Ethnography/Ethnoarchaeology (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Todd Surovell. Matthew O'Brien. Randy Haas.

The division of labor by sex and gender among small-scale societies is well known, but how differences in gender roles are reflected in variation in human spatial behavior has received considerably less attention. Understanding how and why individuals of different gender use space is critical to the development of middle range theory linking gendered human behavior to its archaeological correlates. Over five field seasons, we have collected data on the spatial distribution of people and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Moises Gonzales.

This is an abstract from the "Chicanx Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Genízaro Ethnogenisis, Emergence, and Futurism is an emerging story about the evolution of identity and cultural practices of the Genízaro people of New Mexico. The term Genízaro was the designation given to North American Indians of mixed tribal derivation living among the Hispanic population in Spanish fashion: that is, having Spanish surnames from their masters,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Smith.

This is an abstract from the "Negotiating Watery Worlds: Impacts and Implications of the Use of Watercraft in Small-Scale Societies" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Canoes were central to watercraft cultures in subsistence activities, in hauling people and loads, in travel and recreation, and in warfare and ceremonies. However, to many people on the Pacific Northwest Coast, canoes were viewed, understood, and experienced as much more than just...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sigrid Arnott. Janis Fairbanks. David Maki. Marcus Ammesmaki.

This is an abstract from the "Heritage Sites at the Intersection of Landscape, Memory, and Place: Archaeology, Heritage Commemoration, and Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Grand Portage of the St. Louis River is both a historic route and a series of historic sites originally documented as a fur trade connection between Lake Superior and the Mississippi River Basin. Although often considered a “contact period” site, the trail has...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Allen Christenson.

This is an abstract from the "The Role of Women in Mesoamerican Ritual" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. According to the Popol Vuh, the first truly successful human beings were created from maize by the goddess Xmucane: “The yellow ears of maize and the white ears of maize were then ground fine with nine grindings by Xmucane. Food entered their flesh, along with water to give them strength. . . . The yellowness of humanity came to be when they were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joanne Gallagher. Michael Padian. Abby Barrios. Brianna King.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In November 2016, California passed the Adult Use of Marijuana Act (Proposition 64) to legalize the recreational use of cannabis. As a result, local county governments enacted their own county ordinances for Cannabis Legalization. In Humboldt County, in compliance with the Commercial Medical Marijuana Land Use Ordinance (CMMLUO) Cultivation Application...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Natalia Égüez. Jean-Luc Houle. Oula Seitsonen. Jamsranjav Bayarshaikhan.

This is an abstract from the "New Directions in Mongolian Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lipid biomarkers such as alkanes, fatty acids, and steroids together with their stable carbon and hydrogen isotope ratios are nowadays leading proxies for the identification of past climate variability, human activities, and animal presence in a site. These can be extracted from modern feces, desiccated dung, and soil sediments. When applied to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Gutierrez. Jean-Paul Rojas. Cristian Figueroa. Ana Maria Morales. Angie Farfan Garcia.

This is an abstract from the "Finding Community in the Past and Present through the 2022 PARCC Field School at Buen Suceso, Ecuador" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. ​​​​Archaeological investigations in Dos Mangas began in 2006, and continued with excavation of a Valdivia village site, Buen Suceso, in 2009, 2017, 2019, and 2022. Those and subsequent excavations have combined archaeological inquiry with community engagement activities such as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Natalie De La Torre-Salas.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. People, governments and societies have repeatedly throughout history had to respond to the effect of hurricanes on their communities and environments. Although places like the Caribbean have a long history of being impacted by natural disasters; hurricanes are seldom studied in the context of heritage management and community adaptation strategies in regards...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Van Alst.

This is an abstract from the "Technique and Interpretation in the Archaeology of Rock Art" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Historically, researchers have interpreted rock art based on ethno-historical accounts of ceremonies as male-created and male-oriented experiences and spaces. This has led to researchers ignoring traditional women’s roles in the creation of rock art as well as women’s interaction with rock art spaces. I examine how Lakota women...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Hommon.

This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Hinterlands in Polynesia" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The eighteenth century Hawai`i Island state included more than 400 local communities divided among six districts, each with a resident elite. The king’s mobile court of as many as a thousand people frequently moved from one highly productive district core to another. The "capital" was wherever the king resided. Varying in time and space, hinterlands...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hannah Budner. Lacey Carpenter. Hannah Lau. Colin Quinn.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the early colonial context of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the United States, understanding wellness practices include a dynamic view of what constitutes medicine, personal hygiene, and healthcare. At this time, European colonizers arrived in central New York, occupying traditional Oneida Land, and brought with them their views on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erik Steinbach. Christopher Garraty. Gary Huckleberry. J. Andrew Darling.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Phoenix Basin Hohokam are celebrated for the construction of massive and elaborate canal systems fed by perennial waterways, principally the Salt and Gila rivers. In desert areas, however, along the many ephemeral drainages that crisscross the region, rainfall-harvesting and water-storage technologies largely overshadowed canal irrigation. These...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Brite.

This is an abstract from the "Empirical Approaches to Mobile Pastoralist Households" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A key feature of mobile pastoralism is the circulation of kin groups within a landscape, where movement is structured at least in part by the repeated return to places of social and ritual significance. Cultural anthropologists describe these as practices of "belonging made by moving," where notions of lineal descent, home, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carrie Heitman.

This is an abstract from the "Kin, Clan, and House: Social Relatedness in the Archaeology of North American Societies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In recent years, a growing number of archaeologists have explored the potential of expanding Lévi-Strauss’s concept of "house societies" to better understand local as well as regional development sequences. In this paper, I draw on the work of cultural anthropologists as well as archaeologists to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gerad Smith.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study compares the remains of two prehistoric houses to those of the protohistoric past. Each housepit represents a different archaeological tradition, dating roughly to 1,000 and 2,000 years ago. If house features represent a stable material culture correlate reflecting a culture's core concept of the family unit, the comparison allows us a viewpoint of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Molly Corr.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Starvation and malnutrition have ravaged societies for thousands of years, but the effort to leverage food insecurity has existed just as long. When faced with hunger, humans adapt and respond to the best of their abilities, which may look different according to the resources and options available to them at the time. Maya subsistence literature has a long...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Traci Ardren.

Domestic gardens are a well-established aspect of Classic Maya residential settlement, and they are rightly considered important components of food security and even food sovereignty strategies utilized by the ninety-nine percent. Taking inspiration from the emerging field of human-plant studies, I argue daily interactions with household garden plants exerted a profound influence on not only the daily habits of ancient Maya populations, but also on their memories and sense of social identity. ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Currie. Diego Quiroga.

In January 2017, members of the indigenous Salasaca community of the central sierra region of Ecuador discovered a cache of pre-Colombian pottery during ditch construction work which passed through a site of ritual significance. The government organisation responsible for managing antiquities removed the artefacts, promising that archaeological investigations would be carried out in due course. They never were. The cache of artefacts was a strange mixture of authentic ceramic figurines and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Helina Woldekiros.

Caravans form an important component of ancient trade routes world-wide. They were lifelines to settlements and connected diverse landscapes. They also encouraged complex transport networks. Our understanding of ancient ways of life along these trade routes is, however, hampered by an incomplete picture of the participants or caravaners themselves. This study uses quantitative and qualitative data from ethnoarchaeological and archaeological research on the Afar salt caravan route in northern...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aaron Armstrong. Martha Tappen.

Archaeological analyses of faunal remains frequently rely on observations derived from ethnoarchaeological studies to identify bone surface modifications that were the result of animal capture, butchery, and consumption by humans. In addition to the accurate identification of human-derived modifications, ethnoarchaeological studies in which carcass processing and consumption were observed and documented can provide a more precise means to recognizing specific human behavioral choices, such as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only S. Margaret Spivey-Faulkner.

The typology is one of the archaeologist's oldest analytical tools and it pervades nearly every facet of archaeological research, whether explicitly or implicitly. Using theories of practice, ethnographic evidence of Native American classification systems, and an interdisciplinary understanding of human perception and pattern recognition, this work attempts to deconstruct and reconstruct the typology as a tool of archaeological analysis, with an eye toward creating a newly theorized typology to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Olanrewaju Lasisi.

This is an abstract from the "Essential Contributions from African to Global Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since the discoveries of the astronomical orientation of Stonehenge in the 1960s, several scholarships have employed skyscape archaeology to answer questions about state formation and consolidation of complex societies. The majority of these works have focused outside Africa, particularly on cultures in Latin America, China,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erik Stanley.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper examines indigenous understandings of the archaeological record through the case study of the Mopan Maya of Belize. Among many traditional Mopan Maya, classic era artifacts such as potsherds and stone points are often attributed to the Cheil or "those of the forest." Mopan believe that the Cheil are magical anthropomorphic beings descended from the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christina Bisulca. Marilen Pool. Nancy Odegaard.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The mesquite tree (Prosopis spp.), endemic to the desert regions of the American Southwest, has been utilized by indigenous peoples for centuries. The anthropological literature often cites the use of the mesquite gum in the material culture of the O’odham as a paint, adhesive and dye, and also notes its medicinal applications. Most described is the use of...