Material Culture and Technology (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jesse Tune.

Various methods have been developed to assess the use-life of Paleoindian bifaces by focusing on morphological attributes. Comparative studies have often proven difficult in part because of the diverse nature of Paleoindian biface technologies in North America. While morphological ratios such as length-to-width vary considerably throughout biface use-lives, technological ratios related to fluting and lateral grinding typically remain more constant. In turn, technological variables may be more...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Danielle Macdonald. Lisa Maher. Theresa Barket. Naomi Martisius. Ahmad Thaher.

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 multicomponent Epipaleolithic site of Kharaneh IV, located in the Azraq Basin of eastern Jordan, documents over 1,000 years of occupation by hunter-gatherer groups during the end of the Last Glacial Maximum. Multiple lines of geomorphological, faunal, and archaeobotanical evidence indicate that the environs around the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carmen Martin-Ramos.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Stone tool making has proven to be essential in human evolution and evolutionary cognitive archaeology studies (Herzlinger et al. 2017; Martín-Ramos 2022; Martín-Ramos and Steele 2023). In the case of the Acheulean technocomplex, concepts such as innovation, imposition of arbitrary form, and artifact variability have been linked to cognitive traits such as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah MacIntosh. Levent Atici. Sachihiro Omura.

This paper investigates the production of bone artifacts during the Bronze Age (ca. 3000-1200 BCE) at the central Anatolian site of Kaman-Kalehöyük. At this time, small agrarian societies transformed into more complex polities and states, which gave way to a more centralized and specialized market economy. These transformations in sociopolitical and economic organization resulted in other changes as well. For example, animal exploitation patterns began to reflect a more regulated economy to meet...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Rutkoski. Michelle Bebber.

The earliest known occurrence of limestone temper usage in Ohio began sometime during the Middle Woodland Period, and becomes common in Late Woodland cave sites in the southern part of the state. However, little is known about the overall temporal and geographic distribution of this temper type. Toward this end, we analyze pottery throughout the southern Ohio Woodland period by assessing it with hydrochloric acid (HCl) for the presence or absence of limestone. The results of this examination...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ximena Villagran.

This is an abstract from the "Early human adaptation on the African coasts: Comparing northwest Morocco and the Cape of South Africa" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Micromorphology has become a vital part of the toolkit for site formation process analyses in any archaeological context. The technique has been little applied in coastal settings, with most of the work focusing on shell-matrix sites in a few coastal areas of the world. In such...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Josie Mills.

Raw material studies are becoming increasingly popular as the development of technical and methodological advances adds to the macroscopic and geological study of stone tools. In turn this improves our capability to create a link between a stone tool’s archaeological context and geological area of origin. This connection is often discussed in terms of hominin behaviour, such as organisation of subsistence, adaptation to environment, and forward planning. However, the growing body of data...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shelby Saper. Richard Rosencrance. Katelyn McDonough. Geoffrey Smith. Dennis Jenkins.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Some researchers support a “long” chronology for corner-notched points in the northern and eastern Great Basin, with some points dating as old as 8500 cal BP. Other researchers support a “short” chronology and argue that corner-notched points almost exclusively postdate 5000 cal BP. This debate suffers from the use of a variety of typological schemes,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robbyn McKellop.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Located in the east Texas Pineywoods, Boxed Springs (41UR30) is a lesser-known Early Caddo mound center characterized by a diverse and distinctive archaeological assemblage. Recently, Wichita State University has been granted permission to access the eastern portion of the site which was previously restricted. Excavation findings during the 2021 and 2022...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yuichi Nakazawa. Kyohei Sano.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Obsidian Studies of the Old and New Worlds" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Among the various factors that potentially affect the obsidian hydration rates, intrinsic water content of obsidian has been considered a significant factor. Despite this understanding, variation in water content even within the geochemically identical provenance of obsidian makes us difficult to evaluate the effect of water content...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Suzanne Eckert. Deborah Huntley.

The Goat Spring Archaeology Project explores late Pueblo period (A.D. 1300 - 1680) cultural continuity and transformation in south-central New Mexico. Goat Spring Pueblo was occupied periodically: initially during a period of demographic reorganization and expansion of regional networks in the 1300s, again during the early Spanish Colonial period, and possibly during the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. This highland village was strategically located along the trail connecting Western Pueblo and Rio Abajo...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Austin Cross.

This is an abstract from the "First Floridians to La Florida: Recent FSU Investigations" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Schott and Ballenger’s (2007) work analyzing the expended utility of Dalton bifaces looked at the difference between the potential utility of an artifact and its residual utility to understand the use-wear and resharpening processes that shaped the artifact, and applied their findings to reconstructing the population-level use of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fernando Castillo Flores. Francisco Javier García Ugalde. José Luis Punzo Díaz. Alfonso Gastelum-Strozzi. Dante Bernardo Martinez Vazquez.

Currently there exist several databases composed of hundreds or thousands of digital images of arrowheads made by different ancient ethnic groups around the world. Extracting information or comparing and classifying the elements of these databases in an efficient and automated way, even without the need of arrowhead’s metadata, would be of great help in carrying out a comprehensive study on this archaeological subject. This work deals with this problem by developing an image processing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kim Cullen Cobb. Emily Kaplan. Michele Austin Dennehy. Christopher Beekman.

This is an abstract from the "Coastal Connections: Pacific Coastal Links from Mexico to Ecuador" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A technical study of pre-Columbian copper-alloy axe-monies from the collections of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian and National Museum of Natural History. Research activities include stereo microscopy, digital photography (macro and micro), portable X-ray fluroescence (pXRF)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joseph Birkmann. Bruce Huckell.

Although long known from surface sites, the Middle Archaic record in the Tucson Basin includes very few in buried alluvial contexts. AZ BB:13:70 is a Middle Archaic occupation site located along Brickyard Arroyo, a deeply incised tributary arroyo of the Santa Cruz River. First discovered in 1975, the site was revisited throughout the early 1980’s and investigated formally in the summer of 1984 after monsoon rains created an extensive exposure of features and artifacts along the arroyo. The site...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Annelou Van Gijn.

Experimental archaeology plays a critical role in the development of new ideas and techniques within the discipline, for example, within studies of artifact manufacture and use, butchery practices, taphonomy, etc. Despite a difference in the nature of ‘controls,’ out-of-the-lab experiments play a crucial role in scientific archaeology because they often shed new and different light on a range of complex issues, as demonstrated by recent house building experiments conducted with the assistance of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Dylla.

This is an abstract from the "Indigenous Practices and Material Culture: Seventy Years of Mission Life" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since its creation by the Texas legislature in 1977, the Texas Historical Commission both houses the State Historic Preservation Officer for federal antiquities compliance and administers the Antiquities Code of Texas, which offers state-level protections to significant archaeological sites. The Alamo occupies a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Glenna Nielsen-Grimm. Diana Christensen Hawks.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Research in Montezuma Canyon, San Juan County, Utah" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cave Canyon Village is a large, multi-component site investigated through survey and excavation by Brigham Young University Archaeology Field School in 1975-78. Two years of excavation in the Basketmaker component of the site uncovered 5 large pit structures, and associated small slab-lined cists that date to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emanuela Rudnicka.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although Peruvian basketry remains unexplored, recent investigations at Castillo de Huarmey offer insights into this ancient craft. Dating back to the Middle Horizon (600-1000 AD), the site served as a multifaceted locus, encompassing administrative, religious, and funerary functions for Wari culture. In 2012, the site yielded the burials of numerous...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Camila Alday.

This is an abstract from the "Histories of Human-Nature Interactions: Use, Management, and Consumption of Plants in Extreme Environments" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study presents the results of an archaeobotanical analysis of the hunter-gatherer’s plant-fiber technologies of South America’s west coast. Due to the extreme aridity of the Atacama Desert, the preservation of organic technologies is exceptional. I analyze a unique assemblage...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Utting.

This is an abstract from the "The Expanding Bayesian Revolution in Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. By studying stone tool technology, archaeologists and anthropologists shed light on big questions in human prehistory, including how ancient peoples adapted to changing environments, moved throughout landscapes, and interacted with other groups of people. There are many methodological approaches for characterizing stone tool technology,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Isabel Guevara-Duque.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation showcases results from research on the metallurgical traditions of the Yaguachi chiefdom, a regional polity within the Milagro-Quevedo society that thrived in the Guayas Basin, Ecuador, between 400 and 1400 CE. Despite the region's apparent lack of local metal sources, the presence of copper alloys and other metals in burial sites...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Hughes.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. It has been noted that the western exteriors of Chaco Great Houses in the Northern San Juan Region exhibit evidence of substantial prehistoric activities. Recent excavations at the West Great House at 5MT1905 indicate complex stratigraphic deposition at the exterior of the westernmost extent of the structure. Initial findings indicate that the location...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jenny Ni.

This is an abstract from the "What’s Going on in Texas? Current Topics in Texas Archaeology" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. <html> Plains Biographic Tradition rock art, through recording the military exploits of Plains warriors and associated historical events, was an important method of earning prestige and political influence in Plains cultures. As it developed alongside the increasing integration of equine pastoralism, the Plains Biographic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Efrain Arroyo.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Tumi de Oro, a gold ceremonial knife with an anthropomorphic figure created by the Middle Sicán culture (AD 900–1100) of northern Peru, is an emblematic artifact of prehispanic Peru and a national symbol of contemporary Peru, a symbol of pride and identity, representing peruanidad. The Tumi de Oro is a ubiquitous symbol, permeating Peru, from art to...