Material Culture and Technology (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hilda Torres.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Attribute analyses are common in the field of archaeology for categorizing and analyzing artifacts. In this study, the Later Stone Age end scrapers and backed blades from Blydefontein Rock Shelter in South Africa undergo an attribute analysis using an objective attribute guide. The guide combines common terms from previous studies along with new terms for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Lassen.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. AmaTerra Environmental, an ERG Company, initially recorded site 41CR61 during a survey of a proposed highway expansion for the Texas Department of Transportation in 2019. The site was situated on a stabilized sand dune, and the presence of a buried dark earth anthrosol bearing multiple cooking features prompted data recovery excavations. During those...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angela Gore.

Investigating prehistoric landscape use is significant in answering questions about the adaptive strategies and behaviors of prehistoric Beringians. How can we define the lithic landscape? How did humans provision themselves in eastern Beringia, and how did these provisioning behaviors change through time? Toolstone procurement and selection behaviors influence toolkits, mobility, and settlement strategies; therefore, they are important in explaining prehistoric behavioral adaptation and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kaoru Akoshima.

The paper investigates some fundamental aspects of use-wear of lithic artifacts, concerning the relations between function and morphology. During the course of micro-wear research since the 1960s, it was often questioned whether tool typologies actually reflects their functions, or which morphological attributes are diagnostic of their utilization. Case studies in the Upper Paleolithic of East Asia also revealed variability in end-scrapers whose functions seem to be relatively consistent as hide...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marta Sánchez De La Torre. Xavier Mangado. François-Xavier Le Bourdonnec. Bernard Gratuze. Mathieu Langlais.

This is an abstract from the "Case Studies in Toolstone Provenance: Reliable Ascription from the Ground Up" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Montlleó open-air-site (Prats i Sansor, Catalonia) is located in one of the largest high-attitude valleys in the Pyrenees, the Cerdanya Valley, in SW Europe, at 1,144 masl. The site is in a natural road to cross the Pyrenees in the eastern part. The site, discovered in 1998 and excavated since the 2000 by a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Hull. Nathan Goodale. Alissa Nauman. Colin Quinn.

Utilitarian stone tools produced from raw materials that are linked to a place or landscape of significant social, ritual, and economic importance likely still carry that importance when tools are transported away from their source. Such objects can serve as indices of social relationships, economic priorities, and ritual practices. By transporting and using these objects, communities would have daily reminders of their connections to important places and activities that take place there....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bethany Potter. Kelly Graf. Rolfe Mandel.

This is an abstract from the "American Foragers: Human-Environmental Interactions across the Continents" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents results of an analysis of lithic artifacts from the Kanorado Locality in the High Plains of Western Kansas. The Kanorado Locality is a stratified Clovis-age and Folsom/Midland occupation along Middle Beaver Creek. The Clovis adaptation in the Great Plains is well-documented, but not as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caitlin Limberg. Christopher Noll.

This is an abstract from the "New Research into the Old Cordilleran" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In western Washington, Olcott sites are generally understood to represent a period of cultural and technological stability that extended through the early Holocene into the middle Holocene. While some researchers have suggested subtle technological evolutionary developments occurred over time, Olcott sites have often been characterized as a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kirsten Paulson.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology from Western North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A new study at the Cooper’s Ferry site (10IH73) located in west central Idaho focuses on the contents of pit feature 110 of Area B. Feature 110 (F110) has been dated between ~9938 ± 36 BP (11,352–11,264 cal BP) and ~9867 ± 36 BP (11,278–11,223 cal BP) and contains WST points, debitage, and faunal remains. Notably, the F110 faunal record includes a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Elston.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, I explore the lithic technology used in the Spanish colonial outpost of Dixon (or Embudo), New Mexico, before the arrival of the Chili railroad line in 1877. With limited access to metal, the Spanish colonists turned to the native technology of lithic tool production to overcome this absence. By focusing specifically on the obsidian found in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stance Hurst. Ricardo Chacon. Eileen Johnson. Doug Cunningham.

Prehistoric flintknappers world-wide typically used heat-treatment to improve the flakeability of lithic materials after initial reduction into smaller-sized packages. In contrast, along the eastern escarpment of the Southern High Plains of Northwest Texas, Late Archaic-age (4,500-2,000 rcyBP) flintknappers used heat-treatment to improve large quartzarenite clasts prior to initial clast reduction. Heat-treatment in this case was used as part of procurement at quarry gravel source locations....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Harris.

The people of the Columbia Plateau have been frequently characterized as a homogenous culture despite a 3,000-year depth of history and large spatial extent. Moreover, differences in artifact form, assemblage composition, and household features belie this characterization. The changing natural and social environment can be detected in modifications in cultural technology, and relationships among distinct groups can be inferred. The research presented here tracks these changes. By using concepts...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Quintela.

In Ohkay Owingeh’s origin tradition the Tewa peoples emerged into this world from the north and traveled south as two separate groups – the Summer and Winter people – before coming together to create a new society in the Rio Chama valley of northern New Mexico. This history parallels our archaeological understanding of diverse peoples, likely migrants from the Mesa Verde region and indigenous Rio Grande populations, who settled the Chama in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. However, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Teel. Leslie Dunaway. Billie Follensbee.

This is an abstract from the "Textile Tools and Technologies as Evidence for the Fiber Arts in Precolumbian Societies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Among the most enigmatic ancient North American artifacts are the objects collectively known as birdstones: Small ground stone objects, usually made of banded slate, that take the generalized form of a simplified bird or a bird’s head, sometimes with protruding "popeyes." The vast majority of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rowan Flad.

Small bronze objects, some tools, others ornaments, and yet others of undetermined function, are the earliest known Bronze objects in China. Many of these objects are found in sites from Northwest China that date to the early part of the second millennium BC. Their manufacture seems to have been conducted locally on a small scale in this region, and yet the transformation of matter that their production entailed played a role in large scale transformations of society – ultimately culminating...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arturo De Lombera-Hermida. Tania Mosquera Castro. Xose Rodríguez-Álvarez.

This is an abstract from the "Local and/or Exotic Interactions: Symbols, Materials, and Societies" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The NW of the Iberian Peninsula is defined by the scarcity of flint and the predominance of acid soils that prevent the preservation of organic remains. These are the main handicaps affecting Paleolithic research. The lithic assemblages of the Galician Upper Paleolithic sites are defined by the hegemonic use of local...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Barzilai. Jayne-Leigh Thomas.

This is an abstract from the "Advancing the Archaeology of Indigenous Agriculture in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mississippian peoples (circa eleventh–fourteenth centuries CE) in the midwestern and southeastern United States have long been proven to be and defined by their maize agricultural practices. Due to the nutritional deficiencies of subsisting solely on maize as a crop when unprocessed, researchers have linked all maize...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Catherine Lara.

This is an abstract from the "Them and Us: Transmission and Cultural Dynamism in the North of Peru between AD 250 and 950: A Vision since the Recent Northern Investigations" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Los pocos datos existentes sobre el origen de los Tallanes provienen esencialmente de la etnohistoria, según la cual este grupo estaba inicialmente asentado en los Andes, desde donde habría migrado hacia la costa norte bajo la presión de grupos...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charles McGimsey.

This is an abstract from the "What’s Canoe? Recent Research on Dugouts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Louisiana has 31 dugout and plank canoes spanning the last 2,000 years recorded in the archaeological site files. The collection reflects a diversity of shapes and sizes in both Indigenous and Euroamerican assemblages, suggesting that beyond the required linear shape, individual preference and intended function significantly influenced form. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mel Miller. Danielle Macdonald.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. To reconstruct the life history of an artifact one must understand how the tool was made, used, but also what happened to the artifact after it was discarded. For stone tool analysis, evaluating lithic artifact condition helps reconstruct this life history through insight into site exposure, assemblage integrity, and post-depositional processes. Multiple...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tim Messner.

This is an abstract from the "Experimental Pedagogies: Teaching through Experimental Archaeology Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For several million years our ancestors used tools to shape their world, and themselves. Some argue we have lost our way, as artificial intelligence and machine learning has reshaped the fabric of society. Our post-industrial, capitalist mode of production resulted in a nearly complete detachment from the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joanna Ostapkowicz.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in the Archaeology of the Bahama Archipelago" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Exotic hard stone materials (e.g., jadeites, cherts, basalts) and artefacts were imported into the entirely limestone Lucayan archipelago (The Bahamas/Turks and Caicos Islands) post-AD 700, to fulfil both functional and ceremonial needs. Many of these pieces were removed from their original contexts during the 19th/early 20th...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ana Almeida.

This is an abstract from the "The Iron Age of Northwest Portugal: Leftovers of Behavior" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. It is generally accepted that Iron Age folk left the sodden lands in the valleys of large rivers and choose to settle on high ground, in locations with natural defenses, but very often near water sources. Agropastoral interests likely were part of the decision, but so were proximity to the mouth of major rivers and to the sea....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leobardo Pacheco Arias. Andrés Tejero Andrade. Denisse Argote Espino. Gerardo Cifuentes Nava. Martín Cárdenas Soto.

This is an abstract from the "Bringing the Past to Life, Part 1: Papers in Honor of John M. D. Pohl" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents the methodology employed, as well as the results obtained from the geophysical research conducted in the archaeological site of Mitla, Oaxaca, during the 2022 season of the Lyobaa Project. In this project, noninvasive geophysical techniques, such as ground-penetrating radar (GPR), electrical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeffrey Splitstoser. Jon Clindaniel.

This is an abstract from the "Cordage, Yarn, and Associated Paraphernalia" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While Andean khipus—indigenous knot-and-cord recording devices—have been extensively studied over the past hundred years in their final, completed form, relatively little attention has been paid to the process by which they were made. As such, the level of agency that khipu makers, called khipukamayuqs, had in producing khipus is not fully...