Material Culture and Technology (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yuqi Zou.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The previous study of Han bronze mirrors was mainly concerned with the diachronic change, such as the overall development in typology and the main component formula. Although there is only one Han bronze mirrors workshop found in North China at present, the regional diversity still deserves further investigation. This paper first presents a comprehensive...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Schaefer. Leslie Aragon.

Regional Influences on Cliff Phase Ground Stone in the Upper Gila Area Jonathan Schaefer and Leslie Aragon Ground stone tools are a productive means of studying subsistence and technology practices in the American Southwest. Excavations at the Gila River Farm Site and other nearby settlements have provided a large collection of ground stone objects used for various tasks. Here, we evaluate the use of the tools from these sites and compare their morphology to tools recovered elsewhere in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gregor Bader. Lyn Wadley. Christian Sommer. Nicholas Conard.

This is an abstract from the "From Veld to Coast: Diverse Landscape Use by Hunter-Gatherers in Southern Africa from the Late Pleistocene to the Holocene" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The final MSA of southern Africa (~40–28ka) represents one of the most understudied technocomplexes in this part of the world. Researchers often focused on earlier time periods or those shortly after, encompassing the transition between Middle and Later Stone Age....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Brandl. Daniel Modl.

Since 2009, the Neolithic chert quarrying site in the Rein Basin in Styria (Austria) has been the focus of a multidisciplinary research project. A mining area for tabular chert, approximately 10 hectares in size, was established at this locale in the course of a series of archaeological excavations, core soundings and a geophysical prospection. At Rein, tabular chert occurs in residual loams and mined in up to four meter deep shafts. According to this evidence, the site is only the second...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Weahkee. Edward Jolie. Benjamin Bellorado.

This is an abstract from the "Approaches to Archaeological Footwear" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Until recently, the memory of ancient footwear traditions was only retained in the oral histories and stone-hewn writings of Pueblo scholars. Previous interpretations have suggested that footwear was as an everyday item used only to increase mobility and ensure survival in diverse surroundings. For Pueblo people, ancestral footwear was and is a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Woods.

This is an abstract from the "Ceremonial Lithics of Mesoamerica: New Understandings of Technology, Distribution, and Symbolism of Eccentrics and Ritual Caches in the Maya World and Beyond" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The manufacture of Mesoamerican flaked stone "profiles" involved a multi-step sequence from large percussion blank to detailed finishing using pressure-flaking. This paper explores issues involved with this last stage. Included is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Xu Yingyuan. Zhao Xiaowei. Li Zongmin. Jin Zhengyao.

The paper focuses on the characterization of material from fragmented pieces of the imperial lacquered wooden coffin excavated in Xuyi County, Jiangsu Province，whose owner was the empress of Jiangdu State in Western Han Dynasty. The samples were analyzed by scientific techniques including optical and electron microscopy, XRD, FT-IR and GS-MS. The laquer film outside consists of a seven-layer structure, which includes (from the top): a red pigmented layer, two laquer finish layers, three ground...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Deborah Huntley. Suzanne Eckert.

Every site has at least one: the worked sherd. Game piece? Scraper? Spindle whorl? Miscellaneous ceramic object? Different analysts categorize these easily recognized but not always easily interpreted artifacts in different ways. In this presentation, we examine worked sherd assemblages from three 13th-15th century Ancestral Puebloan villages. Differences among these assemblages attest to variable contexts of use and meaning for worked sherds. We argue that individual worked sherds should be...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christina Hahn.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The focus of this research is the variability of ceramics from Late Woodland (A.D. 400-1000) sites in the Little Miami River Valley in Hamilton County, Ohio. Few Late Woodland features have been recovered and little is known about the ceramic technology in southwest Ohio, but these artifacts still play a major role in understanding prehistoric societies. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Aland. R. Alan Covey. Robert Z. Selden. Astrid Runggaldier.

This is an abstract from the "From Households to Empires: Papers Presented in Honor of Bradley J. Parker" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Populations in the Chao Valley of coastal Peru experienced successive waves of imperial expansion from about AD 1350 to the mid-sixteenth century. In relatively short order, the Chimú, Inka, and Spanish empires each established varying degrees of control over the valley. The site of Santa Rita B offers...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charles Kolb.

An assemblage of 280 white clay smoking pipe fragments were recovered from a disturbed context during the construction of a marine basin and wharf at Barcelona Harbor, New York, on the southeastern shore of Lake Erie. Apparently packed in a wooden box or crate, this collection represents one of the largest unique and homogeneous collections fabricated during a brief period in a single manufactory from only a few molds. I summarize descriptive and quantitative analyses, probable provenance, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Theresa Barket. Andrew Garrison. Claudia Camacho-Trejo. David Sosa.

CA-MRP-283, the Hackney Site, is a late prehistoric/protohistoric site in Mariposa County, California. Excavated by California State University, Los Angeles in 1972, the flaked-stone assemblage includes debitage, projectile points, and flake tools. A reanalysis of the debitage shows that late stage biface production, expedient flake-tool production, and the production, repair, and replacement of projectile points were all common activities at the Hackney site. A recent analysis of the projectile...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gary Rollefson.

This is an abstract from the "Pushing the Envelope, Chasing Stone Age Sailors and Early Agriculture: Papers in Honor of the Career of Alan H. Simmons" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The late Pleistocene and early Holocene Neolithic connections over the maritime routes from the eastern Mediterranean shores to Cyprus have been fruitfully investigated, and those links clearly involved more than the simple movement of ideas. Another development in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jayson Gill. Daniel Adler. Keith Wilkinson. Ana Barun. Boris Gasparyan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study applies a three-dimensional landmark-based geometric morphometric (GM) technique to evaluate chronological variation in Acheulian bifacial technology during the Middle Pleistocene of Armenia. This analysis utilizes 360° documentation of biface shape to supplement more commonly used single-surface and outline GM approaches. Furthermore, traditional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dylan Person.

What is the value of an expedient lithic tool? By what standard is its performance judged? Analysis of lithic debitage has long focused on morphological characteristics of flakes to determine fracture mechanics and other technological aspects of the flintknapping process. As such, most lithic flake termination types are seen as the result of misdirected force as opposed to techniques producing a mechanistically ideal flake type. What does this mean for past humans who did not follow the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leanna Maguire. Briggs Buchanan. Metin Eren.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The experimental study of stone projectile points created via flintknapping has shed light on issues of culture, penetration, durability, aerodynamics, resharpening, among several other topics. Here, we present an experiment that systematically assesses the role that isometric scaling, i.e., size, plays in stone point durability. Thirty obsidian projectile...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ann Merkle.

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. This paper addresses how social identity, as reflected in networks represented through pottery decoration, served as a means of mediating and buffering against the social uncertainties generated by shifting political and religious landscapes of medieval Central Asia. My project examines the decoration and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan Parker. Jon Spenard.

Material culture studies allow archaeologists to examine the social implications of the physical world in which people are embedded. Sacred landscapes, for example, inspire social narratives regarding how people should interact with the environment. Components of those landscapes, such as caves and mountains, become active participants in the establishment, maintenance, and mobilization of environmental narratives. They serve as hegemonic tools for conveying morality and proper behavior, and as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anne S. Dowd.

The Pipestone National Monument, created August 25, 1937, attracts people to mine its catlinite rock containing traces of iron-rich hematite giving it a red hue. The living cultural landscape preserved as a National Monument in southwestern Minnesota is 301 acres, but its modern constituency extends far beyond these borders. In ancient times, raw material from the Sioux Quartzite Formation traveled long distances as well. Archaeological research in combination with ethnography and descendent...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aleesha Clevenger. Allen Denoyer.

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 research examines the projectile point assemblage from the Gila River Farm site, a Cliff phase (AD 1300–1450) Salado site excavated by the Archaeology Southwest and University of Arizona Upper Gila Preservation Archaeology (UGPA) field school from 2016 to 2022. The projectile point assemblage was recovered...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alejandro Rey De Castro. Augusto Oyuela-Caycedo.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Excavations at various archaeological sites located in the northern coast of Colombia have yielded evidence of early ceramic production and, in the case of San Jacinto, the earliest so far unearthed in the Americas, dating back to 6000 years BP. San Jacinto ceramics are characterized by the use of an organic-tempered clay and the presence of highly...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jianfeng Cui. Rui Min.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Research on Early Chinese Borderland Cultures and Archaeological Materials" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Up to now, the Yinsuodao site is one of the earliest Bronze Age sites known in Yunnan Province. This work will present the results of metallographic and lead isotope analyses of a number of metals discovered at this site. The metallographic studies suggest that the metal technology at Yinsuodao represents...

DOCUMENT Citation Only D'aundra Lewis.

For millennial alcohol has played a prevalent role in the development of communities and human interaction. Scotland is well known for the creation of whisky that made its way to America during the Colonial Period. The goal of this research is to identify the influence alcohol has had on the development of Scotland. Scotland whisky distribution has caused a change in laws, economics, health perspective, and tradition. According to Bill Walker, "Scotch whisky is more than a whisky. It is part of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara Purdy. David S. Leigh.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During archaeological field schools in 1976-1978, unfamiliar chert objects and tools were recovered from a sandy/clay deposit at the Container Corporation of America site (CCA 8MR154), Marion County, Florida. This deposit, the Alachua Clays, was traditionally considered "culturally sterile." The specimens from the sandy/clay deposit did not resemble in any way...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Pierce. Patti Wright. Rachel S. Popelka-Filcoff.

The Truman Road Site (23SC924), St. Charles County, Missouri, features a diversity of material remains and a long periods of occupation mostly occurring during the Late Archaic (3000 – 2500 BC) and Middle Woodland (100 BC – AD 500). For this region of prehistoric Missouri, ceramics and chert constitute the main evidence for understanding trade and cultural dynamics. Despite its relative ubiquity among sites, ochre has rarely been considered in such studies. Recognizing that this material is a...