in particular proboscideans such as mammoth and mastodon, is a matter of debate. There are three accepted general hypotheses explaining...
The Effects of Climate Change and Risk on the Foraging-Farming Transition in North America (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology I (QUANTARCH I)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The evolution of the Homo lineage is characterized by the emergence of numerous biological and cultural traits. One behavioral trait is the transition from foraging to farming. Some scholars suggest that climate change contributed to the emergence of agriculture while others hypothesize that continually increasing foraging risk...
Empire of Aksum Settlement Patterns: Site Size Hierarchy and Spatial Clustering Analyses (2018)
Settlement pattern analysis has long remained a key means of examining the social, economic, and political relationships among archaeological sites and the way those relationships changed through time. Two common approaches involve: 1) analyzing the relative sizes of sites to evaluate possible site size hierarchies, and 2) analyzing the spatial distribution of sites across landscapes to evaluate possible clustering or dispersion. This paper applies more statistically rigorous methods that...
Estimating the Effect of Endogenous Spatial Dependency with a Hierarchical Bayesian CAR Model on Archaeological Site Location Data (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology II (QUANTARCH II)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research presents a method to test the endogenous spatial correlation effect when modeling the landscape sensitivity for archaeological sites. The effects of endogenous spatial correlation are inferred using a Hierarchical Bayesian model with an Conditional Auto-Regressive (CAR) component to better understand the...
Evaluating Archaeological Predictability Across the Western United States (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology II (QUANTARCH II)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human behavior is patterned in relation to the environment, and these patterns are approximated by the archaeological record. Similarly, the ability to discover archaeological material is patterned in relation to the environment. Geographic Information Systems and statistical software have been used to develop multiple...