Material Culture and Technology (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Donald Purdon.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Typological classifications of stone projectile points are often used as diagnostic indicators of cultural occupations and chronological sequences at archaeological sites across North America. However, many of these typological traditions are only applicable to a particular region where they were first discovered and were commonly based on nothing more than...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Byram. Kent Lightfoot. Jun Sunseri.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Fluted point weaponry types and the expansion of Indigenous people across North American megafauna habitats 13,050–12,650 cal BP are considered in light of historical polearm use. Confronting megaherbivores such as Proboscidea and Bison or megacarnivores such as Arctodus, Panthera, and Smilodon with thrust or thrown spears was likely less effective than...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Stuart.

This is an abstract from the "Decipherment, Digs, and Discourse: Honoring Stephen Houston's Contributions to Maya Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The 1980s saw dramatic new insights into the decipherment of ancient Maya writing, much of it spurred by collaborations with my friend and colleague Steve Houston. One of these was the recognition of inscribed "name-tags" on various types of portable objects and monuments, serving to specify...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jayson Gill. Daniel Adler. Jennifer Sherriff. Keith Wilkinson. Hayk Haydosyan.

This is an abstract from the "Pleistocene Landscapes and Hominin Behavior in the Armenian Highlands" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The recently excavated site of Ptghavan-4 in the Armenian Highlands provides rare data on Middle Paleolithic hominin behaviors during the early Upper Pleistocene. The site contains a dense accumulation of lithic artifacts that are Middle Paleolithic in character within a pedogenically modified aeolian deposit, which...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Russell Skowronek. Brandi Reger. James Hinthorne. Juan Gonzalez.

The U.S.-Mexico border region along the Rio Grande River, separating the southernmost Texas counties (Cameron, Hidalgo, Starr and Zapata) from the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, is a strategic corridor for prehistoric human travel connecting the Gulf of Mexico with the interior of the continent. The area contains a history of human presence extending over 11,000 years, evidenced by a wealth of projectile points that have attracted collectors for decades. To understand prehistoric people’s...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Lévy.

Pyro-engraved gourds discovered by the "Nasca Project" (CEAP) in Cahuachi, Nasca ceremonial center located in the basin of Río Grande, can provide new data about their manufacture and decoration. From a comparative perspective, we study artifact characteristics and archaeological records to understand an unusually large and complex pyro-engraved found during 1994 excavations as an offering associated with ceramics from the last phase of the Early Horizon (Ocucaje 8-9) and the beginning of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cindy Hsin-yee Huang. John Murray. Sydney James. Nicolas Hansen. Jonathan Paige.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The issue of inter-analyst variation is common across nearly all archaeological artifacts. Within lithic analysis, there are many quantitative and qualitative assessments that could vary among analysts, which can cause problems in interpretation of stone tool assemblages. In addition, the effects of raw material on inter-analyst variation is not entirely...

DOCUMENT Citation Only W. James Stemp. Danielle Macdonald. Naomi Martisius. Christopher Brown.

This is an abstract from the "Animal Resources in Experimental Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Increasingly, archaeologists have adopted various approaches from engineering and materials sciences to quantify the surfaces of artifacts and ecofacts. Different microscope systems and surface texture/roughness parameters have been employed with various degrees of success. Although most studies have focused on chipped stone tools and animal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angelina Curley. Sylvia Wemanya. Emmanuel Ndiema. Jonathan Reeves. David R. Braun.

Stone artifact weathering is important for understanding the formational history of surface and in situ assemblages. While much of this work has focused on chert and other crypto-crystalline sillicas, the weathering of basalt is under-studied. As a large proportion of the Early Stone Age record consists of basalt, it is necessary to explore the weathering process of this material. Characterizing basalt weathering currently relies on the subjective characterization of both mechanical and chemical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Ahlrichs.

Great Lakes Archaic copper artifacts have been well documented and typed for many decades. However, there is a lingering tendency to think of copper as primarily a social signifier and to shy away from development of economically oriented copper theory. One component of the problem is rooted in copper’s innately malleable nature. Copper was made into a wide range of tools and non-utilitarian items during prehistory. While most of these types have been enumerated, there are no published...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chung Tang. Maya H. Tang.

This is an abstract from the "Two Approaches to Archaeological Jades: Source Characterization and Social Valuation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As gold is for the West, jade has been one of the finest symbolic vehicles in the East since prehistory. In recent years, a large amount of nephrite accessories have been excavated from early Neolithic-Bronze Age archaeological sites in Northeast China, Cis-Baikal, and the Russian Far East, posing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aylar Abdolahzadeh. George Leader. Tamara Dogandzic. Li Li. Harold Dibble.

Archaeologists have long studied the effects of raw material variation on different aspects of lithic technology, primarily focusing on raw material availability and nodule size and shape. This paper presents the results of a controlled experiment designed to compare different rock types (obsidian, flint, basalt, quartzite, and silcrete) and assess their effects on flake production. The experiment utilizes a mechanical robot that applies force to pre-shaped cores, controlling for known...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wade Campbell. Matthew Magnani. Alex Wesson.

In 2003, a master’s thesis project examined a multicomponent Navajo habitation site dating to the 17th-18th centuries in the Dinétah region of northwest New Mexico. The initial survey program carried out a number of activities, including site mapping, surface collection, and artifact analyses; however, certain questions were left unanswered. A new phase of research initiated in the summer of 2017 aims to better characterize the site and explore the possibility of a pastoral adaptation on the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caitlin Wichlacz.

This is an abstract from the "Mogollon, Mimbres, and Salado Archaeology in Southwest New Mexico and Beyond" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster presents the results of dissertation research examining manifestations of the Salado phenomenon at Hohokam sites in the Phoenix basin of Arizona, investigating how Salado polychrome (Roosevelt Red ware) ceramics were incorporated into contemporaneous Hohokam ceramic assemblages and practices during...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lori Barkwill Love.

This is an abstract from the "Mogollon, Mimbres, and Salado Archaeology in Southwest New Mexico and Beyond" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The red-slipped pottery associated with Mimbres Mogollon pithouses seldom gets much attention, and the typology and chronology of these red-slipped ceramics are not well understood. This poster presents the results of an attribute analysis on the red-slipped pottery from seven Mimbres Mogollon sites as well as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only George Schwarz. Benjamin Ford.

The 70-ton schooner Royal Savage played a pivotal role as the flagship of Benedict Arnold’s squadron in the American Continental Army’s defense of Lake Champlain during the first year of the American Revolution. Misfortune led to her sinking during the Battle of Valcour Island in 1776, and the wreck was left largely undisturbed in shallow waters for over a century and a half until, in 1935, her remains were rediscovered and salvaged for exhibit in a museum that never materialized. Instead, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erina Gruner.

This is an abstract from the "Byways to the Past: An American Highway Archaeology Symposium" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since 2015, WestLand Resources has excavated sites along the proposed South Mountain Freeway, Loop 202 extension in Phoenix, Arizona, for the Arizona Department of Transportation. The freeway corridor lies in the western, lower Salt River Valley near the confluence with the Gila River, within what is traditionally defined as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lars Boyd.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ceramics from Buick Campsite (5EL1), a High Plains Upper Republican open camp in eastern Colorado, were previously classified as Frontier and Cambridge ware of the Central Plains Tradition Upper Republican Culture. However, analyses of 568 sherds from excavations and surface collections indicate that vessel morphology was significantly different than...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meghan Johnson. Terry Ozbun.

This is an abstract from the "Debitage Analysis: Case Studies, Successes, and Cautionary Tales" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Pacific Northwest Region of the United States Forest Service is updating guidance for implementation of a 1984 Programmatic Memorandum of Agreement (PMOA) for management of lithic scatter sites in eastern and central Oregon National Forests. The guidance update emphasizes meaningful consultation with Native American...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathleen Hull.

This is an abstract from the "Recognizing and Recording Post-1492 Indigenous Sites in North American Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Land-use patterns of seasonally mobile hunter-gatherers present a particular set of challenges to archaeological recognition of post-1492 indigenous residential sites in the colonial hinterlands of California. The relatively short duration of site use, frequent re-use of sites episodically occupied in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Hlatky. John Fagan.

This is an abstract from the "Debitage Analysis: Case Studies, Successes, and Cautionary Tales" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Debitage analysis can be conducted in a wide range of ways, and no standard approach has been broadly accepted. Over the years many attempts have been made to introduce varying classification systems for debitage analysis. This paper uses experimental archaeology to test different classification systems for accuracy, and...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Samantha Nadel.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The interdisciplinary study of cochineal production in Mesoamerica has overwhelmingly focused on the written record. These documents, written by Spanish colonizers, European scientists, and modern-day ethnographers, yield insightful information into the material culture of cochineal production, from the cactus farm to the dye vat. Yet thus far, this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Catherine Klesner. Pamela Vandiver.

This is an abstract from the "Identity, Interpretation, and Innovation: The Worlds of Islamic Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Central Asia has long been the connecting bridge facilitating the long-distance trade of goods across Eurasia. While Central Asian communities have served as trading centers, they were also producers of specialty goods and centers of technological innovation themselves. In this study we examine the technological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nora Flegenheimer. Natalia Mazzia. Celeste Weitzel. Salomón Hocsman.

Fishtail points constitute a flexible type that exhibits morphological variability, in part unrelated to spatial and chronological factors. Assemblages from the Argentinian pampas include small, medium and large points, produced either on a flake blank or by bifacial thinning on a biface, with or without fluting, with rounded or angular shoulders, that is, presenting variable sizes, design and manufacturing techniques. These variations were partly the result of the production of objects intended...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caitlin Wichlacz.

This is an abstract from the "WHY PLATFORM MOUNDS? PART 1: MOUND DEVELOPMENT AND CASE STUDIES" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As time passes, fewer and fewer of us retain an intimate knowledge of the site of Las Colinas and the excavations that took place there in the 1960s and 1980s. Published artifact data for the site do not accommodate certain research interests, including inquiry into Salado polychrome ceramics, a significant ceramic category...