Material Culture and Technology (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patrick Reed. Shelby Anderson. Caelie Butler.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We are conducting a multi-year (2009-2018), multi-disciplinary research project at Inuigniq (Cape Espenberg) to explore changing patterns of human occupation, culture change, and environmental conditions in Northwest Alaska. Our current focus is on the emergence of Birnirk archaeological culture ca. AD 1000, and the question of how Birnirk culture factored...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Owen Mason.

This is an abstract from the "Arctic Pasts: Dimensions of Change" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A climate-driven eastward push of Thule migrants remains axiomatic to many arctic archaeologists, associated with presumed warming weather of the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA), by tradition dated ca. AD 1000. Thule researchers implicated a rapid migration by rapacious “over-killing” seal-hunters and whalers entering unoccupied landscapes—increasingly...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bruce Huckell.

Along the western edge of the Rio Grande Valley in Central New Mexico is a huge expanse of late Cenozoic volcanics, including a high-quality hydrothermally altered rhyolite. Colloquially known as Socorro jasper, at least one source of this material was exploited frequently by Clovis groups. This paper describes this source—the Black Canyon quarry—and the physical and geochemical properties of the "jasper" from it. Recent and continuing studies of its use by Clovis groups are reviewed, and its...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bruce Huckell. Nadine Navarro. Christopher Merriman. Joseph Birkmann. Steven Shackley.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Opportunities to learn more about Clovis technological behavior at lithic material procurement and workshop sites are rare, particularly in the Southwest. The Blue Canyon site is a rare example of such a site—an artifact scatter covering some 16,000 m2 and consisting of Clovis projectile points and preforms, end scrapers, bifaces, and lithic debitage...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa DeLeonardis. Dawn Kriss. Ellen Howe. Judith Levinson. Adriana Rizzo.

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. Indigo (*Indigofera) is a recognized plant exudate employed in cloth dyes to produce the color blue. In Andean South America, indigoid dyes have been identified in textiles as early as about 4200 BCE. While in other parts of the Americas the plant is utilized as a ceramic pigment (e.g., “Maya Blue”), in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kaitlin Stanley.

Situated in Alaska’s eastern Aleutian Islands on Unalaska Island, the Summer Bay site dates to 2,000 years BP. Over 700 osseous objects representing various manufacture and use stages have been recovered. Among these are harpoons, fish hooks, labrets, points, wedges, awls, and needles. These are primarily made from sea mammals and avifauna. Although Summer Bay represents one of the most secure dates of the Amaknak Phase (3,000 to 1,000 years BP), minimal research has been done to better...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Coutros. Brooke Luokkala.

This is an abstract from the "African Archaeology throughout the Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Worked bone has a long history across the African continent, occurring as early as the Middle Stone Age in eastern and southern Africa. However, since the beginning of the Holocene, barbed and un-barbed points – associated with the so-called ‘African Aqualithic’ peaking at 9,000 BP – have likewise been recovered from sites within Sahelian and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Autumn Myerscough.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Through conducting a microwear analysis, I argue that the use wear of the bone tools examined will determine their functional use. The collections of bone tools for this study are from various Mimbres (AD 200–1130) and Chacoan (AD 850–1250) sites (located in the North American Southwest). Many bone artifacts with narrow, pointed distal ends are defined as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nancy Wicker.

This is an abstract from the "New Work in Medieval Archaeology, Part 2: Crossing Boundaries, Materialities, and Identities" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While interdisciplinarity in archaeology increasingly has blurred the borders between humanities and sciences, an additional boundary in archaeology exists between what is considered Iron Age and what is medieval. The terms have been defined largely from the Continental point of view. In the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christophe Darmangeat. Jean-Marc Petillon.

This is an abstract from the "The Global “Impact” of Projectile Technologies: Updating Methods and Regional Overviews of the Invention and Transmission of the Spear-Thrower and the Bow and Arrow" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The nearly worldwide diffusion of the bow is often interpreted in terms of its superiority over other weapon systems. There is, however, at least one exception to this diffusion: Australia, where this weapon was never...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Donnermeyer. Brittney Cardarella. Bobby Saunters.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Logging was an economic and cultural pillar of the Pacific Northwest. The Bridal Veil Lumbering Company, a logging company operating in the Columbia River Gorge in Oregon State, was the longest continuously operating early lumber mill west of the Mississippi River. The company spanned a timeframe that encompassed a wide range of technologies, immigration...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Russell Cutts.

This is an abstract from the "Fire-Cracked Rock: Research in Cooking and Noncooking Contexts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Experiments quantifying the thermal curved-fragment (TCF) model (Cutts et al. 2019) unsurprisingly yielded considerable numbers of fire-cracked rocks (FCR; yet not strictly conforming to TCF definitions). Many exhibited characteristics commonly described in FCR—e.g., broken, cracked, crazed, crenated, crenulated, pocked,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Natalie Carpiaux. Alicia Boswell. Jessica Walthew. Gabriel Prieto.

The site of Pampa la Cruz, located in Peru’s northern coast in Huanchaco, is situated just north of the ancient Chimu capital of Chan Chan. A multi-component site with occupations from the Salinar, Gallinazo, and Chimu eras (400 BC – AD 1470), excavations in 2016 recovered Chimu child sacrifices. Each body was interred wearing multiple garments, including mantles, loincloths, and tunics. Environmental and soil conditions enabled the preservation of these textiles. In July 2017 students in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan Harris.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ground stone disk beads represented a tangible signal of wealth within the Salish Sea archaeological record; they appeared continuously from 7,000 – 500 BP across the region in scattered frequencies to massive caches. The massive caches were often observed in a burial context, despite non-burial contexts being more frequent and wide-spread. The differences in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Abigail Fisher. Lewanne French.

This is an abstract from the "Animal Bones to Human Behavior" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dogs were an important resource for many Plains peoples, especially for the transportation of materials (e.g., timber, meat, water). The use of dogs for traction may have even facilitated high mobility in early North and South American populations. This high mobility eventually decreased with the introduction of agriculture across the northern Plains. Did...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Iseminger.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Cahokia Birdman Tablet is the iconic example of what defines this artifact category, with engraved graphics on the obverse and crosshatching on the reverse of a rectangular stone tablet. Other tablets from Mississippian contexts have similar combinations or variations of these three features. Some may only exhibit crosshatching on one or both sides....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Valentine Wauters. Aurore Mathys.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeological collection of the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels gathers more than 377 pre-Columbian objects from Ecuador. Among these are twenty wind musical instruments (flutes and ocarinas) in ceramic from the Carchi-Nariño culture. These objects, which joined the collections in the 1990s, had remained dormant in the museum’s storage...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chun Yu. Ya Wei Dong.

This is an abstract from the "From Tangible Things to Intangible Ideas: The Context of Pan-Eurasian Exchange of Crops and Objects" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The four-footed base is a specific structural feature of bronze statues of Buddha in China during the fourth to ninth century BC. This feature appears to have been made using the lost wax method, but experimental methods indicate that the four-footed base was made with the sand mold...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Thacker. Carlos Periera.

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. Castro settlements, prominent from the Late Chalcolithic through the Iron Age in western Iberia, are often described as hillforts or defensive hilltop villages. The delineation of sites as castros often influences archaeological interpretations, bolstering focus on the strategic advantages of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nuria Sugrañes. Gustavo Neme.

Hunter-Gatherers from Southern Mendoza started to use ceramic at 2000 years BP, and it starts to diversified rapidly in each environment. Such diversity shows a contrast between highlands and lowlands tipologies. According to Lagiglia, this ceramic diversity was motivated for exchange between agricultural communities from western side of Andes and northern Mendoza. In this poster, we present new ceramic information from six archaeological sites located in the Atuel river basin. This information...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Boudreaux.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Maya Landscapes in Northwestern Belize, Part I" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. It is now well recognized that Late Classic Maya communities were highly variable politically, economically, and environmentally. Researchers often assume that community and household variation are corollary with the broader political climate— and this remains under problematized. Thus, research that explores differences in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Ownby. Fiona Kidd.

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. The ceramic corpus at Bashtepe, Uzbekistan, is a complex mix of pottery forms, fabrics, and technology. Some vessels are hand-made, while others are wheel-made. Transport vessels, cooking pots, and fine ware are all present. To better understand the acquisition and local production of this corpus, a preliminary...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carolina Corrales. James Allison.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Alkali Ridge Site 13 is a large ancestral Pueblo village in southeastern Utah dating to the late A.D. 700s. Ceramics from the site consist almost entirely of small gray ware jars and decorated red ware vessels in a variety of forms. Extensive excavations by Harvard at the site in the 1930s recovered more than 100 whole or reconstructible vessels, which...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Breault.

Feasting is a well-documented phenomenon in Mesoamerica as a means of community integration and interaction. Ceramic analysis of Op. B, Pozo 20, Feature 1 from the site of Etlatongo may point to one such feasting event at the site. This Yucuita phase (500-300 BC) feature was a primary refuse deposit of ceramic, lithic, and faunal artifacts intermixed with extremely ashy sediment, probably from a specific event. An overview of the stratigraphy of the feature and an inventory of the assemblage...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Belen Mendez Bauer. Takeshi Inomata.

This is an abstract from the "Humble Houses to Magnificent Monuments: Papers in Honor of Jerry D. Moore" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dr. Jerry Moore’s work has been highly influential not only in Andean archaeology but also in the archaeology of Mesoamerica and other parts of the world. Dr. Moore’s pioneering analysis of the lived experience of the built environment has inspired us to examine ceremonial spaces at Maya sites, including plazas...