Material Culture and Technology (Other Keyword)

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...

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 Laura Recklies. Loren Davis. Daniel Bean. Alexander Nyers.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Caches of stone tools offer unique opportunities to study lithic technology crafting at extremely short temporal scales. We created digital 3D models of 378 obsidian bifaces from a cache located in central Oregon (35DS751) and submitted them for x-ray fluorescence and geometric lithic morphometric research (GLiMR) analyses. The raw materials from this...

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 Stephanie Scialo. David E. Leslie.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sites containing Early Holocene Gulf of Maine Archaic Tradition (GMAT) components have been few and far between in the New England region. Given the lack of diagnostic tools associated with the industry and the general rise in quartz use during the Archaic Period in the Northeast, these sites have often been misattributed to Late Archaic period...

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...