Taphonomy and Site Formation (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kyra Johnson. Emily Sponsel. Gilliane Monnier.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caitlin Rankin.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Wright. Jeong-Heon Choi. Jessica Thompson.

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)....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Miriam Rothenberg.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicolette Edwards.

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...

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 Jennifer Muller.

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...

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 William Belcher. LuAnn Wandsnider. Ella Axelrod. Gargi Jani. Koel Mukherjee.

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...

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 Masami Izuho. Nicolas Zwyns. Katsuhiro Sano. Gunchinsuren Byambaa.

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,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only César Méndez. Amalia Nuevo-Delaunay. Catalina Contreras. María Paz Quercia. Bayron Soto.

This is an abstract from the "Expedient Technological Behavior: Global Perspectives and Future Directions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The study of toolstone procurement in Patagonia is biased in favor of high-quality exotic materials—chiefly obsidian—often transported over large distances as heavily curated artifacts. Lesser-quality sources however may be important in the technological behavior at smaller scales (e.g., basin, subregion). The...

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 José Capriles. Velia Mendoza España. Daniela Velasco Arzabe. Christophe Delaere.

This is an abstract from the "Underwater and Coastal Archaeology in Latin America" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lake Titicaca is one of the centers of early cultural development in the ancient Andes. Because of its sensitivity to climate change, the surface of the lake has fluctuated considerably over time, which in turn has influenced the development of ecological systems and cultural development. This paper focuses on the archaeofaunal remains...

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...