Ethnography/Ethnoarchaeology (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Zeanah. Robert Elston.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A recent reinterpretation of global ethnography challenges the "men hunt, women gather" stereotype, finding cross-cultural evidence that women regularly hunted in foraging societies. Another study finds bioarchaeological evidence of women's role in hunting large game during the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition in the Americas. Although provocative, these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Johnson.

This is an abstract from the "Supernatural Gamekeepers and Animal Masters: A Cross-Cultural Perspective" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Native peoples along the Pacific Coast of North America exploited stranded whales that washed ashore, providing abundant meat and oil for consumption. Many rock art sites along the coast between Alaska and Acapulco contain images of whales and other cetaceans, and portable effigies also depict these marine...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine VanPool. Gavin Easley.

This is an abstract from the "Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Altered states of consciousness (ASC) is a defining characteristic of shamanism. ASC, however, is not unique to shamans nor is it a single neurological/physiological phenomenon. Mystics and mediums also use ASC, and mediums are even “possessed” to greater or lesser degrees. In contrast, most shamans go on soul flights during “ecstatic” trances....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carolyn Dillian. Katie Stringer Clary. Cheryl Cail. Harold Hatcher.

This is an abstract from the "Entangled Legacies: Human, Forest, and Tree Dynamics" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Waccamaw Indian People (WIP) are a close-knit community that shares knowledge of the relationships, culture, and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) of their ancestors. Working collaboratively, we have created an outdoor exhibit and interpretive trail that embraces TEK as a means for the public to learn about Indigenous...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zach Chase.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite insights from recent archaeologies of the senses, notions persist in the human and social sciences of vision as the invariant individual’s passive reception of a phenomenally “given” world, while cognitivists posit a universal “visual grammar.” In contrast, this paper asks how archaeology might draw on and contribute to the understanding that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelly Morgan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The complex set of interrelated stone circles on the northern Great Plains and where literally hundreds of thousands of stone circles exist as marks on the ground left by those who came before us and our direct ancestors are a trifecta of multi-component, multi-generational, multi-nation site complexes. These stone circles arise in singular patterns and large...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Felicia Fricke.

Qualitative data are often overlooked in archaeological research in favour of quantitative data which can provide statistical results. However, there are many contexts where qualitative data (such as oral historical accounts) can provide valuable information on meaning and personal significance. This is beneficial in projects addressing topics such as inequality and colonialism. The author therefore presents qualitative data from her doctoral thesis in order to demonstrate the importance of this...

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

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Maya archaeology has always relied on the labor and expertise of field technicians hired from heritage communities across the modern nations of Guatemala, Mexico, Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador. Some of these communities, like Dolores, Guatemala, have been continuously engaged with archaeological projects for several decades, granting its members...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Huffman. Frank Lee Earley.

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. Abstract rock art formed part of a pilgrimage trail that led from the lower Apishapa Canyon to the Spanish Peaks near Trinidad, Colorado. Hunter/gatherer ethnography from the Great Basin makes sense of abstract engravings in the canyon at sites such as Cramer, Canterbury, and Snake Blakeslee. The Apishapa Canyon leads from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alison Brooks. John Yellen.

While interest in the role of social learning in the Paleolithic has focused extensively on stone artifacts, very little attention has been paid to social learning in living forager populations. In this paper we report on many years of fieldwork among the Jun/wasi of northwestern Botswana and Namibia. We argue that most cultural transmission in relation to domains such as technology, language and food acquisition was informal, and was acquired in the context of close daily relationships between...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Roscoe.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. An important theory for the origins of war defines it as lethal retaliatory action based on a structural principle of social substitutability, a principle that any member of the targeted group can be killed to avenge the actions of any one of its members. Prior to the Holocene, according to the theory, this principle (and hence war) did not exist. Lethal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jon Daehnke.

Over the course of the last two decades I have been actively involved in anthropological research along the Lower Columbia River. This includes archaeological field work conducted within and just outside of the boundaries of the Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge in Washington, as well as a heritage ethnography completed in collaboration with the Chinook Indian Nation. This research has happened on both federal and private lands and has involved multiple "stakeholders," including both federally...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lori Khatchadourian.

To borrow Yuri Slezkine’s formulation, "the Soviet Union was an empire—in the sense of being very big, bad, asymmetrical, hierarchical, heterogeneous, and doomed". In this it differed little from the early empires that have long held archaeology’s attention. But unlike its precursors, the U.S.S.R. was guided by a political ideology premised vigorously on the relationship between humans and things—between labor, the non-human inputs of production, and property. Imperial sovereignty rested on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caylee Dzurka.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Relationships form the foundation of every community archaeology project. By establishing relationships with communities whose cultural heritage is intertwined with the archaeological record, archaeologists not only ensure that their work is meaningful to all connected parties but also adhere to the ethical principles of accountability and public outreach...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claudia Chang.

This is an abstract from the "Empirical Approaches to Mobile Pastoralist Households" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Iron Age agropastoralists of the Talgar region built a variety of houses including rectangular double-walled mud-walled houses, semi-subterranean pit houses, mud brick platforms, and central circular rooms with multiple plastered floors. In earlier periods of prehistory the description of transition from mobile to sedentary...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kenneth Tankersley.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although δ13C values obtained on Soil Organic Matter (SOM) from archaeological sites have been used as isotopic fingerprints for the identification of ancient maize agricultural fields and the evaluation of the scale of maize production, determining the quantity and rate of 13C enrichment through time largely has been ignored. The focus of this study is to use...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ron Adams.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Stone remains a prominent feature of the natural and cultural landscape of Tana Toraja, Indonesia, where outcropping basalt and limestone karst formations create a dramatic backdrop. In this context, the manipulation of stone is an important aspect of ancient cultural traditions that persist to the present day, but which has received relatively little...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ronald Faulseit.

This is an abstract from the "Checking the Pulse II: Current Research in Oaxaca Part 2" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During archaeological excavations I directed on the lands of San Mateo Macuilxóchitl in Oaxaca México, members of the community shared several narratives with me about the mountains surrounding their village. These stories intertwined myth and history to convey the special connection between the people and place. In this paper, I...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Curteman. Briece Edwards. Jon Krier.

The significance of cultural resources along Oregon’s dynamic coast continues to have a stronger presence and recognition in landscape management. As future projects look to develop off Oregon’s coast, there is a need for predictive modeling and analysis of cultural resources in a landscape that today is submerged. Paleolandscapes having high potential for a variety of cultural resources are identified using isostatic rebound adjustments and bathometric data. One such landform is off-shore of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Walter Dodd.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sixteen years of ethnoarchaeological observation and collection has resulted in the creation of a massive data set relating to ongoing drug sales in an urban context. Hundreds of thousands of “trash” items have been gathered for study. They display strong repetitive patterning in their content and testify to the organized complexity of everyday dealing. A...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Coline Lemaitre. Claire Alix.

This is an abstract from the "The Global “Impact” of Projectile Technologies: Updating Methods and Regional Overviews of the Invention and Transmission of the Spear-Thrower and the Bow and Arrow" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Around AD 600, cultural dynamics and a technology shift emerge among coastal Alaska Neo-Inuit people. Archaeological sites show evidence of the adoption, in a unique and innovative way, of a recurved or reflex bow of highly...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hitoshi Yamada.

This is an abstract from the "Supernatural Gamekeepers and Animal Masters: A Cross-Cultural Perspective" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Supernatural gamekeepers of the Ainu appear in yukar divine songs. Mainly as master of deer (yuk kor kamuy) or master of salmon (cep kor kamuy), they have controlled the main suppliers of animal protein. On the one hand, they were believed to keep the animals in a storehouse or a bag, or to multiply them from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carla Jaimes Betancourt.

This is an abstract from the "Andean and Amazonian Ceramics: Advances in Technological Studies" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ethnic and linguistic diversity of the southwestern Amazon is one of the greatest in the world. This diversity is reflected in settlement patterns, types of monuments, spatial planning and use, cultivation techniques, and also in ceramic production. From AD 400 to the present, numerous ethnic groups of the Llanos de...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samantha Fladd. Saul Hedquist. E. Charles Adams. Stewart B. Koyiyumptewa.

Ash provides a ritually meaningful medium through which to alter or close spaces. In the U.S. Southwest, the patterned deposition of ash in archaeological contexts has been linked to practices of purification and the preservation or suppression of social memory. Turquoise also carries important symbolic meanings in the region, with notable links to moisture, sky, and personal and familial vitality. In archaeological contexts of the Pueblo Southwest, turquoise is often associated with ash or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Chamberlin.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper considers whether processes of symbolic conflict propel change in the spatiality of social groups from ethnographic and archaeological vantage points, particularly with respect to the mobility of agents positioned differently within and at the edges of nascent communities such as small villages. Of special interest is the interaction between...