Coastal and Island Archaeology (Other Keyword)
226-250 (277 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Hinterlands in Polynesia" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The concept of a "hinterland" is a tool. As such, the concept is only beneficial if it can help us understand human behavior or the archaeological record better than alternatives. Recent research has shown that it can be usefully applied in Polynesia, but its application is geographically and substantively limited. This paper will explore the use of...
A Small Rock Holding Back the Waves (2018)
Islands are both understudied and spatially constrained, with often turbulent colonial histories. This paper reconsiders the conceptual basis of intra- and inter-island relationships in the context of archaeology. We argue that islands need not be isolated as geographic, ecologic or cultural entities and have not been so during the proto-historic and prehistoric periods. Using 21st century equilibrium theory and gateway theory we suggest that islands may be in some contexts central places. We...
Social Memory and Sustainability in Dynamic Landscapes (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Living Landscapes: Disaster, Memory, and Change in Dynamic Environments " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We explore the role of social memory in facilitating human survival within the dynamic landscape of southwest Madagascar. By analyzing an oral history archive compiled through interviews with over 100 knowledge holders in the Velondriake Marine Protected Area, we address questions about human adaptation to climate...
Soil Nutrient Variability in the South Kohala Field System, Hawai‘i Island (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The uplands of Kawaihae 1 ahupua‘a, Hawai‘i Island, contain a dense fixed-field agricultural field system built, utilized, and occupied by Hawaiians from as early as the 17th century into the 19th – early 20th century. This field system includes a diverse array of agricultural practices including fixed-field agriculture, planting mounds, terracing, and water...
The SPLASHCOS Viewer: The First Online Atlas of Submerged Prehistoric Sites in Maritime Europe and the Mesolithic Site of Strande, Kiel Bay (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in Global Submerged Paleolandscapes Research" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The EU-funded SPLASHCOS network promoted the fledgling discipline of "Continental Shelf Prehistoric Research." This discipline is based on an interdisciplinary research approach combining archaeological, geophysical, geological, oceanographic, and biological methods. Investigations so far have already enormously expanded the...
The State of the (Conch) Republic: Renewed Archaeology in the Imperiled Florida Keys (2018)
Although the Florida Keys’ archaeological record famously made possible the seriation of south Florida pre-Columbian ceramic styles in 1949, this 356 km2 archipelago has been largely ignored by academic archaeologists ever since. Today, Keys archaeological sites and historical properties are plagued by tourism-related development, a multi-faceted issue that is exacerbated by the compounding effects of weekly tidal erosion and seasonal tropical storms. Consequently, an untold number of sites have...
Strategies for Exploring the Protohistoric Period on the Southern Maine Coast (2018)
As investigations of the Protohistoric period move away from a reliance on the reliable material culture recovery found in burial contexts, our basis for investigation of protohistoric sites and landscapes in the Far Northeast often begins with European historical records. Recent excavations in the area described in 1607 by Champlain as the village of Chouacoet in Saco Bay, Maine highlight the fact that many of the equivalencies drawn between the archaeological record of the protohistoric and...
Style vs. Function in Polynesian Fish Hook Shank Variation (2018)
Polynesian i’a makau, or fishhooks, may stand in for ceramics for the purpose of generating culture-historical units, facilitating relative dating of the three Hawaiian assemblages under scrutiny (Allen 1996). Artifact assemblages at Waiahukini, Makalei, and Pu’u Ali’i contained over 1000 intact or partial fishhooks and fragments of shaped pig bone representing unfinished manufacture. Allen’s (2015) conceptual style-function model of hook attributes necessitates a focus on stylistic shank...
Submerged Prehistoric Archaeology: Tackling the Issues of Scale and Context on the Gulf of Mexico Outer Continental Shelf (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The northwestern Gulf of Mexico outer continental shelf (OCS) includes approximately 38,660,700 acres of submerged land under federal permitting authority, which are in turn subject to Section 106-compliant archaeological survey. Both historic and prehistoric resources must be identified. While historic shipwrecks can occur in any water depth, sea-level curve...
Sustainable Heritage through Community Engagement and Education (2018)
In addressing the problem of burning libraries, this paper focuses on sustainable heritage through public awareness and civic engagement. Political rhetoric and limited first-hand experience has created a system whereby the impacts of climate change, coastal erosion, and rising sea levels are no longer a priority; and for students, it has become but a distant concern. This paper addresses these problems through education programs designed to (i) get students involved in the archaeology of...
Swandro, Rousay, Orkney: Between Sea and Land (2018)
The site of Swandro is on the eroding coastal fringe of the island of Rousay, Orkney and has been the focus of field training for the next archaeological generation between the University of Bradford, Archaeological Institute UHI and Hunter College, CUNY since 2010. Such sites are a finite resource, endangered by coastal erosion exacerbated by the effects of climate change. The site straddles both the shore and the land and consists of a Neolithic Chambered Cairn and a later settlement dating...
A Synthesis of Windward Oahu Archaeology (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Research and CRM Are Not Mutually Exclusive: J. Stephen Athens—Forty Years and Counting" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Steve Athens legacy has provided archaeologists working within a historic preservation context a reminder of the numerous opportunities available to conduct research within a cultural resource management setting. This paper argues that not only does historic preservation provide a plethora of funding...
A Tale of Tongan Chickens (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lapita peoples transported a number of animal species in their colonizing canoes as they settled the islands of the Pacific. Included among the domesticated animals introduced by Lapita peoples were chickens (Gallus gallus). Later, Polynesians also transported chickens as they settled many of the islands of the Polynesian Triangle. The discovery of...
A Tale of Two Ports: A Preliminary Assessment of Ceramic and Artifactual Assemblages from Conil and Vista Alegre (2018)
Coastal communities in the Maya Lowlands played a myriad of roles in the ebb and flow of political, economic, and social formations over the past 3000 years, yet these roles have remained along the periphery of Maya studies. Though ever present, Maya coastal sites were atypical – perhaps even idiosyncratic – in terms of how they were imagined and lived-in by the Maya. Critical to our understanding of these coastal settlements is the material culture traded and utilized by the occupants of these...
Terrestrial Survey for the Beeswax Wreck of the Oregon Coast (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Pacific Maritime History: Ships and Shipwrecks" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The recent discovery and subsequent recovery of ship timbers believed to belong to the Manila galleon Santo Cristo de Burgos present new opportunities for archaeological survey on the Oregon coastline. The Maritime Archaeological Society, along with Oregon State Parks, has plans to conduct survey and phase one testing in areas surrounding...
Testing the Efficacy of Methodologies for the Estimation of Body Size of California Mussel Based on Shell Fragments (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past decades, archaeologists have developed regression formulae to estimate animal body size based on shell fragments. In this study, we tested the efficacy of five different methods by measuring over 1200 mussel (Mytilus californianus) shells excavated from an archaeological site (CA-VEN-395) in the Santa Monica Mountains, located about 9 km from the...
Thermal Processes on Tropical Archaeological Shell: An Experimental Study (2018)
Tropical archaeological shell middens throughout Australasia provide valuable information about subsistence practices, environmental changes, and human occupation. One of the major anthropic processes that can occur in any midden site is burning or heating of the shell, either from cooking or heat-treating shell for working. Thermal influences on marine shell are poorly understood across all disciplines, including archaeology. Burning or heating may not always show any visual signs and rather...
Time and the Landscape: Visualizations of Murujuga and Beyond. (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Art of Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Developing 3D photorealistic visualizations of the landscapes of Murujuga going back nearly 125,000 years has been an objective of research since late 2015. Certain challenges have been met in relation to increasing the accuracy and resolution of bathymetric and topographic data, and in dealing with the complexity of hydrodynamic effects on currently submerged...
Time and Tide Wait for no Man: Responses to Sea Level Rise on Virginia's Eastern Shore (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Middle Atlantic Regional Transect Approach to Climate Change Impacts on Archaeological Resources" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With sea level rise inevitable, archaeologists can no longer cling to the 'Preservation in Place" paradigm as there will no longer be a place. The 'place' of the past will readily become the eroding beach and, eventually, sea bottom. The Threatened Sites Program of DHR anticipated the...
Toolstone Acquisition in the Interior of California’s South-Central Coast: Raw Material Extraction in the Mid- to Late Holocene (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The use of local vs. nonlocal toolstone sources can reveal much about past hunter-gatherer behavior. Toolstone-acquisition-related decisions reflect past people’s settlement strategy—“mapping on” or logistically exploiting a stone resource, raw material quality, and environmental productivity. Our sample of nine sites is an optimal geographic context...
Tortuga - Haiti's Ile de la Tortue - Prehistoric and Buccaneer Archaeology (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Ile de la Tortue, Haiti, is perhaps more famously known as Tortuga for its association with the seventeenth century's Buccaneers. It was settled in prehistoric times by multiple cultural groups, given its Spanish name by Columbus, depopulated by enslavement of its indigenous population, settled by English Puritans, liberated by French Huguenots, became a...
Toward a Holistic Understanding of Marine Ecosystems in the South Central Andes: An Interdisciplinary Marine Invertebrate Biodiversity/Zooarchaeological Survey (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Maritime adaptations play an essential role in the central Andean past as far back as the region’s earliest occupation. While economically useful molluscan species are well known by archaeologists, other invertebrates are inadequately understood due to poor preservation and/or lack of interest. This poster presents the preliminary results of a biodiversity...
Toward the Remote Identification of Stone Tools in Submerged, Buried Contexts Using Acoustics (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since the inception of geophysical survey, archaeologists have longed for the ability to detect the presence or absence of artifacts in buried contexts remotely. This ability is particularly desirable underwater, where accuracy in site location and efficiency in excavation are paramount given the expense and logistical burden associated with performing...
Tracking Changes in Nearshore Ecology over 2000 Years in Southern Yap, Western Caroline Islands (2018)
The initial human settlement of Yap, Western Caroline Islands (northwest tropical Pacific), is one of the least understood in Pacific prehistory, although new archaeological research is beginning to address this issue. Excavations at the southern site of Pemrang in Yap, western Caroline Islands (northwest tropical Pacific) have revealed multiple rich, well-stratified deposits of shell and pottery spanning the known occupation sequence of Yap and extended the date of early human activity by ca....
Tracking Human Dispersals to Palau Using Ancient DNA: Results from the Chelechol ra Orrak Site (2021)
This is an abstract from the "When the Wild Winds Blow: Micronesia Colonization in Pacific Context" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Initial settlement of Remote Oceania represents the world’s last major wave of human dispersal. While transdisciplinary models involving linguistic, archaeological, and biological data have been utilized in the Pacific to develop basic chronologies and trajectories of initial settlement, a number of elusive gaps remain...