Taphonomy and Site Formation (Other Keyword)
26-50 (171 Records)
This is an abstract from the "The Late Middle Paleolithic in the Western Balkans: Results from Recent Excavations at Crvena Stijena, Montenegro" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A trend in the past few decades of archaeological research is to apply different microstratigraphic techniques, which provide clues about behavioral and paleoenvironmental aspects of past societies. At Crvena Stijena (Montenegro), a Middle Paleolithic site under current...
Colonization of the Southern Tip of the World (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Patagonian Evolutionary Archaeology and Human Paleoecology: Commending the Legacy (Still in the Making) of Luis Alberto Borrero in the Interpretation of Hunter-Gatherer Studies of the Southern Cone" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the last years of the 1980s, Luis Borrero elaborated an archaeological model of the peopling of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego which still prevails. In particular, this model provides...
A Comparison of the Surface Variation of Burned and Weathered Bone (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Burned and weathered bones play an important role in understanding the taphonomy and possible behavior of an archaeological site. The processes can sometimes be difficult to distinguish from one another due to the similarities in the overall degradation of the bone. This study attempts to further develop methods of quantifying surface texture variation in...
Compositional Practice in Turbulent Times: Investigating Ritually Charged Deposits in a West African Metallurgical Workshop (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Ritual Closure: A Global Perspective" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. <html> The workshops of West African metallurgists were transformative locations where metals were forged and tools fabricated, at the same time as they were sites of problem-solving through divination, soothsaying and healing. The social and knowledge networks of skilled metallurgists often reached beyond those of fellow community members and their...
A Concealed Landscape: Historic Processes of Landscape Change at Cahokia Mounds, IL (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Geoarchaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ongoing geoarchaeological research studying the relationship between urbanism and environmental change at the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Cahokia Mounds has begun to unravel a pre-contact landscape concealed by historic land-use practices. Archaeological excavations and sediment coring conducted to understand the environmental conditions during the construction and...
Construction of Pleistocene Geochronologies in Central Africa: Luminescence Dating in Northern Malawi (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances and Debates in the Pleistocene Archaeology of Africa" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Advances in understanding the Pleistocene archaeology of Africa depend on well-dated models of human behavioral change. Portions of southern Africa with limestone caves and eastern Africa with volcanic tephra have datable materials (uranium and argon, respectively) beyond the limit of the radiocarbon clock (50ka)....
Contemporary Archaeology of the Recent Soufrière Hills Volcanic Eruptions on Montserrat (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In July of 1995, the Soufrière Hills volcano began a series of eruptions that would fundamentally alter the communities and landscapes of the small Caribbean island of Montserrat. By the turn of the millennium, two-thirds of the island had been abandoned or destroyed, and a comparable proportion of the population had relocated abroad. This paper presents the...
Controlling Inherited Biases and Analytical Procedures for the Zooarchaeologist: A Case Study from the Central Anatolian site of Kaman-Kalehӧyük (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Zooarchaeologists have tackled numerous questions to reveal human-animal interactions in time and space. In addition to depending on animals for their primary products, that is meat, and secondary products such as milk, muscle-power, and wool, humans have used animals to establish and legitimize status and power, and to represent ideologies, identities,...
Cross-Cutting Zooarchaeology: Butchery Analysis through Indigenous Methodologies (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Zooarchaeological research often relies heavily on quantitative data analyses and positivist interpretations that are statistically significant. Typically we study human and animal interactions by characterizing animal processing, butchery, and consumption, including cut mark location on the bone, shape, size, quantity, and directionality. Here in the...
Croxton Site Faunal Assemblage: Pre- and Post-Deposition Disturbance Analysis (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The pre- and post-depositional processes that impacted the faunal assemblage associated with the Ipiutak component at the Croxton site, Alaska, have not been adequately studied/documented (see Gerlach 1989). This study focuses not only on the pre- and post-depositional disturbances that may have occurred, but also on how the burial environment may have played...
Cultural, Taphonomic, and Biogeographic Considerations of Black Footed Ferret at the Burntwood Creek Bison Kill Site, Central High Plains, USA (2018)
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...
Cut Mark Size Does Not Change during Butchery: Implications for Reconstructing Tool Use and Carcass Processing (2019)
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...
Deposition, Disturbance, and Dumping: The Application of Archaeobotanical Measures to Taphonomic Questions (2018)
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...
Developing Methods of Hunter-Gatherer Archaeology in Western North America: 1983–2022 (or, from Map-O-Matics to Total Stations) (2023)
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...
Discerning Paleolithic Places Rather Than Pleistocene Palimpsests: Olival Grande and the Early Upper Paleolithic in Central Portugal (2019)
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...
Dismemberment as Postmortem Disablement: The Disparate Mortuary Sites of the Collected (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Storeroom Taphonomies: Site Formation in the Archaeological Archive" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Acknowledgment of the educational value of pathological conditions in human cadavers prompted scholars of anatomy and anthropology to partition bodily tissues of the dissected among their colleagues. This scientific network of shared body parts, for the purpose of specialized study, segregated the divisible body into...
Distinguishing Tooth Marks from Knapping Marks and Assessing Conflicting Interpretations of Modified Bones from the Upper Paleolithic Site of Gough’s Cave (Somerset, UK) (2023)
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...
The Down and Dirty: Differential Preservation of Burials from Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Cemeteries on Sint Eustatius, Dutch Caribbean (2021)
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...
Early Pleistocene Behavior and Archaeological Inference: Insights from Experiments (2021)
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,...
eep Stratigraphic Deposits: Pond Scum, Aircraft Wreckage, and Safety in Assam, India (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Fulfilling a Nation’s Promise: The Search, Recovery, and Accounting Efforts of DPAA and Its Partners" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Stratigraphy is an important part of understanding the history and land use of any archaeological site, but it is exceptionally important in understanding sites associated with US missing service personnel. Understanding the stratigraphy and pedogenic processes of a recovery site/scene...
The Effect of Postdepositional Fragmentation on Archaeological Oyster Shell Metrics (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The eastern oyster (Crassostrea virginica) is an ecological and cultural keystone species that has been exploited by humans for millennia. Oyster size is a good proxy for population health, and researchers frequently use valve height and length measurements from archaeological and paleontological contexts that provide baselines for assessing past human...
Efficiently Assessing a Large Collection of “Unidentifiable” Faunal Specimens (2023)
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...
Elephant-Hunting with D. Stanford (2018)
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...
Equus caballus during the Protohistoric: Looking for the Horse in the Archaeological Record (2019)
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...
Excavation at an Early Upper Paleolithic site of the Tarvagataiin Am, Northern Mongolia (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While early modern human dispersals occurred in Northern Eurasia around ~45–40ka ago, a cultural phenomenon often labeled as the Initial Upper Paleolithic (IUP) is identified in Central and Eastern Europe, but also in West, Central, and Northeast Asia. Despite significant progress in our understanding of the timing and routes of these population movements,...