Frontiers and Borderlands (Other Keyword)
101-125 (148 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Exploring Culture Contact and Diversity in Southern Peru" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Converging evidence from archaeological excavations and ethnographic research in the Peruvian Andes has demonstrated that the indigenous alcoholic beverage chicha de molle has a time depth of at least the Middle Horizon (600 CE – 1000 CE). The most impressive example of large-scale, pre-Hispanic production of chicha de molle hails...
Political Alliances and Trade Connections Seen in Ceramic Record from the Classic period: the Perspective of the Maya Site of Nakum, Guatemala (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Making and Breaking Boundaries in the Maya Lowlands: Alliance and Conflict across the Guatemala–Belize Border" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological investigations at Nakum (an important Maya site located in northeastern Guatemala) brought about the discovery of many monochrome and polychrome ceramics in many different architectural contexts. The style of ceramics supplemented in many cases by mineralogical...
The Porous Boundary: Understanding Late Postclassic Belize-Petén Interactions through Lithic Technology (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Making and Breaking Boundaries in the Maya Lowlands: Alliance and Conflict across the Guatemala–Belize Border" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Late Postclassic and Early Contact Periods (A.D. 1400-1697) of central Petén and western Belize are typically characterized by intensive interaction and migration during a time of shifting geo-political divisions. One of the divisions in Belize known as Dzuluinikob (loosely,...
The Pottery of Beef Basin and Its Cultural Implications (2018)
I present my completed thesis research hypothesizing that the chronology and culture of the prehistoric occupation in Beef Basin is reflected in ceramics and architecture. Beef Basin is located west of Monticello, Utah and south of Canyonlands National Park. Archaeologically it is located within the fluid boundary space between the Ancestral Puebloan and Fremont archaeological cultures. Although there has been a surge of recent research in the north periphery of the Ancestral Puebloan area,...
Power from the Periphery: 40 Years of Insight on the Maya Lowlands from Southeast Mesoamerica (2019)
This is an abstract from the "I Love Sherds and Parasites: A Festschrift in Honor of Pat Urban and Ed Schortman" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For more than 40 years, Pat Urban, Ed Schortman, and their student-colleagues have toiled long and hard in the blazing heat of Northwestern Honduras to understand the "non-Maya" populations resident in Southeast Mesoamerica. Their work stretches from the beginnings of complexity in the Middle Preclassic...
Provisioning an Embattled Frontier: The Role of the Inka Settlement of Pulquina Arriba within an Imperial Defensive Network in the Southeastern Bolivian Andes (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Navigating Imperialism: Negotiated Communities and Landscapes of the Inka Provinces" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In certain loosely incorporated territories of the Inka Empire, privileged non-Inka colonial populations were granted considerable autonomy and entrusted with the maintenance of local imperial settlements and infrastructure. Such was the case across much of the southeastern Bolivian Andes, in which...
Purposeful Unpatterning: Investigating Maroon Site Distribution In Colonial Florida (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the colonial era, Spanish Florida built a reputation as a refuge for self-liberated people escaping from slavery in the Carolinas and Georgia. However, following the Treaty of Paris in 1763, Florida was passed from one government to another and the Maroons’ freedom was under constant threat. Florida Maroons were constantly on the move and their...
(Re)Conquests: Creating New Societies at the Frontiers of the Medieval Western Mediterranean (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The State of the Art in Medieval European Archaeology: New Discoveries, Future Directions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper introduces the key questions of the "Landscapes of (Re)Conquest" research programme which is investigating the character of frontier societies in the medieval SW Mediterranean in the context of multiple conquests and regime changes. How did conquering authorities deal with the creation...
Reading Cultural Landscapes in Time and Space: Ostimuri in Historical Archives and Archaeological Remains (2018)
This paper discusses the historical construction of landscapes in the borderlands of northwestern Mexico, with a particular focus on the colonial Province of Ostimuri, bounded by the Yaqui, Mayo, and Fuerte rivers. In honor of Carroll Riley, the paper presents original research in historical archives, analyzed in the context of archaeological, ecological, and ethnographic literatures, to explain the formation of this space as a region and to explore both the vulnerabilities and the resilience of...
Recent Archaeological Investigations of Wiki Peak and the Beaver Creek Drainage (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of the Southern Yukon-Alaska Borderlands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The headwaters of Beaver Creek are located in the Nutzotin Mountains in northeastern Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve. Beaver Creek originates at Beaver Lake near the community of Chisana and flows east to the to the Alaska-Yukon border before heading north to join the White River. An important feature of the Beaver...
Recent Research at El Pueblo, NM (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. LA 1697 is a small site located on the Rio Pecos near the village of El Pueblo, New Mexico. Although the site was initially registered with the state’s Archaeological Records Management Section (ARMS) in 1978, no other research was conducted on the site until 2016. Over the course of several field sessions during the 2016-2017 school year, a survey and limited...
Reorganización socio-política entre lago y montañas: El sitio de Los Naranjos y la cuenca de Yojoa durante el Postclásico Temprano (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Postclassic Mesoamerica: The View from the Southern Frontier" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Durante la transición entre Clásico y Postclásico (siglos IX-XII dC), se observan notables cambios en las dinámicas de ocupación y la organización socio-política de los sitios del Noroeste de Honduras, así como en las redes de intercambio a larga distancia con la Zona Maya o la Gran Nicoya. Sin embargo, debido a las...
Reorienting Frontiers and Borderlands: Recent Research on the Usumacinta River (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Frontiers and borderlands are often conceptualized as places of precarity, where uncertainty characterizes communities outside the purview of authority. In contrast, borders evoke the presence of a reinforced authority where physical and political structures have been put in place to fortify a territory. However, these approaches often simplify or distill...
Resurrecting Kaskaskia: A GIS and Archival investigation of the Multiethnic Town of Kaskaskia, Illinois (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Colonial Archaeological Research in the American Midcontinent" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Kaskaskia, Illinois, was established in 1702 as a Jesuit mission to the Kaskaskia. Through time it expanded into a large multi-ethnic fur trading and farming community that served as the gateway for the entrance of African slaves into Illinois. By the 1750s almost half of the town’s population consisted of African...
Rethinking the Pueblo II Period in the Upper San Juan Region of the American Southwest (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Upper San Juan region of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado is an area of unique cultural developments related to, but differing from, the adjacent Chaco, Mesa Verde, and Rio Grande regions. Our knowledge of both internal developments and status of relations with external groups is poorly understood in comparison to those neighboring regions. This...
Scalar Responses to Production and Extreme Conditions in the Southern Borderlands of Aragon between AD 1248 and 1559 (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Property Regimes" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Alfonso I took Daroca, an important city in the Upper March of Al-Andalus since the ninth century, by conquest in AD 1120. He granted the city a large rural territory that evolved by AD 1248 into a new property regime called the Comunidad de Aldeas de Daroca. Four such entities emerged in the southern borderlands of Aragon independent of the control...
Situating Rancho Johnson: Landscape transitions in Baja California (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The U.S.-Mexico borderlands have been shaped by cultural exchange, binational power dynamics, and its unique ecosystems. This paper explores the political ecology of landscape transformations in northwestern Baja California in the nineteenth century at the site of Rancho Johnson, located near Punta Colonet and today a working ranch. In the nineteenth and early...
Society in Flux: Migration and Kinship during Sociopolitical Change in the Southern Lowlands (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Making and Breaking Boundaries in the Maya Lowlands: Alliance and Conflict across the Guatemala–Belize Border" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the midst of conflict and change people are instigators, bystanders, or unwilling victims of larger sociopolitical machinations. Those living in the Southern Lowlands in the prehistoric and historic periods were familiar with the results of fluctuations in the social...
The Spanish Missions of La Florida: Archaeologies and Histories of Contact, Colonization, and Resistance (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeologies of Contact, Colony, and Resistance" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The nearly 200 years of Spanish mission activity in La Florida had profound impacts on the lives of both the Native Americans and Spanish. Missions were places of new contact, culture change, cultural continuity, religious instruction, and the locations of exchange and introduction of new foods, materials, and ideas. This presentation...
Star Bridge: A Late Mississippian Village in the Central Illinois River Valley (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The late pre-Columbian period in the central Illinois River valley (CIRV) is demarcated by the development of large, oftentimes fortified Mississippian towns, farming hamlets, extensive trade networks, and shifting political alliances between AD 1050 and 1400. The fission and fusion of local polities ceased with abrupt abandonment of the CIRV by AD 1450 as...
A Study of Flexed Burials in the Central Lake Region of Yunnan: from Neolithic to Bronze Age (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Research on Early Chinese Borderland Cultures and Archaeological Materials" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The flexed burial is a distinct burial style that has prevailed in various regions of China since ancient time. Scholarly interest in flexed burials in the Central Lake region (Lake Dian and adjacent lands) of Yunnan began after discovery of a grave in 1955 during the excavation of the ancient necropolis...
Substance and Subsistence: A Use-Wear Analysis on Ground Stone from the Virgin Branch Puebloan Region (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology of the Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological investigations pertaining to the upland zone of the Virgin Branch Puebloan region—namely, the Colorado Plateaus—have historically been limited in both number and scope. Recent expeditions to various sites on the Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument, however, have helped expand the archaeological record of the...
A Tale of Two Peripheries: Recent Excavations at Fracción Mujular, Chiapas, Mexico (2018)
Fracción Mujular is a modest residential site located on the Pacific Coast of Chiapas, Mexico. Long known for the Central Mexican iconography found on its carved stelae, investigations conducted during the winter of 2017 represent the first excavations of the site. This paper presents the results of these excavations, as well as subsequent laboratory analysis. We now know that Fracción Mujular has a history that covers over one thousand years of occupation, from the Early Classic to the Late...
A Tale of Two Places in D’Hanis, TX: Combining Linguistic Anthropology and Historical Archaeology to Study Place-Making on the Texas Frontier (2018)
In this paper, I discuss an archaeological approach to place-making that incorporates elements of linguistic anthropology, drawing from narrative analysis and Bakhtin’s chronotope to analyze oral histories from a small town in southwest Texas. D’Hanis originated as an Alsatian colony on the Texas frontier, one of four settled by empresario Henry Castro in the 1840s. By the 20th century, the town had not simply transformed but moved – the railroad had caused a rupture in the settlement that...
Taming the Maya Jungle: Decauville Railroads in 19th and Early 20th Century Yucatán (2018)
Starting in the nineteenth century, industries like henequen, chicle, hardwoods and sugarcane required the installation of narrow-gauge railroads across the Yucatán Peninsula. Mules, horses or people pulled low and flat, four-wheeled wooden carts along these rails, which connected haciendas, ports, and remote jungle camps. These rails brought supplies from "civilization" or commodities out of the forest for distribution. This paper will explore the role that railroads played during this period....