Ethnography/Ethnoarchaeology (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Codding. Kate Magargal. Douglas Bird. Rebecca Bliege Bird. David Zeanah.

This is an abstract from the "Life Is Risky: Human Behavioral Ecological Approaches to Variable Outcomes " session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Explaining major subsistence transitions in human prehistory requires an evaluation of the costs and benefits past people experienced. All too often, these trade-offs are explored solely by analysis of central tendency (i.e., mean returns), without exploring the distribution of possible outcomes. Here we explore...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michelle Young. Sadie Weber.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Murra’s model of the vertical archipelago continues to reverberate in discussions of ecological exploitation across Andean regions, while other scholars have argued that such frameworks essentialize Andean societies by projecting ethnohistorical data onto the deep past. New ceramic, microbotanical, and isotopic evidence from Atalla and other sites in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nora Zariñán.

This is an abstract from the "Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. It has been a while since anthropology experienced an ontological turn that calls to question the universal application of Western concepts, such as nature, culture, and humanity. That questioning, however, has not permeated enough into anthropology, but even much less into...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Triozzi.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. On the Dalmatian Coast of Croatia and stretching for kilometers inland and along the shores of the Eastern Adriatic are massive drystone ramparts and enclosures that litter hilltops. These structures are known as hillforts, are poorly understood, and are colloquially assumed to date to the Iron Age, as there is scant settlement evidence in the area dating to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Howard Higgins.

This is an abstract from the "Collaborative and Community-Based Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1974-76 I conducted ethnoarchaeological research among the Tahltan Indians of northwestern British Columbia. Like many native groups, from the early 1800’s into the 1940’s, the Tahltan were repeatedly decimated by epidemics. These killed disproportionately- with many old and very young dying. The loss of the elder women (the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Magdalena Garcia. Luca Sitzia. Adrian Oyaneder. Manuel Prieto.

This is an abstract from the "Water Management in the Andes: Past, Present, and Future" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Distintos factores han llevado a conceptualizar el altiplano como un espacio hostil y deshumanizado, y el pastoreo de camélidos como una forma única de subsistencia en este ambiente “extremo”. Desde esta óptica, se ha promovido que los pastores andinos aprovechan los pastos que crecen aquí naturalmente sin intervenir en su...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Miguel Aguilar Diaz. Nils Sulca Huarcaya.

En esta presentación se exponen los aspectos fundamentales de la vida y obra del arqueólogo peruano Luis Lumbreras desde sus vivencias en su natal Ayacucho y la trascendencia de su formación personal y académica en la configuración de la consolidación de la tradición científica de la arqueología en el Perú, desde una perspectiva ofrecida por él mismo a partir de una serie de conversaciones entre Lumbreras y los autores, apelando a la memoria y la tradición oral como fuente histórica en la...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Walker. Judy Berryman.

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. Archaeologists routinely encounter ceremonially closed buildings and sites yet specific explanations about why this occurs and how to frame it remain murky. For the American Southwest and likely many other parts of the world, fear of witchcraft may explain these closures. We argue in this poster that ritual burning and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Neil Kohanski. Jeffery Rosa Figueroa.

This is an abstract from the "Studies in Mesoamerican Subterranean Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1966 a cave near Chichen Itza was reported to the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) by Maya living in the area. The cave was investigated by Victor Segovia Pinto, after which the sinkhole entrance was filled with rocks. When archaeologists from the Gran Acuífero Maya opened the cave 52 years later, workers on the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Pilles.

This is an abstract from the "Hot Rocks in Hot Places: Investigating the 10,000-Year Record of Plant Baking across the US-Mexico Borderlands" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Excavations in the Verde Valley of central Arizona have documented the use of roasting pits for food processing from Archaic to modern times. The most obvious evidence for this can be seen in the large mounds of burned earth and fire-cracked rocks that dot the Valley. Over 90...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Olivia Kindl. Alma Noemi Vega Barbosa.

This is an abstract from the "Polychromy, Multimediality, and Visual Complexity in Mesoamerican Art" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Some features of a rocky site in the Potosino semi-desert of north-central Mexico will be presented, where an ancient rock world and ritual expressions of contemporary ethnic groups, in particular the Wixarika (Huichol Indians), coincide. For the latter, the site is an important step in their ritual journey to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Roxanne Tsang.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Rock art and its ethnographic study provide important insights to understand people’s connection to place. In this research, formal and informed methods were used to analyze four stenciled rock art sites in Auwim village, East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea (PNG). One thousand and seventy-seven rock art motifs were identified while the ethnographic data...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Alberti.

Archaic rock art in the Rio Grande Gorge in northern New Mexico demonstrates an intimacy with the ecologies of which it is a part, from the microscopic life with which it shares its surfaces, to the talus slopes it occupies or watches over. Knowledge of materials and the ecological processes with which they were thoroughly entangled encouraged hunters to lay down tracks and traces of their own, including the geometric patterns and animal and bird prints that constitute the archaic rock art...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Radoslaw Palonka. Aaron Wright. Katarzyna Ciomek.

This is an abstract from the "Painting the Past: Interpretive Approaches in Global Rock Art Research" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. How we frame the study of rock imagery (i.e., petroglyphs and pictographs) conditions the types of questions we ask, the types of data we employ, and ultimately the types of conclusions we draw. In the North American Southwest, the study of rock imagery has long focused on the images, less so on the rocks, and only...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Norberto Baldi.

Archaeological investigations in the Caribbean region of Greater Chiriquí conducted over the last two decades have documented occupations dating to the second millennium BCE. Similarities in material culture suggest local and trans-isthmic cultural relationships within Greater Chiriquí and a pattern of scattered hamlets associated with the exploitation of marine and lowland ecosystems. In order to provide a model for this settlement pattern, we offer a theoretical model based on ethnohistorical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Reckin.

This is an abstract from the "Three Sides of a Career: Papers in Honor of Robert L. Kelly" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The study of high elevation archaeology in the Rocky Mountains continues to enhance our understanding of the seasonal rounds of precontact hunter-gatherers in the region. Yet the specific seasonality and quantity of time Indigenous people spent at high elevations each year is unclear. Ethnographically, we know that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Gorden.

Yokuts and Western Mono tribes of central California had close cultural ties. While the Yokuts were the most numerous and the dominant culture, many people were bilingual. They shared themes in their pictographs, petroglyphs, and cupules, which are cultural traits of a ceremonial nature that are archaeologically identifiable, and are generally agreed to have magico-religious significance. Forty-one percent of the paintings in their territory occur in shallow caves and rockshelters, which vary in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Zeanah.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology on the Edge(s): Transitions, Boundaries, Changes, and Causes" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Great Basin hunter-gatherers procured obsidian from more distant sources during the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition (PHT) than did their Holocene successors, suggesting a more mobile subsistence adaptation. However, this requires annual rounds and logistic forays beyond the scale of ethnographic, pedestrian...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Brock.

This is an abstract from the "Working with the Community in Ecuador" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Agua Blanca community has participated in one of the most successful and sustainable community archaeology projects in Ecuador. Since the start of excavations in the Manabí region in 1979, archaeologist Collin McEwan and Maria-Isabel Silva have worked collaboratively with community members to excavate, interpret, and present findings about the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Konwest. Marijke Stoll.

This is an abstract from the "The Vibrancy of Ruins: Ruination Studies in Ancient Mesoamerica" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. What role do ruins play in the lives of descendant peoples? Surrounding the small mountain pueblo of San Antonio La Baeza are numerous ruins dating to different time periods. For example, below the modern pueblo are large, deep rockshelters that have been occupied from the Late Formative up until today and are covered in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jorge Flores.

This is an abstract from the "Unsettling Infrastructure: Theorizing Infrastructure and Bio-Political Ecologies in a More-Than-Human World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The residents of Santa Catalina de Salinas have exploited salt since prehispanic times in the northern Ecuadorian Andes, possibly in the hands of the indigenous groups of the Chota-Mira valley. However, during colonial times, this activity shifted to the hands of mestizos and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Liana Jiménez Osorio.

This is an abstract from the "Checking the Pulse: Current Research in Oaxaca Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. El tema de los santuarios y paisajes sagrados de origen precolonial en Ñuu Savi o Mixteca lo he estado investigado desde la arqueología, antropología, los códices y documentos coloniales. También han sido fundamentales las experiencias y aprendizajes que he tenido en diferentes rituales mixtecos. De esta manera, en esta plática me...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carlos Rodriguez-Rellan. Ramón Fábregas Valcarce.

This is an abstract from the "The Role of Rock Art in Cultural Understanding: A Symposium in Honor of Polly Schaafsma" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Polly Schaafsma has often emphasized the use of ethnographic analogy to get insights into the use and ideological framework of ancient pictographs. While this is both feasible and reasonable in Southwestern rock art, the numerous petroglyphs known in the Galician region mainly belong to a period...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Rees.

This is an abstract from the "Music Archaeology's Paradox: Contextual Dependency and Contextual Expressivity" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Early historical accounts suggest that drums played an important role in the ceremonial life of the prehistoric southeastern United States. However, because they were made in whole or in part of ephemeral materials, drums are virtually invisible in the archaeological record. Interestingly, historical records,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susannah Clinker.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Gut-sewing technology was utilized by Inuit communities until the early 20th century. Despite gut-sewing being a successful and advantageous technology for thousands of years, it is scarcely practiced today. This is in part due to the availability of synthetic materials but also because these kinds of traditional practices have been lost over generations...