Material Culture and Technology (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Walsh. Shawn Graham. Alice Gorman.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From January to March 2022, astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) carried out the first documentation of in situ material culture from a space habitat. Since then, we have identified and marked the locations of thousands of artifacts in the 358 photographs made by the crew in six sample locations across the ISS. At the 2023 SAA Meetings,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Nielsen.

This is an abstract from the "SANNA v2.2: Case Studies in the Social Archaeology of the North and North Atlantic" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The goal in this Master’s Thesis is to collect and systematize data from eight medieval Norse sites in the Tasikuluulik peninsula and use these data to compare with past interpretations regarding the use and purpose of these Norse sites. In past research projects, the eight sites under investigation have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ann Johnson.

This is an abstract from the "Paleo Lithics to Legacy Management: Ruthann Knudson—Inawa’sioskitsipaki" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over 100 lithic tools accompanied the burial of a two-year-old Clovis boy. While this assemblage has been called a cache by some, these artifacts appear to have been left as grave goods, so the child would have needed tools in the next life. Some artifacts have nicks and breaks, or have been resharpened suggesting...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Taylor Burnell. Mark Sutton.

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. The use of various organic resins as mastics and sealants in prehistoric North America is well documented in the archaeological and ethnographic literature. While the utilization of the creosote lac resin by people in western North America is known, resinous materials discovered in archaeological contexts are most...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melanie Saldana. Michele Bleuze. James Brady.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1993, a previously unknown composite material made of layers of finely woven cotton fabric saturated in ceramic slip were recovered by the Petexbatun Regional Cave Survey in the Cueva del los Quetzales, Petén, Guatemala. An analysis of the sherds was conducted by the Smithsonian Institution's Conservation Analytical Laboratory (now the Smithsonian...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lauren Christensen. Frédéric Surmely. Jay Franklin. Sandrine Costamagno. Maureen Hays.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We present new research at Enval, a Middle Magdalenian rock shelter site in the Massif Central of France. Lithic materials previously recovered indicate far ranging contacts in multiple directions. Artifacts from our 2018 excavations reflect intensive use of local raw materials, suggesting that use of allochthonous materials was not simply a response to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Corinne Watts.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ground stone tools can indicate important patterns in food production, craftwork, and farming practices in Neolithic and Chalcolithic Iberia due to their varied use. As Iberian communities adopted sedentary practices and social inequalities emerged, they began to create tools made from new raw materials, indicating a changing relationship with their...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edward Jolie. W. Rex Weeks.

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. Ethnographic, iconographic, and archaeological records attest to the sophisticated and sumptuous textiles produced by Maya peoples in ancient and contemporary times. However, historical neglect of cordage industries in archaeology, combined with poor organic preservation and gaps in the ethnographic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Collard.

This is an abstract from the "The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis and Human Origins: Archaeological Perspectives" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Identifying the factors that influence variation in cultural complexity among groups is an important task for archaeologists. In this paper, I argue that niche construction may be one of these factors. I begin by showing that empirical work on the drivers of technological complexity in small-scale...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Charlton.

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. Linking the evolution of smelting technology to the development of regional economies remains one of the greatest challenges for archaeometallurgy. It is neither possible to explain technological evolution without reference to its costs and benefits in a given...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Hughes. Leigh A. R. Cominiello. Jamie Merewether. Kari Schleher.

This is an abstract from the "Adopting the Pueblo Fettle: The Breadth and Depth of the Basketmaker III Cultural Horizon" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The stone artifacts recovered from the Basketmaker Communities Project study area in southwestern Colorado resemble broader technological and social trends documented in the San Juan region during the Basketmaker III time period on the Colorado Plateau. Do the residents of the BCP study area...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michele Smith.

This is an abstract from the "Celebrating Anna Kerttula's Contributions to Northern Research" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Anna Kertulla’s vision of Arctic research incorporated a desire to see female scholars succeed and work on issues pertaining to women’s lives in the North. Three NSF-funded grants from Arctic Social Sciences, focusing on textiles as women’s production, used over 1500 textiles from Iceland, Greenland, the Faroes, and Scotland...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Madeleine Hale.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Object itineraries allow archaeologists to analyze material culture with less bias, while acknowledging both Native and archaeological perspectives, by considering the many different contexts through which an object moves in time and space. In this paper, I focus on creating a deeper understanding of European-made metal objects uncovered at Stark Farm...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Max Ayala. Cinthia M. Campos.

This is an abstract from the "Crossing Boundaries: Interregional Interactions in Pre-Columbian Times" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Epiclassic, well known as a transitionary period, some emerging chiefdoms sought control of exchange networks and natural resources like obsidian. Specifically, in Western Mesoamerica, in Michoacán are two obsidian sources that had a local distribution across the Lake Chapala basin, the central mountain...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabriela Montero. Nathan Wilson. Lourdes Budar.

In this paper, we present the results of technological and visual sourcing analyses of over 1000 obsidian artifacts collected by the Proyecto Arqueológico Piedra Labrada (PiLab), directed by Dr. Lourdes Budar. The PiLab area of study, the eastern Sierra de los Tuxtlas, Veracruz, Mexico, includes the eastern flanks of the Sierra de Santa Marta and the adjacent coastal plain along the Gulf of Mexico, and has a long sequence of Prehispanic occupation. Despite this, and almost a decade of regional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lindsay Powell. Zachary Hruby.

This is an abstract from the "The Pre-Columbian Cultures of Honduras after AD 900" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The rather diminutive site of Rio Amarillo, located to the north of the Copan city center, is well known as a subsidiary site that was somehow involved in the movement of goods between the Motagua and Copan Valleys. After the collapse of the Copan Dynasty, large civic-ceremonial structures were abandoned and the people that remained,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alejandro Pastrana. Annick Daneels. Silvia Domínguez.

During the Classic period (1st mill. CE), South Central Veracruz was a mosaic of microstates in which obsidian was scarce but available to everyone. Semi-intensive systematic survey in 400 km2 of the lower Cotaxtla basin showed occasional concentrations that led to propose two alternatives: state-controlled workshops obtaining and redistributing artifacts to resident population, or independent workshops servicing clients across borders, implying the existence of a market-based economy. Chaîne...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Blaine Burgess. Jeffrey Ferguson. Shannon Fie.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists attribute many possible connections between the Bajío and Basin of Mexico during the Formative through Postclassic periods. Elemental analysis of obsidian from the site of La Magdalena (Q-25) in the eastern Bajío region of Mexico both support and challenge different aspects of these connections. Excavations conducted by Beloit College in 1958...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emmanuel Gómez Ambríz. José Luis Punzo Díaz.

This is an abstract from the "Approaches to Cultural and Biological Complexity in Mexico at the Time of Spanish Conquest" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The most important city of The Tarascan Empire was Tzintzuntzan. The Yacatas, political and ceremonial center of this site, was explored in the first half of the 20th Century by Mexican scholars. Nevertheless, information about these excavations is not clear at all. For this reason, here we offer...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mélanie Ferras Deletré.

This is an abstract from the "Chavín de Huántar’s Contribution to Understanding the Central Andean Formative: Results and Perspectives" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ceremonial center of Chavín de Huántar (1200–500 BCE) stands out for its extensive network of hydraulic canals. The excavations carried out by the Chavín de Huántar Archaeological and Conservation Research Program in the Explanada sector allowed these subterranean structures to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elodie Dupey.

This is an abstract from the "Bringing the Past to Life, Part 2: Papers in Honor of John M. D. Pohl" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper revisits the structure and contents of the greatest source—the only one of its kind—concerning the knowledge of color technology and, consequently, artistic practices of the ancient Nahua: the chapter on colors in Sahagún’s “Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España,” which contains a description in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peng Peng.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The “independent invention versus diffusion” argument remains undecided regarding the inception—or rather inceptions—of copper-based metallurgy in China. The intriguing course leading to the substantial rise of a distinctive metallurgical tradition that can be confidently called “Chinese” was probably too perplexing to be explained by a single theoretical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Metin Eren. The Eren Lab Graduate Students.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1996, the anthropologist and ethnobotanist Wade Davis recounted in his book "Shadows in the Sun" the tale of an Inuit man who manufactured a knife out of his own feces and saliva as these raw materials froze during the arctic night. With these items he then butchered a dog. Since that time, this story has been told, and retold, on websites, radio...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ximena Villagran. Marcony Alves. Thiago Kater. Kelly Brandão. Francisco Pugliese.

This is an abstract from the "Step by Step: Tracing World Potting Traditions through Ceramic Petrography" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Organic inclusions, such as freshwater spicules (cauixi) and tree bark ash (caraipé) are one of the most diagnostic elements of pottery production in the Amazon basin. At the Monte Castelo shell mound (southwestern Amazonia), Bacabal pottery represents the widespread use of sponge spicules in the ceramic paste,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexander Brittingham. Michael Hren. Gideon Hartman. Keith Wilkinson. Daniel Adler.

A number of different direct and indirect proxies are used to identify fire at archaeological sites. We propose a new organic molecular proxy for identification of anthropogenic fire in archaeological sediments, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). These molecules are a byproduct of the incomplete combustion of organic biomass, and are preserved well on deep time scales. We applied this proxy to Lusakert Cave, a Middle Paleolithic site in the Hrazdan Gorge, Armenia. From these same samples,...