Archaeometry & Materials Analysis (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Margarita Diaz-Andreu. Tommaso Mattioli.

The site of Las Cuevas (western Belize) has been identified as a mid-sized, Late Classic ceremonial and administrative center. Interestingly, given the importance of caves in Maya religion, the underneath part of the site has a large cave system. Research so far on this cave has focused on aspects that are common in cave archaeology: 1/ structures - in this case on the one hand the series of platforms built around a central, sunk cenote and on the other the walls subdiving the narrow part of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brigitte Faugere. José Luis Ruvalcaba.

This is an abstract from the "Late Pleistocene Stemmed Points across North America: Continental Questions and Regional Concerns" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A complete black obsidian Agate Basin Point was found in a rockshelter in the state of Michoacán, Mexico, during the excavations realized by the CEMCA team. Despite the fact that the stratigraphy of the shelter had been completely disturbed, this point was found associated with a complete...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Johnson. Jason Nesbitt.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Canchas Uckro (ca. 1100-850 BC) is a large monumental platform situated above the Puccha River approximately 25 km north of Chavín de Huántar. Recent excavations have revealed monumental features that suggest the Canchas Uckro played an important role within the political landscape. Ceramic analysis has likewise linked the site to broader economic spheres of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bernardo Arriaza. Juan Pablo Ogalde. Leonardo Figueroa. Vivien Standen. Sian Halcrow.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ancient Chinchorro people of northern Chile used manganese as part of their mortuary rites (7000–3000 BP). Chinchorro artifacts (n = 12) reveals the presence of manganese up to 64% measured with portable X-ray fluorescence. In addition, bone chemistry analysis from Chinchorro mummies (n = 68) using atomic absorption spectrometry reveals for the first...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andres Francisco Sanchez Guerrero. José Luis Punzo Díaz. Lissandra González González. Juan Julio Morales Contreras.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology in South Central Michoacán México, Ongoing Studies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1788 the Spanish Crown wanted to evaluate the mining industry in New Spain in order to start the implementation of new technologies, change the domain and administration of the mines, and create new foundries that would help the mining industry to have more eficiency in all the processes related to this activity. That is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lane Fargher. Ricardo Antorcha-Pedemonte.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent theoretical advances emerging from Historical Ecology have reoriented thinking regarding human-environment relations in many ancient contexts. Consistent with this research program, the concept of the Maya Forest-Garden introduced by Ford and Nigh and Rivera-Núñez and Fargher’s work on Kanan Ka’ax, among others, have provided a more integrated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katina Lillios.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. At the time of the Islamic conquest of the Iberian Peninsula, the landscape was dotted with countless ancient sites, including megalithic monuments constructed between the 6th and 3rd millennium BCE. Were these sites ignored, defaced, or destroyed, as they dated to the time before Muhammad (Age of Ignorance/ jāhilīyah), or is there archaeological evidence for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adrian Velazquez. Norma Valentín. Belem Zúñiga.

This is an abstract from the "The Palace of Xalla in Teotihuacan: A Possible Seat of Power in the Ancient Metropolis" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Project “Teotihuacan, élite y gobierno” (Teotihuacan elite and government) has excavated 420 artifacts made of mollusk shells. Ninety-one of them are objects and 166 are valves or fragments that present traces of human modification; 163 are fragments with no traces of human work. In this paper the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Judith Sealy.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Science and African Archaeology: Appreciating the Impact of David Killick" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. African archaeology has a rich tradition of archaeological science. Sophisticated chronostratigraphies underpin our picture of human origins; archaeometric studies of provenance, trade, and exchange are reshaping our understanding of how societies developed; and my own field of bone chemistry and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cinthya Vidal Aldana. Emmanuel Gómez. Hugo Sánchez. Alfonso Grave. Jorge Blancas.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Culiacán valley is located in central Sinaloa. It is well known in archaeological literature because of the excellent quality of its pottery. Nevertheless, archaeological knowledge is limited due to the lack of continuity in research during last seventy years. This work presents a new perspective on the region through integral research carried out by the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shelby A. Jones. Eric Blinman. Jon Lohse. J. Royce Cox.

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. Directional archaeomagnetic techniques were used to propose use-history models for two burned rock features at archaeological site 41AN162, in Anderson County, Texas, USA. While common in the region, such burned rock features are rarely associated with cultural artifacts that indicate their function. Archaeologists have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Reyna Solis. Emiliano Melgar.

This is an abstract from the "From Materials to Materiality: Analysis and Interpretation of Archaeological and Historical Artifacts Using Non-destructive and Micro/Nano-sampling Scientific Methods" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the main goals of the archaeological researches in Teotihuacan is the analysis and classification of the material culture in order to distinguish local and foreign goods among this multiethnic settlement. In this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Judith Trujillo.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Geochemical studies of rock paintings in Colombia help to reflect on the technological processes used by the painting peoples to make these representations. With the use of analytical techniques, the chemical and molecular composition of pigments and of possible raw materials used in their manufacture are identified. Geochemical and mineralogical analyses...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emiliano Melgar. Reyna Solís.

This is an abstract from the "The Palace of Xalla in Teotihuacan: A Possible Seat of Power in the Ancient Metropolis" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The new archaeometrical characterization of the lapidary objects from Xalla allowed us to distinguish local and foreign goods among this palace compound inside the multiethnic settlement of Teotihuacan. In this paper, we will present different nondestructive techniques (UVF, IRR, OM, SEM-EDS, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashlee Hart.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In American archaeology the use of archaeometric testing such as neutron activation analysis and inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry have become increasingly utilized since the 1960s. These techniques, adopted from parallel disciplines including geology, continue to be relatively underrepresented approaches out of Western European and American...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Keegan. Michael Pateman.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in the Archaeology of the Bahama Archipelago" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. It has long been assumed that the Bahamas were colonized by Ceramic Age peoples who began their expansion into the Caribbean islands from northeastern South America about 500 BC. The widespread occurrence of pottery in the Bahamas (Palmetto Ware), and the timing of initial ‘Lucayan" settlement in the Bahamas is dated to AD 700-800 ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Ahlrichs.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research presents the results of an analysis of a large privately curated collection of Archaic period (Old Copper Complex) copper from the Western Great Lakes. Results from metric, LA-ICP-MS chemical characterization, and radiometric dating analyses will be presented. The data set is drawn from a collection of over 2000 formal copper tools recovered by a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rubén Morales Forte. Maxime Lamoureux St-Hilaire.

The regal palace of La Corona flanks Plaza A to the west and is the largest construction at the site: a complex of structures sitting atop a sustaining platform extending over ca. 80 x 55m, and 7m in height. This paper describes the architecture of the two northern groups of the regal palace during their two last phases of construction, spanning roughly 750-850 A.D. While the Northeast Group comprised elaborately decorated corbel-vaulted buildings, the Northwest Group featured a mix of sturdy...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mia Carey.

Have you recovered thousands of artifacts, but none from the time period of interest? Have you spent weeks or months in the field, with absolutely nothing to address your research questions so you keep digging? This is the phenomenon of negative data. While this can be a scary thing, it is okay. Archaeologists suffering from artifact addiction have developed an unhealthy obsession with the recovery, analysis, and interpretation of material culture. This addiction can result in delayed reports,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ricardo Leonel Cruz Jimenez. Jose Luis Ruvalcaba Sil. Edgar Casanova González. Mayra Manrique-Ortega. Luis Barba Pingarron.

This is an abstract from the "Central Mexico after Teotihuacan: Everyday Life and the (Re)Making of Epiclassic Communities" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. En el marco del "Proyecto arqueológico Chicoloapan viejo" de la Universidad de Wisconsin-Madison, se discuten aspectos de vida comunitaria y regional en el sitio de Chicoloapan Viejo durante su ocupación epiclásica (550-850 ec). A partir del estudio morfo-tecnológico de la obsidiana y del...

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 Jay Stephens. David Killick.

Evidence for trade between southern Africa and the Muslim world dates back to the 8th century CE. However, it is not until the 12th and 13th centuries, with the discovery of alluvial gold in southern Africa, that entanglement between the two regions intensified. As a result, state-level societies emerged and began incorporating aspects of the Muslim identity into their own culture. With the intensification of these trade relations, craftsmen began expanding their repertoire of iron and copper...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gerardo Gutiérrez. James Millette. Mariana Sanders. Mary E. Pye.

This is an abstract from the "From Materials to Materiality: Analysis and Interpretation of Archaeological and Historical Artifacts Using Non-destructive and Micro/Nano-sampling Scientific Methods" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. After 45 years of polemic about the Codex Grolier, the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia of Mexico finally decided to undertake major scientific studies on this document to evaluate its authenticity. During...

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 Bonnie Clark.

This is an abstract from the "2019 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of M. Steven Shackley" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The sourcing of lithic raw material often challenges preconceived notions of the relationships between people, places, and objects for time periods prior to written records. But what of historic obsidian? What can sourcing reveal about the more recent past? This paper presents the case study of a most amazing historical...