Coastal and Island Archaeology (Other Keyword)
1-25 (87 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Forty-six newly documented anthropogenic shell works, stretching along 1.5 km of a paleoshoreline in the intertidal zone of southwestern Puerto Rico constitute a precontact landscape (a shellscape, if you will) without parallel on the island. Besides evidencing subsistence practices, these monumental features speak to the culturally mediated adaptive...
All along the Watchtower: A Spatial Analysis of the Defensive Network of Coastal Towers in Early Modern Sicily (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sicily holds a strategic position between the eastern and western Mediterranean. Fortified coastal towers have served as a component of coastal defenses since the establishment of the earliest Greek colonies on the island. During the Late Medieval period (fourteenth–sixteenth centuries), fortified coastal towers took on an intensified role as the Spanish...
AMS Radiocarbon Dates Establish Ballcourt Site Chronologies for Toita and Llanos Tuna in Precolonial Puerto Rico (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study addresses the relative paucity of dated archaeological sites in Puerto Rico and expands the islands’ existing database of radiocarbon dates. Our project focuses on developing AMS radiocarbon chronologies from two ballcourt sites: Toita, located in central eastern Puerto Rico, and Llanos Tuna, located in southwestern Puerto Rico. Current...
Analysis with Lidar of Coastal Environments on Pohnpei (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Ancient Seashore Sites and Environments in Geoarchaeology" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. An airborne lidar data set collected over most of the island, and the entire coast, of Pohnpei, in the Federated States of Micronesia, allows for the development of a variety of digital models of the surveyed area. These models include digital terrain models (DTMs), which represent the surface of the ground without vegetation....
Analyzing an Historic-Era Refuse Deposit at Crystal Cove State Park, Orange County, California (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the last 100 years the coastal landscape now designated as Crystal Cove State Park has seen overlapping usage by various communities. These include the Hollywood campers of the 1920s, the Japanese and Japanese-American farming communities of the 1930s, the abrupt takeover of the Coast Guard in the 1940s, and the more recent visitors and state park...
“…Any man who pits his intelligence against a fish…”: What a diverse set of fishing tools and strategies tells us about the Earliest Known fishing communities of Baja California. (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Fishing Technologies: Exploring Manufacturing Techniques and Styles, Traditions, Exchange, Migration and More" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The recovery of several dozen single-piece shell fishhooks, fishing weights, indirect evidence for the use of small-gauge nets and harpoons from Terminal Pleistocene/Early Holocene contexts on Isla Cedros Baja California provides the earliest definitive evidence for a fully...
The appearance of bifacial technology in the Middle Stone Age of Bizmoune Cave, Morocco (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Early human adaptation on the African coasts: Comparing northwest Morocco and the Cape of South Africa" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. <html> The Middle Stone Age Aterian of North Africa shows a high level of continuity in artifact forms and modes of reduction. This continuity probably reflects stable environments in near-coastal parts of North Africa, combined with the notable adaptability of Homo sapiens. However,...
Applying Late Pleistocene Archaeological Discovery Models in Southern Alaska: Shorelines, Paleoenvironments, and Predictions from Hinchinbrook Island, Prince William Sound (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The origins of the First Americans have been debated by archaeologists for decades. As increasing evidence emerges supporting the Coastal Migration Theory, greater interest has been directed at the sparse and enigmatic Late Glacial archaeological record of the Northwest Coast. Recent discoveries have demonstrated that, contrary to long-held belief, the...
Archival Processing and Rehabilitation of Extant Archaeological Collections from the Georgia Coast (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The UGA Laboratory of Archaeology is on year three of an NPS Saving America’s Treasures grant to rehabilitate archaeological material and associated documentation and media collected within Georgia’s five coastal counties. This includes over 1,500 boxes from more than 300 cultural sites, over 50 different investigations and represents in some cases, the...
Assessing the intensity of coastal resource use by micromorphological analyses (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Early human adaptation on the African coasts: Comparing northwest Morocco and the Cape of South Africa" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Micromorphology has become a vital part of the toolkit for site formation process analyses in any archaeological context. The technique has been little applied in coastal settings, with most of the work focusing on shell-matrix sites in a few coastal areas of the world. In such...
Beyond the Shell Ring: Examining the Impact of Sea Level Change during the Late Archaic/Early Woodland transition on Creighton Island, GA, U.S.A. (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Ancient Seashore Sites and Environments in Geoarchaeology" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Shell rings appear along the coast of the Southeastern U.S. during the Late Archaic period (3000—1000 cal B.C.). These circular depositions of marine shell were abandoned as a result of fluctuating sea levels before the start of the Woodland period, around 1000 cal B.C. This research looks to the landscape surrounding the...
Bioarchaeological Analysis of Fragmentary Burials from the Site of Julcuy, a Late Archaic Site in Coastal Ecuador (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study presents the analysis of two fragmentary, poorly preserved burials — one adult male and one adolescent — discovered at the site of Julcuy in coastal Ecuador. These burials are tentatively dated to the Late Archaic, a period with very little osteological evidence resulting from the hostile burial environment. Due to the poor preservation,...
Bioarchaeology of the Coastal Maya (2025)
This is an abstract from the "The Maritime Maya: Current Archaeology of Coastal Yucatan, Mexico, and Belize" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper reviews previously published skeletal studies from coastal sites in Mexico and Belize, focusing on diet, health, population structure, and preliminary genetic data. Bioarchaeological research in these regions has provided unique insights into the biocultural adaptations of the Maya to coastal...
The Camera and the Trowel: Two Approaches to Tool-Using Primates (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Primate archaeology is a burgeoning area of inquiry that sheds light on the technological aspects of primate behavior and its implications for human evolution. However, primate archaeology also offers opportunities for the validation of archaeological proxies through actualistic study. Among living primates, behavior and site formation can be observed...
City of Miami’s Historic Preservation Challenges: Sea-Level Rise and Coastal Real Estate Trends (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The inevitable rise in sea level has drawn the City of Miami into the focus of many studies aimed at understanding future impacts on coastal cityscapes. Local archaeological organizations and professionals are interested in understanding the impact that climate change will eventually have on the region’s archaeological landscape. Miami’s most incredible...
Clarifying Coral Harvesting for Historical Swahili Monuments (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Swahili architecture is well known for its grand structures, often constructed using carved, live-harvested coral. Research has been sparse on the practices of coral harvesting despite coral’s importance for the medieval Swahili and for reef ecosystems. To clarify the potential impacts of coral harvesting, the authors collected survey data on the amount...
Clay from the Coast: Petrographic Investigations of Xiajiaoshan's Coastal Hunter-Gatherer Pottery Production in Southern China (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite extensive research on ceramic production in agricultural societies, ceramic traditions of coastal hunter-fisher-gatherer groups in southern China have been comparatively overlooked. The middle Neolithic site Xiajiaoshan, said to belong to the Xiantouling Culture (dated to 7,000 BP), excavated in recent years has yielded abundant intact pottery...
Coastal Foraging at a Shifting Shore: Assessing Late MIS 3 Coastal Resource Use at Knysna Eastern Heads Cave 1 on the South Coast of South Africa (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Early human adaptation on the African coasts: Comparing northwest Morocco and the Cape of South Africa" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The early MSA coastal forager record of the African southern coast includes considerable variation in foraging strategies. The earliest sites show evidence of systematic use of coastal resources as part of a broader foraging strategy. True shell middens appear slightly later and...
Coastal Pottery Exchange in Belize, the Maya World, and Beyond (2025)
This is an abstract from the "The Maritime Maya: Current Archaeology of Coastal Yucatan, Mexico, and Belize" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Along with chronology, one of the key goals of ancient Maya pottery analysis is to better understand trade and stylistic interaction among people in various parts of the Maya world and beyond. In this paper I review how some of the styles and types of pottery that are evidence for coastal trade in Maya...
Colonial Period Occupations and Historical Archaeology on Barbuda (2024)
This is an abstract from the "At the Frontier of Big Climate, Disaster Capitalism, and Endangered Cultural Heritage in Barbuda, Lesser Antilles" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A variety of colonial period structures are scattered across the island of Barbuda. Spanning the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, they include wells, lime kilns, a Martello Tower, as well as the remains of a dozen buildings at the Highland House site, amongst others....
A Comparative Study of Oyster Harvesting Practices from Domestic and Non-domestic Shell Middens on Ossabaw Island, Georgia, USA (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since arriving on Ossabaw Island ca. 5,000 years ago, Guale communities have intricately engaged with their natural environment, creating a diverse array of subsistence practices reflected in the archaeological record, most visibly the consumption and disposal of large quantities of eastern oyster (Crassostrea virginica). Guale people living at the town...
Comparing Northern and Southern African Coastal Adaptations Through Faunal Remains (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Early human adaptation on the African coasts: Comparing northwest Morocco and the Cape of South Africa" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Decades of zooarchaeological research on faunas from coastal sites along the Cape of South Africa have documented human subsistence patterns during the Pleistocene Middle Stone Age (MSA) and the subsequent Terminal Pleistocene and Holocene Later Stone Age (LSA). MSA humans regularly...
Continuity and Change from the Classic to Late Postclassic: Perspectives from Placencia Lagoon, Belize (2025)
This is an abstract from the "The Maritime Maya: Current Archaeology of Coastal Yucatan, Mexico, and Belize" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The coastal area of Placencia Lagoon, Belize has long served as a vital economic resource. During the Late Classic period, the ancient Maya utilized the hyper-saline brackish water of the lagoon to produce salt, which was essential for their diet. The salt producers likely resided on Placencia Cay, trading...
Cranial Modification in Coastal Peru at the Site of CuzCuz, Huarmey Valley, Peru (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cultural cranial modification is practiced in many cultures and has been interpreted to signify different facets of identity. In 2022, a surface collection from Sector A of the pre-Hispanic cemetery of CuzCuz revealed 12 complete adult crania with cultural cranial modification. These crania were discovered out of context—looted from their original...
Deka-In-Nin: A Pandanus Pounder from Kwajalein Atoll, RMI (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological monitoring of environmental remediation at U.S. Army Garrison-Kwajalein Atoll/Reagan Test Site (USAG-KA/RTS) by HDR in 2018 resulted in the recovery of a coral pandanus leaf pounder (Marshallese: deka-in-nin) from Kwajalein Island in the Republic of the Marshall Islands. Historical descriptions and ethnographic accounts emphasize the...