Taphonomy and Site Formation (Other Keyword)
51-75 (146 Records)
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...
The Geoarchaeology of Megamammal Survival in the Argentine Pampas (2018)
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...
Geoarchaeology of Terraces and Building XVI at Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios, Cyprus: Evidence for Site Formation and Settlement Activity (2021)
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...
Geoarchaeology of Three Olcott Sites along the Elwha River, Clallam County, Washington (2019)
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...
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and the Analysis of Cut Marks for Archaeological Faunal Collections (2021)
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...
Hallazgos paleontológicos dentro de la construcción del nuevo Aeropuerto Internacional Felipe Ángeles (2021)
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...
Historical Palimpsests: Animal-Accumulated Plant Remains in Aboveground Structures (2023)
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...
How Experimental Research in Forensic Archaeology Informs Archaeological Practice: Differentiating Perimortem Fracture From Postmortem Breakage (2018)
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...
Human Body Parts from the Monumental Special Buildings at Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN) Göbekli Tepe, Southeast Türkiye (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Embodied Essence: Anthropological, Historical, and Archaeological Perspectives on the Use of Body Parts and Bodily Substances in Religious Beliefs and Practices" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In recent years, the Pre-Pottery Neolithic (ca. 9500–8000 BC) site of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey has seen the emergence of some major hypotheses based on results from ongoing fieldwork. Perhaps the most significant new insight...
Human Induced Percussion Technology: A Synthesis of Bone Modification as Archaeological Evidence (2023)
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...
Identifying Depositional Processes: Statistical Cluster Analysis at Sacred Ridge (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Continued Advances in Method and Theory for Commingled Remains" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Site of Sacred Ridge has the earliest identified Extreme Processing assemblage in the four corners region, with over 14,000 fragments of human bone (representing at least 33 individuals) deposited in two pit structures around AD 810. During excavation, over 9,000 point locations were taken with a total station. During...
Impact Notches on Megafaunal Limb Bones: Hammerstone Versus Carnivore Tooth Notch Shapes on Samples of Experimental, Paleontological, and Archaeological Bones (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Impact notches on megafaunal limb bones can be diagnostic of marrow extraction and tool blank production behavior by hominins. Notch shape statistics have been applied to impact-fractured megafaunal limb bones from Old World Paleolithic sites to demonstrate hominin technology that begins 2.6 mya in Africa. We compare data from experimental cow femora...
The Importance of Sediment: A Selection of Julie Stein’s Contributions to Geoarchaeology (2019)
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...
Improving Zooarchaeological Methods for Classifying Fragmented Faunal Remains Using Differential Geometric Methods and Machine Learning (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Accurately identifying bone fragments and the agents that broke them is essential to site reconstruction and improving our understanding of human evolution and behavior. Here we implement geometric invariants and machine learning on digital 3D models of experimentally derived bone fragments to classify them by breakage agent. We characterize the surface with...
Interpreting a Mid-Eighteenth-Century Vertebrate Assemblage from a Probable Comanche Site on the Southern High Plains of Texas (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Whiskey Flats is a mid-eighteenth-century probable Comanche site on the Southern High Plains in Midland County, Texas. Ongoing excavation in Mustang Draw of the now dry Mustang Pond uncovered evidence of occupation along a terrace and a bone bed within the pond basin. A modern bison periotic from the bone bed dates to the mid-1700s. Artifacts from both areas...
Intrusive Taxa Identified in the Re-excavation of Room 28 in Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon (2018)
Archaeological sites are attractive places for burrowing rodents, but determining which specimens are intrusive can be a challenge. The fauna from the 2013 re-excavation of Room 28, due to its complex depositional history and rich rodent assemblage, provides an opportunity to explore different methods of identifying intrusive rodents in archaeological sites. In this paper, we use four lines of evidence to identify intrusive remains from human subsistence activity: 1) frequency of surface...
Investigating the Formation History of Surface Archaeology in the Doring River Valley, South Africa (2021)
This is an abstract from the "From Veld to Coast: Diverse Landscape Use by Hunter-Gatherers in Southern Africa from the Late Pleistocene to the Holocene" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Southern Africa’s Late Pleistocene archaeology is pursued through the lens of rockshelter deposits. However, their spatial coverage is small and geographically biased, distorting our understanding of human behavioral evolution. To overcome this, researchers are...
Investigating the Impact of a Recent Wildfire on Tortoises at Cape Point, South Africa: Implications for Our Understanding of Ancient Pyrotechnology and Its Uses (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Animal Resources in Experimental Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists commonly interpret burnt materials at archaeological sites as relicts of human fire use activities, but processes other than human fire use may create burnt materials. Here, we examine if wildfires would leave specific heating signatures regarding the temperature or heating pattern on the skeleton that would be different from...
Is the Wenas Creek Mammoth Site Anthropogenic? (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Wenas Creek Mammoth Site was excavated 2005-2010 near Selah, Washington, USA, yielding bones of mammoth and bison dating ~17 ka, and two lithics resembling chipped stone debitage. Prior publications have reported on some aspects of the project and this poster summarizes those as well as subsequent analyses. The bones were disarticulated and scattered...
It’s the Faunal Countdown! Analysis of Faunal Remains from the 2017 Excavations at the Ryan-Harley Site, Wacissa River, Florida (2019)
This is an abstract from the "First Floridians to La Florida: Recent FSU Investigations" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2017, the Florida State University underwater field school conducted excavations of the middle-Paleoindian Ryan-Harley site (8JE1004) in the Wacissa River in northwest Florida. These excavations recovered significant faunal remains from three one-meter units in association with lithic artifacts, potentially representing a...
Kind of a Pig Deal: The Taphonomic Effects of Chemically Enhanced Fertilizer on Adult Pig Bones (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pig bones have historically been used as a proxy for human skeletal remains because of the similarities in cell structure and soft tissue texture. Using pig elements, and continuing the work of previously completed research on the taphonomic effects of fertilizer on faunal bone conducted by the Northern Arizona University Faunal Analysis Laboratory...
"Left for the Tide to Take Back": Specialized Taphonomic Mechanisms at Play in a Coastal Maine Seal Hunting Camp (2018)
Archaeological investigations at Holmes Point West (Maine site 62-8) on the eastern Maine coast have yielded potential indicators of cultural treatment of seal remains that vary between two primary species: harbor seal (Phoca vitulina) and gray seal (Halichoerus grypus). Analyses of these patterns required development of element-specific speciation factors for best represented elements for each species, the temporal bone of the skull, including the auditory bulla and mastoid process. Holmes...
Let's Cut to the Chase: An Analysis of Experimental and Archaeological Data in the Process of Butchery (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research identifies where taphonomic effects, specifically cut marks are found on zooarchaeological materials from both the archaeological and experimental contexts. Analysis of such taphonomic effects include identification of similar patterning, placement of those marks between the archaeological record, and experimental research. This allows...
Looters Can’t Steal Everything: Salvage Archaeology at the San Giuliano Necropolis (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Etruscan Centralization to Medieval Marginalization: Shifts in Settlement and Mortuary Traditions at San Giuliano, Italy" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Etruscan cemetery around the San Giuliano Plateau has been looted extensively, but salvage excavations of several emptied tombs have yielded results that increase our understanding of the funerary landscape. In the 2018 and 2019 field seasons, two vertically...
Low and Slow: Landscape Taphonomy of High-Altitude Landscapes within the Southern Rocky Mountains of Colorado (2023)
This is an abstract from the "A Tribute to the Contributions of Lawrence C. Todd to World Prehistory" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past 10 years, survey crews from CSU’s Center for Mountain and Plains Archaeology examined the alpine ecosystem of the Colorado Front Range, recording a variety of sites such as game drives, lithic and ceramic scatters, and ice patches within Rocky Mountain National Park and adjacent wilderness areas. We...