Material Culture and Technology (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shelby Saper. Richard Rosencrance. Katelyn McDonough. Geoffrey Smith. Dennis Jenkins.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Some researchers support a “long” chronology for corner-notched points in the northern and eastern Great Basin, with some points dating as old as 8500 cal BP. Other researchers support a “short” chronology and argue that corner-notched points almost exclusively postdate 5000 cal BP. This debate suffers from the use of a variety of typological schemes,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yuichi Nakazawa. Kyohei Sano.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Obsidian Studies of the Old and New Worlds" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Among the various factors that potentially affect the obsidian hydration rates, intrinsic water content of obsidian has been considered a significant factor. Despite this understanding, variation in water content even within the geochemically identical provenance of obsidian makes us difficult to evaluate the effect of water content...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Suzanne Eckert. Deborah Huntley.

The Goat Spring Archaeology Project explores late Pueblo period (A.D. 1300 - 1680) cultural continuity and transformation in south-central New Mexico. Goat Spring Pueblo was occupied periodically: initially during a period of demographic reorganization and expansion of regional networks in the 1300s, again during the early Spanish Colonial period, and possibly during the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. This highland village was strategically located along the trail connecting Western Pueblo and Rio Abajo...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Austin Cross.

This is an abstract from the "First Floridians to La Florida: Recent FSU Investigations" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Schott and Ballenger’s (2007) work analyzing the expended utility of Dalton bifaces looked at the difference between the potential utility of an artifact and its residual utility to understand the use-wear and resharpening processes that shaped the artifact, and applied their findings to reconstructing the population-level use of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fernando Castillo Flores. Francisco Javier García Ugalde. José Luis Punzo Díaz. Alfonso Gastelum-Strozzi. Dante Bernardo Martinez Vazquez.

Currently there exist several databases composed of hundreds or thousands of digital images of arrowheads made by different ancient ethnic groups around the world. Extracting information or comparing and classifying the elements of these databases in an efficient and automated way, even without the need of arrowhead’s metadata, would be of great help in carrying out a comprehensive study on this archaeological subject. This work deals with this problem by developing an image processing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kim Cullen Cobb. Emily Kaplan. Michele Austin Dennehy. Christopher Beekman.

This is an abstract from the "Coastal Connections: Pacific Coastal Links from Mexico to Ecuador" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A technical study of pre-Columbian copper-alloy axe-monies from the collections of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian and National Museum of Natural History. Research activities include stereo microscopy, digital photography (macro and micro), portable X-ray fluroescence (pXRF)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joseph Birkmann. Bruce Huckell.

Although long known from surface sites, the Middle Archaic record in the Tucson Basin includes very few in buried alluvial contexts. AZ BB:13:70 is a Middle Archaic occupation site located along Brickyard Arroyo, a deeply incised tributary arroyo of the Santa Cruz River. First discovered in 1975, the site was revisited throughout the early 1980’s and investigated formally in the summer of 1984 after monsoon rains created an extensive exposure of features and artifacts along the arroyo. The site...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Annelou Van Gijn.

Experimental archaeology plays a critical role in the development of new ideas and techniques within the discipline, for example, within studies of artifact manufacture and use, butchery practices, taphonomy, etc. Despite a difference in the nature of ‘controls,’ out-of-the-lab experiments play a crucial role in scientific archaeology because they often shed new and different light on a range of complex issues, as demonstrated by recent house building experiments conducted with the assistance of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Glenna Nielsen-Grimm. Diana Christensen Hawks.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Research in Montezuma Canyon, San Juan County, Utah" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cave Canyon Village is a large, multi-component site investigated through survey and excavation by Brigham Young University Archaeology Field School in 1975-78. Two years of excavation in the Basketmaker component of the site uncovered 5 large pit structures, and associated small slab-lined cists that date to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Camila Alday.

This is an abstract from the "Histories of Human-Nature Interactions: Use, Management, and Consumption of Plants in Extreme Environments" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study presents the results of an archaeobotanical analysis of the hunter-gatherer’s plant-fiber technologies of South America’s west coast. Due to the extreme aridity of the Atacama Desert, the preservation of organic technologies is exceptional. I analyze a unique assemblage...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Utting.

This is an abstract from the "The Expanding Bayesian Revolution in Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. By studying stone tool technology, archaeologists and anthropologists shed light on big questions in human prehistory, including how ancient peoples adapted to changing environments, moved throughout landscapes, and interacted with other groups of people. There are many methodological approaches for characterizing stone tool technology,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patrick Reed. Shelby Anderson. Caelie Butler.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We are conducting a multi-year (2009-2018), multi-disciplinary research project at Inuigniq (Cape Espenberg) to explore changing patterns of human occupation, culture change, and environmental conditions in Northwest Alaska. Our current focus is on the emergence of Birnirk archaeological culture ca. AD 1000, and the question of how Birnirk culture factored...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Owen Mason.

This is an abstract from the "Arctic Pasts: Dimensions of Change" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A climate-driven eastward push of Thule migrants remains axiomatic to many arctic archaeologists, associated with presumed warming weather of the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA), by tradition dated ca. AD 1000. Thule researchers implicated a rapid migration by rapacious “over-killing” seal-hunters and whalers entering unoccupied landscapes—increasingly...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bruce Huckell.

Along the western edge of the Rio Grande Valley in Central New Mexico is a huge expanse of late Cenozoic volcanics, including a high-quality hydrothermally altered rhyolite. Colloquially known as Socorro jasper, at least one source of this material was exploited frequently by Clovis groups. This paper describes this source—the Black Canyon quarry—and the physical and geochemical properties of the "jasper" from it. Recent and continuing studies of its use by Clovis groups are reviewed, and its...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bruce Huckell. Nadine Navarro. Christopher Merriman. Joseph Birkmann. Steven Shackley.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Opportunities to learn more about Clovis technological behavior at lithic material procurement and workshop sites are rare, particularly in the Southwest. The Blue Canyon site is a rare example of such a site—an artifact scatter covering some 16,000 m2 and consisting of Clovis projectile points and preforms, end scrapers, bifaces, and lithic debitage...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa DeLeonardis. Dawn Kriss. Ellen Howe. Judith Levinson. Adriana Rizzo.

This is an abstract from the "Plant Exudates and Other Binders, Adhesives, and Coatings in the Americas" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Indigo (*Indigofera) is a recognized plant exudate employed in cloth dyes to produce the color blue. In Andean South America, indigoid dyes have been identified in textiles as early as about 4200 BCE. While in other parts of the Americas the plant is utilized as a ceramic pigment (e.g., “Maya Blue”), in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kaitlin Stanley.

Situated in Alaska’s eastern Aleutian Islands on Unalaska Island, the Summer Bay site dates to 2,000 years BP. Over 700 osseous objects representing various manufacture and use stages have been recovered. Among these are harpoons, fish hooks, labrets, points, wedges, awls, and needles. These are primarily made from sea mammals and avifauna. Although Summer Bay represents one of the most secure dates of the Amaknak Phase (3,000 to 1,000 years BP), minimal research has been done to better...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Coutros. Brooke Luokkala.

This is an abstract from the "African Archaeology throughout the Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Worked bone has a long history across the African continent, occurring as early as the Middle Stone Age in eastern and southern Africa. However, since the beginning of the Holocene, barbed and un-barbed points – associated with the so-called ‘African Aqualithic’ peaking at 9,000 BP – have likewise been recovered from sites within Sahelian and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Donnermeyer. Brittney Cardarella. Bobby Saunters.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Logging was an economic and cultural pillar of the Pacific Northwest. The Bridal Veil Lumbering Company, a logging company operating in the Columbia River Gorge in Oregon State, was the longest continuously operating early lumber mill west of the Mississippi River. The company spanned a timeframe that encompassed a wide range of technologies, immigration...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Russell Cutts.

This is an abstract from the "Fire-Cracked Rock: Research in Cooking and Noncooking Contexts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Experiments quantifying the thermal curved-fragment (TCF) model (Cutts et al. 2019) unsurprisingly yielded considerable numbers of fire-cracked rocks (FCR; yet not strictly conforming to TCF definitions). Many exhibited characteristics commonly described in FCR—e.g., broken, cracked, crazed, crenated, crenulated, pocked,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Natalie Carpiaux. Alicia Boswell. Jessica Walthew. Gabriel Prieto.

The site of Pampa la Cruz, located in Peru’s northern coast in Huanchaco, is situated just north of the ancient Chimu capital of Chan Chan. A multi-component site with occupations from the Salinar, Gallinazo, and Chimu eras (400 BC – AD 1470), excavations in 2016 recovered Chimu child sacrifices. Each body was interred wearing multiple garments, including mantles, loincloths, and tunics. Environmental and soil conditions enabled the preservation of these textiles. In July 2017 students in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan Harris.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ground stone disk beads represented a tangible signal of wealth within the Salish Sea archaeological record; they appeared continuously from 7,000 – 500 BP across the region in scattered frequencies to massive caches. The massive caches were often observed in a burial context, despite non-burial contexts being more frequent and wide-spread. The differences in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Abigail Fisher. Lewanne French.

This is an abstract from the "Animal Bones to Human Behavior" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dogs were an important resource for many Plains peoples, especially for the transportation of materials (e.g., timber, meat, water). The use of dogs for traction may have even facilitated high mobility in early North and South American populations. This high mobility eventually decreased with the introduction of agriculture across the northern Plains. Did...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chun Yu. Ya Wei Dong.

This is an abstract from the "From Tangible Things to Intangible Ideas: The Context of Pan-Eurasian Exchange of Crops and Objects" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The four-footed base is a specific structural feature of bronze statues of Buddha in China during the fourth to ninth century BC. This feature appears to have been made using the lost wax method, but experimental methods indicate that the four-footed base was made with the sand mold...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nuria Sugrañes. Gustavo Neme.

Hunter-Gatherers from Southern Mendoza started to use ceramic at 2000 years BP, and it starts to diversified rapidly in each environment. Such diversity shows a contrast between highlands and lowlands tipologies. According to Lagiglia, this ceramic diversity was motivated for exchange between agricultural communities from western side of Andes and northern Mendoza. In this poster, we present new ceramic information from six archaeological sites located in the Atuel river basin. This information...