Taphonomy and Site Formation (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jack Hofman. Barbara Crable.

Feature 15-1 at a 9,000 year old bison kill site in Rawlins County, northwest Kansas yielded remains of black footed ferret (BFF) and numerous other species. Here we summarize cultural and taphonomic factors related to the feature’s formation and review BFF biogeography for the early Holocene period in the central Plains region. The diverse fauna from this feature and its varied modifications may reflect special cultural behavior associated with the bison kill at Burntwood Creek. Both natural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Merritt.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Animal carcass butchery occurs when technological factors (tool attributes) and butchery behavior (distinct actions like defleshing, disarticulation) intersect with animal anatomy (morphology of musculoskeletal tissues or regions), and potentially encodes information about these contexts via bone surface modifications. This study examines cut mark...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dominique Sparks-Stokes. Susan E. Allen. Alan P. Sullivan III.

This study assesses the utility of archaeobotanical measures to recognize differential site formation processes, drawing on the Bronze and Iron Age hill fort site of Zagorë, in northern Albania, as a case study. The blanket sampling strategy for collection of flotation samples applied by the Projeki Arkeologjik I Shkodres (PASH) (2010-2014) during the site’s excavation provides a complete record of archaeobotanical changes across the depth of each excavation unit. The use of small mesh sizes for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marcel Kornfeld.

This is an abstract from the "Developing Paleolithic Excavation Methods for the Twenty-First Century" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although not the Paleolithic in the classic sense of the word, prehistory of North American western Plains and Rocky Mountains is a study of stone tool–using hunter-gatherers. Excavation techniques changed radically over the past 70 years perhaps stimulated by theoretical concerns and questions. In this presentation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Thacker.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The expansive, open-air archaeological site of Olival Grande contains the earliest, well-dated Upper Paleolithic assemblage known from the Rio Maior vicinity. Fabric analysis, sedimentology, and geochemistry studies detail manifold site burial mechanisms, very slow rates of deposition, and significant post-depositional processes at the hillslope site. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Silvia Bello. Simon Parfitt.

This is an abstract from the "Animal Resources in Experimental Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Experimental and fossil-based zooarchaeological research attempts to distinguish traces on bones associated with human actions (e.g., butchery marks) from the actions of other faunal agents (e.g., bone gnawing and trampling). Fewer analyses have tried to differentiate gnawing marks from the marks left by hominin activities associated with the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kallista Karastamatis. Ashley McKeown. Courtney Siegert.

This is an abstract from the "NSF REU Site: Exploring Globalization through Archaeology 2019–2020 Session, St. Eustatius, Dutch Caribbean" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study explores the markedly different preservation of skeletal remains from two historic cemeteries situated within 500 m of each other on the Dutch Caribbean island of Sint Eustatius. The burials of eighteenth-century enslaved Africans are located along the coast and are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Braun.

This is an abstract from the "Inference in Paleoarchaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeology of human origins represents one of the key insights into what it means to be human. Despite this optimistic outlook, the archaeological record represents a dismally preserved record of untranslated objects. Archaeologists have become increasingly good at devising stories about the records of behaviors that our artifacts represent. However,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandra Derian.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Zooarchaeological Methods" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Highly fragmented assemblages are challenging for zooarchaeologists. Large numbers of morphologically unidentifiable specimens are time consuming to analyze and may yield little information relevant to project goals. Faced with an assemblage of 50,000 unidentifiable specimens from the Interior Plateau of British Columbia, I employed an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gary Haynes.

Dennis Stanford’s work at the Dutton, Selby, Lamb Spring, and Inglewood sites was a major part of his lifelong search for breakthrough evidence about North America’s earliest human encounters with mammoths. He encouraged me to study the megafaunal bones from those sites, and gave me room to disagree with him. His support allowed me to start looking into new ways to understand how the bones were modified and how such sites came to be. This presentation ties together data from those fossil sites...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cassidee A. Thornhill.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The introduction of Equus caballus (modern horse) into Native American life on the Plains during European-American contact has been associated with major cultural and ecological changes to native lifeways. The horse influenced a variety of cultural practices including the distance at which resources could be exploited, the number of material goods that could...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Heilen. Monica Murrell. Phillip Leckman. Robert Heckman.

Analysis of previous cultural resource management investigations conducted in the Permian Basin of southeastern New Mexico indicate that many data are of poor quality, unstandardized, and of limited utility for comparative purposes or regional planning. Part of the problem is the limited understanding of which methods are best suited for site recording and testing and, more specifically, how observations made at the site surface correspond to subsurface content. This poster presents an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hannah Keller. Naomi E. Cleghorn.

Knysna Eastern Heads Cave 1 (KEH-1) demonstrates an intense occupation sequence at a site overlooking the now sub-merged Agulhas Bank during multiple ocean progressions and regressions in the late Middle Stone Age and early Later Stone Age (46,000 to 18,000 Cal BP). The site contains numerous hearth features, densely stacked within the stratigraphic section, and has yielded large amounts of fauna. Here we report for the first time on the preliminary taphonomic analysis of the fauna, based on a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacqueline Meier.

During the transition to agriculture in southwest Asia, patterns of settlement site use reflect a major shift in the use of space by the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period. Diverse types of sites were utilized by this time, including locales primarily for ritual activities. More studies of ritual site use are needed to clarify how space was organized and used during the Neolithic Transition. This paper presents evidence of animal selection and refuse management to investigate the intensity of site...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Natalia Eguez. Carolina Mallol.

Traditionally, coprolite identification in archaeology has been limited to hyenids, the most well-preserved and recognizable fossilized faeces, although non-hyena carnivore coprolites are also present in some Pleistocene deposits displaying a wide range of morphological variation (e.g., elongate, spherical, globular, sub-cylindrical, oval, tubular). Common micromorphological characteristics of these different excrements are the appearance of an amorphous phosphatic, optically isotropic and, a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paula Ugalde. Vance Holliday. Calogero Santoro. Jay Quade.

This is an abstract from the "From Middens to Museums: Papers in Honor of Julie K. Stein" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We investigated site formation and modification of surficial and shallow Paleoindian sites (ca. 13-11 cal. ka) located in the hyperarid core of the Atacama Desert. Sites occur primarily on inactive Pleistocene to Pliocene alluvial terraces, in and beneath desert pavements, a sparsely studied context for archaeological sites. Our...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gustavo Politis. Cristian Favier Dubois. Pablo Messineo.

While most of the South American archaeological sites with extinct megamammals have produced Late Pleistocene ages (12,000 to 10,000 14C years BP), a few locations in the Pampas region have been dated well into the Early Holocene. Among these, Campo Laborde and La Moderna, two kill/scavenging and processing sites in the border of ancient swamps have provided 11 taxon dates (Megatherium americanum and Doedicurus clavicaudatus) which range between 9730 and 6550 14C years BP. Recent excavations in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Kulick. Kevin Fisher. Francesco Berna.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Geoarchaeological research conducted in 2019-2020 as part of the Kalavasos and Maroni Built Environments (KAMBE) project focused on collecting multiscalar and high-resolution geoarchaeological data from the Late Bronze Age city of Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios in south-central Cyprus. The aim of the geoarchaeological project is to determine the uses of space in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sean Stcherbinine.

This is an abstract from the "New Research into the Old Cordilleran" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Olcott sites are characteristically skewed toward lithic artifacts due to the acidic forested environment of western Washington. Site interpretations rely on several lines of evidence including landform type and age, soil formation, post-depositional processes, and vertical artifact distributions. Recent survey and excavations at three Olcott sites...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lexie Lowe.

This is an abstract from the "Current Zooarchaeology: New and Ongoing Approaches" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Within zooarchaeological discourse, a central theme concerning taphonomic studies is the observation and analysis of cut marks on faunal specimens. Of particular importance is the maintenance and consistency of methodological approaches in applying archaeological inferences to the diagnostic surface modifications on bones. Despite calls...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edgar Leal Hernandez. Jocelyn Salgado.

This is an abstract from the "Aproximaciones arqueológicas y paleontológicas en Santa Lucía, México" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. En octubre de 2019, trabajadores de la construcción del nuevo Aeropuerto Internacional Felipe Ángeles (ubicado a 50 km al norte de la Ciudad de México), realizaron el reporte del hallazgo de unos huesos poco comunes. En ese momento, arqueólogos del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, así como personal del...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Naomi Miller. Chantel White.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists periodically encounter concentrations of uncharred plant remains in standing structures. Whether excavated or never actually buried, they are a challenge for interpretation. In addition to identification, the archaeobotanical tasks include determining the agent of deposition and the source and date of the material. This paper considers how...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charles Boyd. Donna Boyd. Marta Paulson.

Often perceived as a highly specialized and peripheral subfield of archaeology, forensic archaeology contributes to our understanding of not only forensic anthropology and forensic science, but also traditional archaeological practice. Forensic archaeologists’ extensive knowledge of postmortem taphonomic effects on material objects has led to more precise interpretations of postmortem interval, environmental (including scavenger-induced) scattering and alteration of human remains, and site...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steven Holen. Kathleen Holen.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Animal bone modification by humans has long been part of the archaeological record; however, debate continues as to whether this evidence alone is sufficient to interpret human activity. This is especially true if such evidence is used in support of archaeological sites older than 16 ka in the Americas. We synthesize data representing over three decades of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gary Huckleberry.

This is an abstract from the "From Middens to Museums: Papers in Honor of Julie K. Stein" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Of Julie Stein’s many contributions to geoarchaeology, her publications regarding sedimentology and stratigraphy with respect to site formation have been particularly influential. By employing earth science methods to elucidate the history of archaeological sediments in a diversity of environments and cultural settings, her work...