Material Culture and Technology (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kate Shantry.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Quartzite is a commonly identified material used in the past as heating stones. The quartz minerals in quartzite stones are stable to around 500 degrees Celsius, at which point the quartz mineral experiences a chemical transition or inversion. A second inversion occurs at around 1500 degrees Celsius, causing the morphology to appear similar to tooth enamel....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Duncan Cook. Larissa Schneider. Timothy Beach. Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach. Nicholas Dunning.

This is an abstract from the "2023 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Timothy Beach Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Mexico and Central American region has a history of mercury use that began at least two millennia before European colonization in the sixteenth century. Archaeologists have reported deposits of cinnabar (HgS) and other mercury materials at Classic period (ca. 250–900 CE) Maya settlements across the region;...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Abigail Desmond.

This is an abstract from the "Animal Resources in Experimental Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. How does our knowledge of what people made influence our understanding of who people were? In most prehistoric contexts, stone tools serve as default technological benchmarks. This emphasis on stone tools, in turn, foregrounds practices related to hunting and animal processing. Organic technologies more closely linked with child-wearing,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Reeves. Levi Raskin. Matthew Douglass. David Braun.

This is an abstract from the "Variability: A Reassessment of Its Meaning, Afforded Range, and the Relation to Process" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Our understanding of the evolution of human behavior is largely predicated on how stone tools vary through time and across space. Despite a long history of research, the behavioral processes associated with Early Pleistocene lithic technology remain debated. Some research suggests that lithic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Domenique Sorresso.

This is an abstract from the "Scaling Potting Networks: Recent Contributions from Ceramic Petrography " session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Vacant Quarter is a phenomenon that involved the movement of hundreds, possibly thousands, of sedentary communities in mid-continental North America during the Mississippian period (~AD 1450–1550). Many of the details surrounding this phenomenon are still debated. This study narrows in on two subregions of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Terry Ozbun.

Morrison Formation red orthoquartzite was procured, reduced, and exported as large percussion flake blanks from a late pre-contact quarry and workshop (LA21699) near Tucumcari, New Mexico. Experimental flintknapping replication of the orthoquartzite reduction technology represented at the aboriginal quarry/workshop site produced data on the average frequency of various technologically diagnostic flake types per reduction event. Comparing these experimental flake type frequencies with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Blanca Maldonado.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Charcoal production along the region known as Bishopric of Michoacan, which included the modern states of Michoacan and Guanajuato, as well as parts of Jalisco, Colima, Guerrero, and San Luis Potosí, in Mexico, has changed very little since the arrival of the Europeans. The expansion of this traditional craft is linked to the development of the colonial mining...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristen Pearson.

This is an abstract from the "New Directions in Mongolian Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Mongolia, ethnoarchaeological methods have been applied to questions of mobility, spatial organization, site formation, and animal husbandry practices, among others. An area that remains to be explored is the application of ethnoarchaeological methods to the study of craft production, particularly as out relates to distinctive local resources,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Noll.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Beginning with the introduction of the concept of an Old Cordilleran Culture, research related to early Holocene tool production in northwestern North America appears to assume commonalities of tool production throughout a huge geographic area. This assumption persists despite the recognition of unique cultural traditions, namely Olcott and Cascade....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tiffany Raymond. Carl Lipo.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Poverty Point Objects (PPOs) are thought to have functions related to contexts of heating and cooking in areas where stone alternatives are not locally available. PPO morphology and composition, therefore, may potentially be explained by the efforts of prehistoric populations to manipulate thermal properties that impact performance for cooking and heating. In...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Seren Griffiths. Ben Edwards. Tom Higham. Julian Thomas.

This is an abstract from the "Constructing Chronologies I: Stratification and Correlation" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeology, at its broadest, constitutes a specific set of practices utilizing material culture to create meaningful narratives. Central to this is our discipline’s relationships with time. This paper will discuss the "time dimensions" and ways archaeological narratives are structured. We suggest that archaeologists need to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Danielle Macdonald. Lisa Maher.

Artistic objects are thought to be one of the hallmarks of the Natufian period, marking a florescence of artistic behavior appearing prior to the origins of agriculture. However, with continuing research into Early and Middle Epipalaeolithic sites in the Levant, new discoveries of ‘symbolic’ artifacts are increasing our understanding of even earlier artistic and symbolic pursuits. In this paper we present an engraved plaquette from the Middle Epipalaeolithic context of Kharaneh IV, eastern...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Takashi Sakaguchi.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cross-culturally, wooden food-serving items and serving utensils, such as shallow bowl, plate, ladle and spoon, as prestige items are essential elements for conducting ritual feasting among many transegalitarian societies in the Circum-Pacific Rim regions. Thus, they are keys to understanding prehistoric feasting and ritual activities, and are strong...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Robert Bischoff.

This paper evaluates the role that San Juan Red Ware played in social interaction. San Juan Red Ware was widely distributed throughout the Four Corners region between ca. A.D. 750 and 1100. Prior research has identified this ware as a marker of identity and established an association with communal feasting. A study of the distribution of this ware indicates that it was traded through specific social networks, which changed through time. While ceramics may profitably be used as stand-ins for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Hill. Jan Petrík. Karel Novácek. Ali Ismail Al-Juboury.

This is an abstract from the "Cross-Cultural Petrographic Studies of Ceramic Traditions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Estimation of provenance in fine ceramics is a challenging task. Documenting the trade in glazed Sassanian and Islamic ceramics into southeast Asia and China has driven an interest in identifying the sources of these ceramics. We have defined three hypothetical provenance groups 1) Greater and Lesser Zab catchment (Arbil area),...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Swett.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1949, a master’s student at the University of Arizona, Barton Wright, undertook the first salvage excavation project at Catclaw Cave in anticipation of the construction of Davis Dam. The assemblage recovered by Wright and his team remains one of the best persevered dry shelter collections recovered from the region. This poster represents the results of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only A. Dudley Gardner.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We were commissioned to restore a granary constructed circa 900 AD south of the White River in Northwest Colorado. Restoration involved removing cliff fall debris, excavating the granary, and then restoring the walls that had collapsed. In the process of excavating, we learned how the granary was built, what went into its construction, and how it was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julian Acuna.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Early Formative (2000–1000 B.C.) period in Oaxaca is generally regarded as a transitional period from the Archaic (7000–2000 B.C.). The early formative is characterized by a change in subsistence, social organization, and sedentism. This period included the emergence of La Consentida, the earliest known settled village in coastal Oaxaca. This paper...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joseph Wayman.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Researchers have found bifaces situated on edge at Acheulean sites in what are felt to be undisturbed sediments, and have posited that they were placed this way by early humans, offering a clue to the use of the devices. Opposing this, it has been argued that animal trampling of such objects will turn them on edge, challenging the idea that they were placed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elise Widmayer.

Bipolar lithic artifacts can be challenging for researchers to understand in the archaeological record. Although these artifacts were first noted in North American literature half a century ago, archaeologists continue to debate over terminology and considerations of morphological and functional distinctions of bipolar objects. This experimental approach aims to shed light on these disparities whilst re-examining morphological and functional characteristics attributed to manufacture and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kari Goold. Daniel Perez.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ground stone use-wear analyses in the North American Southwest have been increasingly pursued through both collection studies and experimental approaches since at least the 1980s. Although analyses of prehistoric ground stone are common throughout all portions of the North American Southwest, experimental approaches to understanding ground stone technology in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anthony Graesch. Annette Davis. Sarah Harris. Andrew Prunk. Hector Salazar.

Despite longstanding anthropological concerns with the origins of intensive delayed-return subsistence economies on the Northwest Coast, the use and production of slate fishing knives has received little attention. Owing to specific design attributes, thin slate fishing knives were critical to the necessarily efficient and rapid processing of tens of thousands of salmon in a span of only three or four months. Although anthropologists have a reasonably good understanding of how slate knives were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Takafumi Niwa. Yosuke Higuchi. Hidehiro Shingo.

This is an abstract from the "Craft and Technology: Knowledge of the Ancient Chinese Artisans" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study reconstructed manufacturing technologies of Chinese bronze artifacts by performing a "contrastive manufacturing experiment." This approach called for creating identical casting figures using several manufacturing processes and conditions. One factor contributing to the appearance and development of Shang-Zhou...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Murray. Scott Keohane. Andrew Zipkin.

This is an abstract from the "Human Origins Migration and Evolution Research Consortium Poster Symposium" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The heat treatment of stone for tool production represents one of the oldest technologies for transforming the material properties of a natural product to better suit human needs. The earliest evidence for such technology is the heat treatment of silcrete at the South African Middle Stone Age site Pinnacle Point...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Blanca Maldonado. Patricia Castro. Peter Tropper.

This is an abstract from the "From Materials to Materiality: Analysis and Interpretation of Archaeological and Historical Artifacts Using Non-destructive and Micro/Nano-sampling Scientific Methods" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Copper was the main metal produced and worked in Mesoamerica, but data for pre-modern primary production and processing remain elusive. Systematic research at Itziparátzico, a Late Postclassic location in Central...