Material Culture and Technology (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Wurz.

This is an abstract from the "Early human adaptation on the African coasts: Comparing northwest Morocco and the Cape of South Africa" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Klasies River main, a well-known site in South African Middle Stone Age research, contributed significantly to palaeoanthropological evidence on early humans, and to knowledge of early human behaviour and palaeoenvironments. The earliest layers in Cave 1 at Klasies River is known as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Martijn Van Den Bel.

This is an abstract from the "Coloring Outside the Lines: Re-situating Understandings of the Lifeways of Earliest Peoples of the Circum-Caribbean" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient ceramics (beyond 2000 BC) have been found in the western part of the Guianas, notably in the coastal swamp areas of Guyana from the 1950s onward (Alaka). They are also known from the Courantyne River in Suriname (Kauri) and have only recently come to light in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zexian Huang.

This is an abstract from the "New Thoughts on Current Archaeological Research in Neolithic and Bronze Age China" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We analyzed horse remains from a chariot-horse pit (CMK2) associated with elite burials at the Bronze Age site of Yaoheyuan in northwestern China. Among the horses interred in this specific pit, one adult female and one infant show evidence of post-mortem fetal extrusion. This conclusion is based on an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nathaniel Erb-Satullo.

In the study of technological transformations, there is often much discussion of how innovations are conditioned by earlier systems of technical knowledge. Identification of transitional features is often challenging, however, particularly for questions about the origins of iron smelting and its relationship with copper-base metallurgy. This paper discusses some unusual technological features in iron metallurgical debris (circa 8th-6th c. BC) from a fortified hilltop site in the Caucasus,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Vanessa Workman.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeometallurgy, Eurasia and Beyond: Papers in Honor of Vince Pigott" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The appearance of iron in southwest Asia in the late second to early first millennium BCE is currently understood as a complex social phenomenon, and yet pinpointing even broad details of a technological emergence that led to a full-fledged Iron Age has proven to be a major challenge. Since the work commemorated in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jenna Anderson. Sonia Harmand.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Middle Pleistocene (0.77-0.13 Ma) was a crucial time in the evolution of the human brain. Homo heidelbergensis cranial fossils and endocasts provide evidence of brain size increases and structural changes during this time, which resulted in brains more like our own. The analysis of Acheulean lithic assemblages provides a means of exploring how these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Dersam. Sari Dersam.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The use of high-elevation ecosystems by Early Paleoindian cultures using a Clovis-Techno complex has been known for decades. The earliest uses of North American mountain ecosystems have been hypothesized as transient forays by small groups focused on raw material acquisition and limited supplemental hunting. Between 2021 and 2023, the BEAAR Project...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Norris. Metin Eren.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Goodson Rockshelter in Oklahoma has provided strong chronometric evidence that early- and middle-stage fluted stone tool bases found there date to the Late Archaic. These results further indicate that such specimens are not necessarily diagnostic of the Clovis culture. Here, we present additional evidence that early- and middle-stage fluted bases do not...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Munene.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. <html> Tracking the processes by which Homo sapiens acquired our broad ecological niche is key to understanding the evolution of modern human behavior. Modern behaviors include enhanced adaptive technological flexibility, expansion of social interaction and exchange networks, and intensification of symbolic behavior. This project seeks to improve our...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nysa Loudon.

This is an abstract from the "The Ties That Bind: Cordage, Its Sources, and the Artifacts of Its Creation and Use" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Within the last 30 years of ancient textile and cordage research, new and revisited archaeological evidence and ethnographic studies have shown that prehistoric people in Europe were using a wider range of plant species to produce cordage, netting, mats, and textiles than previously thought. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Randy Haas.

This is an abstract from the "The Far-Reaching Influence of Steven L. Kuhn" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human societies vary considerably in their internal diversity. The drivers of cultural diversity--why greater or lesser diversity occurs in different times and places--remain poorly understood. This study first examines projectile point diversity in North America over 13 millennia in order to characterize spatiotemporal variation in cultural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tatiana Theodoropoulou.

This is an abstract from the "<html>Twenty Thousand Leagues (and Years!) under the Sea:<i> </i>Exploring the Place of Seashores in Prehistoric Socio-economic Systems</html>" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Mediterranean constitutes an ecological and cultural palimpsest, a region of intense millenia-long occupation as well as a precious archive of environmental changes and refugia-phenomena since the LGM. Although cultural sites from later...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alvaro Brizuela Casimir. Gloria Biffano Marcial.

We present a review of the data obtained during the "Proyecto de Rescate Arqueológico Estí (PRAE)" that took place between 2000-2003 in the context of the environmental mitigations of the Estí hydroelectric project; and with special attention to the Barrigón site. Barrigón is a cemetery site from prehispanic times localized near to the Gualaca city in Chiriqui province (Panamá). This kind of "necropolis" was placed in the flat top of a little hill a few meters from the Barrigón river. We...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andres Saul Alcantara Salinas.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. La propuesta de trabajo abordará el uso del adobe en el Occidente Mesoamericano durante el periodo comprendido entre los años 600-900 dC, el cual representó para los habitantes del Valle de Colima, un movimiento transformador que modificó de manera radical la ideología y costumbres que hasta el año 600 dC fueron utilizadas alrededor de mil años; lo cual se...

DOCUMENT Citation Only S. Joey LaValley.

While Great Basin archaeologists use projectile points as time-sensitive markers, these typologies are based on the morphological characteristics of the finished artifacts. In most cases, points were produced elsewhere and curated to their final destination or they are found within a palimpsest containing a mixed bag of flaked stone tools and debitage. Seldom are archaeologists able to analyze debitage specific to the production of points. In 2016, Logan Simpson archaeologists recorded a small...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Natalie Bankuti.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In antiquity, the use of prestige objects and adornment made of jade was a key aspect of Maya elite life which carried over from the Preclassic to the Classic period. The establishment of jade indicating high social status has shown to have begun in Mesoamerica with the Olmec, however the scope of this dissertation will focus only on the 1,800-year span of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peiyu Chen.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. “Why did people begin to use pottery vessels?” is one of the most compelling questions to archaeologists. As a site witnesses the transition from the Late Preceramic to the Initial Period occupation in the Virú Valley, north coast of Peru, Huaca Negra constitutes an ideal case study to investigate the utilitarian function, cultural traits, and possible...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kim Sum Li.

This is an abstract from the "New materials and new insights for our understanding of the First Emperor's Mausoleum and early imperial China" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. I will examine how the Qin empire (221-207 BC) established and maintained its rule over a vast expanse of territory by practices of replication, in which the making of measuring containers constituted the primary focus in my presentation, while other materials such as armors...

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 Elizabeth Adeyemo.

This is an abstract from the "Crafting Archaeological Practice in Africa and Beyond: Celebrating the Contributions of Ann B. Stahl to Global Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the study of craft production in antiquity. It combines theoretical and methodological toolkits from archaeology, material science, studies of craft production, and ancient economies to investigate the organization...

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 Emanuela Cristiani.

This is an abstract from the "Fishing Technologies: Exploring Manufacturing Techniques and Styles, Traditions, Exchange, Migration and More" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Fish has been a significant part of the human diet for nearly two million years, yet early fishing technologies remain challenging to trace due to the perishable nature of materials like wood and plant fibers. Discoveries at the Epipaleolithic site of Jordan River Dureijat...

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...