Material Culture and Technology (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Allison Sabo. Daniel Koski-Karell. William Pestle.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent analysis of the lithic assemblage from the Ortiz site, an early (2340 cal BC–cal AD 310) habitation site in Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico, has revealed the persistent parallel manufacture of blade and expedient flake technologies, with an average of 16.1% of the flaked stone assemblage consisting of blades. While other early Puerto Rican lithic assemblages...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricio Gutierrez. Alfonso Gastelum. José Luis Punzo Díaz. Lissandra González. Dante Martínez.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology in South Central Michoacán México, Ongoing Studies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Scant attention has been paid to the past of the current border of the states of Michoacán and Estado de México, though there has been a proposed local archaeological traditions for the region in order to understand archaeological contexts. There are archaeological data about large carved stone sculptures which can lay the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cathy Costin.

This is an abstract from the "The Movement of Technical Knowledge: Cross-Craft Perspectives on Mobility and Knowledge in Production Technologies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Post-fire incision as method of surface "decoration" is extremely rare in the Central Andean region. This technique was used almost exclusively by the Cupisnique culture on the Peruvian North Coast during the Formative Period, primarily on ritual pottery. The technique was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Roberto Pimentel Nita.

This is an abstract from the "A Decade of Multidisciplinary Research at Castillo de Huarmey, Peru" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Multidisciplinary research and analyses of ceramics found in Castillo de Huarmey, a political center of the Wari Empire during the late Middle Horizon (AD 800–1000), conducted in the last 10 years have produced new interpretations. A large number of ceramic vessels were deposited as offerings in elaborate mausoleums to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fernanda Neubauer. Michael J. Schaefer.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Method and Theory: Papers in Honor of James M. Skibo, Part II" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. James M. Skibo’s pioneering work developing the methods and theory of ceramic use-alteration analysis has allowed archaeologists to make new range of inferences from one of the most broadly available classes of artifacts, utilitarian ceramics. His ethnoarchaeological and experimental work has brought about a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kari Schleher. Emma Britton. Donna Glowacki. Jeffrey R. Ferguson. Robin Lyle.

The Dillard site (5MT10647)-the earliest community center identified in the Mesa Verde region-may contain among the oldest examples of multi-household pottery production during the Basketmaker III period. A thorough understanding of how pottery was produced and obtained at this early large pithouse village, which is centered on a great kiva, provides important insights on village organization and interpersonal relationships. In this poster, we explore compositional variation in pottery...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Masucci.

The Colonche Valley of coastal Ecuador represents an east-west corridor as well as the apex of north-south interconnected valleys. Hilltop sites of the Manteno-Guancavilca (AD 800-1532) have been reported across the high flat ridgetops of these valleys since the early 20th century. Recent comparative analysis of surface vessels at newly discovered sites in the eastern Colonche Valley demonstrates the coalescence of examples of all types found at sites throughout the valleys. Mineralogical and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mauricio Uribe. Camila Riera-Soto. Petrus le Roux.

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 Iluga Túmulos site (900 BC–AD 1600) is an archaeological area of great significance, with abandoned agricultural and public structures partially buried by aridization processes. It represents a record of multiple cultural occupations, which started in the Early Formative and continued until Inca and Spanish...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mitch Hendrickson.

This is an abstract from the "The Current State of Archaeological Research across Southeast Asia" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Crafting with fire is a central feature in the expansion of premodern states. In mainland Southeast Asia, the Angkorian Khmer (ninth to fourteenth centuries CE) possessed a unique mastery of three types of pyrotechnological production: stoneware ceramics, copper-base alloys, and iron. While the products of each craft...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Milosz Giersz. Branden Rizzuto.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The site of Castillo de Huarmey, located on the north coast of Peru and dated to the Middle Horizon period (650-1050 CE), is widely known for an important discovery of the first undisturbed Wari royal mausoleum. With multiple burials, rich ceremonial offerings, and a wealth of grave goods, the assemblage embraces a diversity of artistic, iconographic, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Haden Kingrey. Richard Rosencrance.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Roadcut site (35WS8) near The Dalles, Oregon was first excavated by Luther Cressman in the late 1950’s. It contained some of the earliest evidence of salmon fishing in the Columbia Plateau and a record of human occupations spanning at least 9,000 years-making it one of the most important sites in the region. The Roadcut site is often cited as containing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anthony Ranere.

The first substantial evidence of a preceramic occupation of Greater Chiriqui resulted from the 1970 excavations of upland rockshelters in the watershed of the Chiriqui River in Western Panama. Results from these excavations were reported in a 1972 dissertation and the 1980 publication Adaptive Radiations in Prehistoric Panama. Our current understanding of the preceramic period occupations in Greater Chiriqui owes more to subsequent innovations in research methods – phytolith and starch grain...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marcus Winter. Teresa Alarcón.

Surveys and excavations during the past 12 years in the Valley of Oaxaca and the southern Isthmus of Tehuantepec provide new data on lithic assemblages and settlement distributions in these Oaxaca regions and facilitate comparison with contemporaneous sites in central and southern Mexico.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alessandra Villarreal.

Understanding the organization of ancient ceramic production and distribution patterns can provide archaeologists a means of exploring past economies. Recent studies have shown that petrographic analysis can be operationalized to detect variability in production recipes, distribution of production groups across a landscape, and even producer-specific material choices. Ceramicists working in the Maya lowlands have demonstrated the benefit of using petrographic analysis in conjunction with other...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edith Ortiz-Diaz.

This is an abstract from the "Technological Transitions in Prehispanic and Colonial Metallurgy: Recent and Ongoing Research at the Archaeological Site of Jicalán Viejo, in Central Michoacán, West Mexico" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the northern Sierra of Oaxaca, it has been demonstrated that gold-copper-silver alloys were widely used between different prehispanic groups (Zapotecs and Chinantec). Nevertheless, with the conquest of the Sierra,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Adams.

This is an abstract from the "Research Hot Off the Trowel in the Upper Gila and Mimbres Areas" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The discovery of a prehispanic copper artifact on a Classic Mimbres site in the Gila National Forest in southwestern New Mexico in 2009 initiated an archaeological investigation to determine if more prehispanic copper artifacts existed in the Mimbres area. This preliminary investigation involved surveying a small sample of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ken Seligson. Soledad Ortiz Ruiz. Luis Barba Pingarrón.

Burnt lime has played a significant role in daily Maya life since at least as far back as 1100 BC, and yet its ephemeral nature has limited archaeological studies of its production and distribution. The application of new surveying and remote sensing technologies in recent decades is now allowing for a more in-depth investigation of the burnt lime industries that existed in different sub-regions of the Maya area. In this talk, we present an overview of the current understanding of Prehispanic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michelle Birnbaum.

The Richter site (47DR80) located on Washington Island, Door County Wisconsin was excavated by the University of Wisconsin field school during 1968 and 1973. Large quantities of ceramic materials were recovered. This site was identified as belonging to the Middle Woodland North Bay culture as defined by Mason. Among the body sherds were those with smooth or cordmarked exterior surfaces. Smooth surfaced sherds exhibited breaks along coil lines, indicative of coil construction technique....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bronson Wistuk.

The 2017 fieldwork at Huari, arguably the largest pre-contact city in South America, yielded in excess of 1800 lithic artifacts – excluding microliths found via soil floatation. These artifacts include whole bifaces, unifaces, tool fragments, and debitage. This analysis focuses on the morphologically distinct tool types excavated, such as bifacial points with lanceolate bodies, fluted points, and drills. These tool types offer insight into daily life at Patipampa and the city of Huari,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dustin Wagner. Trevor Lea.

As part of the recent salvage recovery effort at the South Diamond Creek Pueblo (LA 181765), a small Classic Mimbres pueblo (1000-1150 CE) in the Aldo Leopold Wilderness of the Gila National Forest, excavation was performed on a large pit structure that appears to be associated with an earlier occupation of the area. Sample excavation was performed as part of a field school directed by Dr. Fumiyasu Arakawa of New Mexico State University under. Very few archaeological investigations have been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Bishop.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper will discuss the preliminary results of excavations at La Luna, a residential group outside of the El Zotz core. Initial investigations from this Late Classic complex yielded a large volume of high-quality polychrome sherds and prestige items that are inconsistent with the simple architecture of the group. The source of these materials and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Knut Bretzke.

Jebel Faya is a key Paleolithic site in Arabia. The site provides important data on the history of human occupation of desert environments during the Late Pleistocene. One central question is if the observed diachronic pattern of occupation is largely driven by climatic change, as often assumed, or if other factors such as adaptation processes play significant roles. Based on the assumption that survival in the often unpredictable environments of SE Arabia requires increased behavioral...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wesley Stoner. Deborah Nichols.

Compositional studies in central Mexico have largely focused on serving wares of the later Teotihuacan and Postclassic periods. Studies of the region’s earliest ceramics of the Formative period have been almost completely ignored. The earliest ceramics made in the region tend to be much coarser than the later serving wares, so we cannot use the existing reference databases to source them. Here we build the Formative reference database with a large sample of chemical and petrographic data...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hanna Erftenbeck.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Middle Bronze Age (MBA, c. 2000–1500 BCE) in the southern Levant (modern day Jordan, Israel, Palestine, and southern Syria) is characterized by a re-urbanization, and extended use and specialized production of metal objects which obviated the use of chipped stone tools, of which production has long been considered to have significantly declined after the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Sterner. Robert Ahlrichs.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the Eastern United States, the most common material stone tools are made from is quartz (Lewis 2021). However, there have been only a few microwear studies published on quartz in the Americas. Sussman (1985; 1988) used a combination of incident light microscopy and SEM, but she relied on bright field illumination instead of the now more commonly used...