Archaeometry & Materials Analysis (Other Keyword)
151-175 (632 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological sites in Africa and Asia often contain large amounts of eggshell fragments from ostriches (Struthio spp.), indicating that these birds and their eggs were a valuable source of protein and calories for hunter-gatherers. Despite their abundance, however, ostrich eggshell (OES) remains understudied. Stable isotopic values preserved in...
Domestic Activity Areas in a Late Classic Residential Courtyard Group at Chan Chich, Belize (2018)
Households represent a foundational element of any society. The everyday activities that occur within domestic spaces construct and reinforce the social, economic, and political framework upon which societies are built. The 2017 field season of the Chan Chich Archaeological Project saw the first explicit study of domesticity and everyday life at the ancient Maya site of Chan Chich with investigations of final phase domestic activity areas in Courtyard D-4. This Late Classic residential group...
Domestic Life and Ceramic Consumption in Tlajinga, Teotihuacan (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Teotihuacan: Multidisciplinary Research on Mesoamerica's Classic Metropolis" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Tlajinga is the southernmost district of Teotihuacan, a cosmopolitan city that thrived in Central Mexico during the Classic period. Previous research done in this neighborhood includes surface collection associated with the Teotihuacan Mapping Project and the excavation of one compound, designated 33:S3W1 during...
Drilling into the Maize Heart of Mesoamerican Jade (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Hidden Gems: New Research on Lapidary, Lapidarists, and Polished Stone and Shell in the Americas" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Jade dominates ancient Mesoamerican lapidary. While artists shaped the precious blue-green stone into varied forms, the quintessential jewel was a simple, round bead — bored through the center, polished to a sheen, and marked with red: either dusted with vermilion pigment or strung on a...
Dung Microremains as Archaeological Evidence of Pastoral Practices: Exploring Low Impact Methodology to Understand Early Navajo Sheepherding in Northwest New Mexico (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Modelling Human Behaviour through Ethnoarchaeology: Ethnoarchaeology as Long-Term Traditional Knowledge (L-TeK)" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Spanish introduction of sheep to the U.S. Southwest in 1598 CE and their embrace by non-colonized early Diné (Navajo) communities in northwest New Mexico represent an important Indigenous cultural transformation in the history of North America. Not only were Diné lifeways...
The dynamics of crop spectra in the highlands of Odisha: an ethnoarchaeobotanical perspective (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Modelling Human Behaviour through Ethnoarchaeology: Ethnoarchaeology as Long-Term Traditional Knowledge (L-TeK)" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The highlands of Odisha (India) are home to numerous Adivasi communities who traditionally cultivate rice and millets in systems of shifting cultivation and permanent upland cultivation. Various agricultural policies have had notable impact on Adivasi crop spectra, increasing...
Early Globalization of the Han Empire in Its Southern Frontier and the Expansion of Iron Economic Network (2018)
Even though the framework of early globalization has been proved as effective in illuminating ancient interregional interaction in many regions, its value and contribution to the archaeological study of ancient China has been overlooked in the literature. Focusing on the Han Empire, we employed statistical methods to exam variations in assemblages and frequencies of iron objects, one type of critical state finance in the Han political economies, from burials in the southern frontier of the...
Early greenstone objects from Aguada Fénix, Tabasco, Mexico (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Hidden Gems: New Research on Lapidary, Lapidarists, and Polished Stone and Shell in the Americas" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Greenstone axes and ornaments were important objects deposited in caches at various Early and Middle Preclassic centers in southeastern Mesoamerica. Early examples come from the sites of El Manatí in the Gulf Olmec region and Cantón Corralito on the Chiapas Pacific Coast dating to 1400-1000...
Early Islamic Glazed Ceramics from Bukhara and Tashkent: An Archaeometric Analysis (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Advances and New Perspectives in Central Asian Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents the results of the archaeometric analysis of 150 early Islamic style glazed ceramics from Central Asia. The glazed ceramics, introduced to the region in the ninth century CE, served as important cultural markers and demonstrated the intentional affiliation that the residents in Mā Warāʾ an-Nahr developed with...
Eating Clams to Keep Society in Motion: Shell Middens and Social Reproduction at the Longotoma Bay, Central Chile (32°24’ S) (2025)
This is an abstract from the "A Movable Feast: Mobility and Commensalism in the Andes" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Coastal research has stressed the variety of systemic roles played by shell middens as architectural features, markers of the landscape/seascape, and as the result of the accumulation of food debris. The latter is the effect of concrete economic behavior; however, the exploitation and consumption of shellfish on coastal settings...
Economic and Style Trends of Shell Beads from the Tule Creek Village Site (CA-SNI-25) of San Nicolas Island, California (2018)
Native peoples of Southern California developed complex systems of trades through non-monetary exchanges of items such as beads. Through these exchanges and interactions, socioeconomic structures within intra-local and extra-local communities evolved to fit individual governing societies. The Tule Creek Village was the epicenter of cultural and social development during the Late Holocene on San Nicolas Island. It harbored a myriad bead types distributed among the residential and ceremonial...
Economic Integration across Political Boundaries in Highland Chiapas (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Ancient Maya Embedded Economies" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper examines the integration of small polity economies in highland Chiapas, and the ways in which polity size and proximity were factors. This region formed part of the western frontier of the Maya linguistic and cultural area, and has been characterized as a relatively autonomous economic and political periphery. Beginning in the Late Classic...
The Effect of Sex on Diet: Isotopic Variation among North and South American Foragers (2024)
This is an abstract from the "American Foragers: Human-Environmental Interactions across the Continents" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The extent to which subsistence labor was divided among archaeological forager populations of the Americas is currently debated. This analysis uses bone isotope chemistry and Bayesian mixing models to examine trophic variation between female and male individuals from North and South American forager populations....
The Effects of Climate and Culture on Andean Altiplano Diets, 9–1 Ka (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ancient Andes is one of the few regions in the world where gathering and hunting intensified to result in the domestication of a variety of food products that would ultimately achieve global importance. This outcome is remarkable given the harsh, semi-arid, and hypobaric environment, and the driving dynamics remain unclear. Here, I present an analysis...
El Torno del Cielo: A New Spin on Regional Interactions from the Río Grande de Chone, Manabí (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Cuando los senderos divergen: Reconsiderando las interacciones entre los Andes Septentrionales y los Andes Centrales durante el 1ro y 2do milenio AEC / When Paths Diverge: Reconsidering Interactions between the Northern and Central Andes, First–Second Millennium BCE" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Precolumbian societies of the Ecuadorian coast have long attracted the interest of archaeologists studying regional...
Elemental and Isotopic Geochemistry to Source Shell-Tempered Ceramics – Late Woodland and Mississippian Contexts in the Yazoo Basin (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sourcing shell-tempered ceramics using compositional analyses has revealed to be challenging, if not impossible in some contexts. Recent pilot studies have shown that freshwater mussel shells from archaeological sites located in different drainages in Eastern and Southeastern United States display different elemental compositions. The present research further...
Embracing the Research Potential: Geochemical Sourcing of Rhyolite Artifacts from Antelope Valley Orphaned Collections (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Expanding Our Understanding of the Mojave Desert: Emerging Research and New Perspectives on Old Data" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For over 40 years, the orphaned archaeological collections excavated by Antelope Valley College (AVC) have remained underutilized and underreported—an untapped resource and oversight to archaeological investigations in the western Mojave Desert. Orphaned collections can be revisited...
Emotions Underground: Facial Expression in the Andean Past through the Portrait Vessels (Huacos Retratos, a Heterodox Approach to the Emotions of the Past) (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The critical role of emotions in any social framework is a problematic element to address from the archaeological record. The nuances of nonverbal communication preceded articulated language and the production of any other communication record in the human species. Behavioral studies, supported by neuroanatomical registration, allow the detailed...
Empire by Replication: The Making of Measures during the Qin Dynasty (2025)
This is an abstract from the "New materials and new insights for our understanding of the First Emperor's Mausoleum and early imperial China" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. I will examine how the Qin empire (221-207 BC) established and maintained its rule over a vast expanse of territory by practices of replication, in which the making of measuring containers constituted the primary focus in my presentation, while other materials such as armors...
Engaging Materiality: Archaeology of Craft Production in Igbo Ukwu (Ninth–Twelfth Century CE) (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Crafting Archaeological Practice in Africa and Beyond: Celebrating the Contributions of Ann B. Stahl to Global Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the study of craft production in antiquity. It combines theoretical and methodological toolkits from archaeology, material science, studies of craft production, and ancient economies to investigate the organization...
Epifluorescence Microscopy of Experimentally Heated Animal Bones: Applications to Archaeological Micromorphology (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Charred Organic Matter in the Archaeological Sedimentary Record" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Burned bones are an important constituent of the archaeological sedimentary record. Their presence is usually indicative of human activity and may provide information about past human behavior. In micromorphological thin sections, charred bone fragments may appear as opaque and amorphous, and extremely difficult to...
The Esperanza to Middle Marcala Phase Subsistence Practices at El Gigante Rockshelter (11,000–7400 cal B.P.) (2018)
The earliest human occupation of the El Gigante Rockshelter in the highlands of western Honduras dates to the Early Esperanza phase at 11,010 cal B.P. This paper examines the perishable and imperishable remains from the Early Esperanza through Middle Marcala phase occupation from 11,010-7,430 cal B.P. and what they inform about human adaptation and forager subsistence practices in the highlands during this early period of Honduran prehistory.
Establishing a New Database for Chert Raw Material Sources in Northern Belize (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Current Methods and Applications to Chert Sourcing: Case Studies from Across the Americas" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. <html> Lithic raw material quality and abundance played a direct role in the decisions of past tool makers, the type of production, and the organization of exchange networks. The results of raw material procurement influenced the tool making process, whether this be the quality of material...
Establishing Ceramic Source Groups in Florida Using a Multi-method Approach (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Ceramics and Archaeological Sciences" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. More than 500 ceramic artifacts from four prehistoric sites in Pinellas County, Florida, were analyzed nondestructively using a portable XRF spectrometer to address research questions about local production and potential movement or exchange over significant distances. All dating to the Safety Harbor period (ca. AD 900–1500), at least 100 diagnostic...
Establishing Provenance of Ochre from the La Prele Mammoth Site: A Geochemical Analysis (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Red ochre is a ferrous iron oxide mineral used for cultural expression and utilitarian tasks by hominins beginning 250,000 years ago. The use of ochre continued into the New World. While its use by Paleoindians has been noted, the function and significance of ochre for these groups is not well understood. To conceive the importance of ochre to Paleoindians, it...