Worldwide (Other Keyword)
151-175 (303 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Animal Matters: Ethics in Zooarchaeology from Discovery to Display" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As in other disciplines, ethics has become a central topic amongst zooarchaeologists; however, many of these conversations occur between a small handful of individuals. Here, we aim to bring together diverse zooarchaeologists in a large, communal venue to highlight the ethical considerations we face as a discipline. We...
Introduction to Session and Opening Remarks (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Collaborative and Community Archaeology" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Introduction to the Session on Collaborative and Community Archaeology - outlining the history of this decade-long SAA symposium.
Investigating Geospatial Arrangements of Stone Knapping at a Maya Lowland Site Using Random Forest Modeling (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Practice, Theory, and Ethics of Machine Learning in Archaeology" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The machine learning algorithm Random Forest has proven highly accurate in classifying archaeological soil and lithic microdebitage particles. Understanding this efficacy, this model was selected for implementation on soil samples collected from the market plaza of the Late Classic Maya site of Tzikin Tzakan. The ultimate...
Investigating the Morphology of Shod Footprints: An Experimental Approach. (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Footprints and Footwear" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeological record for ancient shoes is minimal, due to their organic composition and therefore perishable nature. Comparatively, fossil footprints have a better record of preservation. Therefore, to ascertain the longevity of footwear, the best chance of doing so is through the identification of shod footprints. Here, an experimental approach was used to...
Investigating Traditional Maya Salt Production in the Past and Present (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Exploring the Intersection of Ethnography and Technology: Understanding the Evolution of Human Technologies through Ethnographic Research" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Salt is a universally necessary nutrient that is only found in limited contexts, making it in some ways an ideal commodity for archaeological investigation into ancient economies. Unfortunately, sodium chloride is also a highly volatile compound that...
Is It Possible to Distinguish Spears, Darts, and Arrows in the Archaeological Record? (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The effort to distinguish weapon systems from scanty remains is an ongoing challenge for archaeologists. Advancements in weapon technology remains an important component of debates and theories in topics related to human evolution, human ecology, the rise of modern behavior and complex social organization. Because most elements of preindustrial weapons...
Islamization and the Construction of Landscape of Care in Early Modern Period Java, Indonesia (2025)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Care and Power" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper argues that the adoption of Islam, and specifically the practice of welfare economy generated by Islamic philanthropy (sadaqah), created a new landscape of care in Early Modern Period (15th -19th century) Java. As a nexus for the disbursement of social services, mosques represent the largest public investments made by Islamic polities. Being...
Isotopic and NAA Investigations into Globalizing Social Communities in Ancient Aksum, Ethiopia 50-800 AD (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Stable Isotope Analysis in Global History" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. <html> This talk presents stable isotope and Neutron Activation Analysis (NAA) results to examine the development of social and geo-local communities during the globalizing punctuations of ancient Aksum, Ethiopia. Aksum (50-800 AD) was the capital of a major polity well-known for its central role in the Indian Ocean trade. Aksum’s most notable...
Isotopic evidence reveals heterogeneous dietary adaptations across the high-altitude Tibetan Plateau (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Stable Isotope Analysis in Global History" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Tibetan Plateau has long prompted archaeological interest with regards to how human societies could have occupied this climatically-harsh and resource-poor environment. Full-scale permanent occupation of the interior plateau after 3500 cal BP has been variously linked to barley-based agriculture, pastoralism, or mixed agropastoralism, but...
It’s Time To Talk about Pseudoarchaeology: Impacts, Strategies, and Outcomes for Engaging with Archaeology Misinformation (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the last few decades, pseudoarchaeology has dramatically increased in popularity. While it might seem easy to laugh off and ignore, as these claims are widely divorced from the reality of our lived experience as archaeologists, the savvy tactics used by pseudoscientist influencers means that misinformation has a real cost on the field of archaeology...
Keeping People at the Center of Long-Term Knowledge Transfer (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Modelling Human Behaviour through Ethnoarchaeology: Ethnoarchaeology as Long-Term Traditional Knowledge (L-TeK)" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Past persons were agents, cognitive entities that moved and acted in the world as part of a complex network of relationships: within communities and environments; with non-human animals, materials, architecture, and landscapes. Long-Term Knowledge may be built on different...
Landscapes of Care, Landscapes of Power?: The Built and Imagined Spaces of Missionization in Ngasobil (Senegal) (2025)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Care and Power" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Mission of St. Joseph in Ngasobil (Senegal) was often framed by as a place of care—for the sick, for refugees, for children, etc. Care was deeply woven into the vocation of the religious personnel living and working in there, and as such is often easiest to consider as an element of a moral framework, in this case particularly rooted in Catholicism...
Leadership and Violence in the Small-Scale Societies of New Guinea (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Acquiring Status and Power in Transegalitarian and Chiefdom Societies" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The degree to which leaders of egalitarian and trans-egalitarian societies deployed violence to achieve and maintain their position has long been a matter of anthropological and archaeological discussion. I investigate this issue using a database of political information drawn from 148 New Guinea societies ranging...
Learning to See: Rock Art, Cave Art and Stone Landscapes in Pennsylvania (2025)
This is an abstract from the "The Value of Rock Art: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Current Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis, Part I" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Historically, rock art has been only a footnote to Pennsylvania’s below ground archaeology. As a result, more enigmatic aspects of the cultural landscape, including cave art and stone landscapes, were either overlooked, not looked for at all, or dismissed because they...
Linking Communities in Time and Space: Mound Building Practices in the Lower Mississippi Valley and Beyond (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Ritual Closure: A Global Perspective" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Beginning around 5500 BCE and continuing through today, groups throughout the American South created their communities in part through mound building. Recent large-scale reviews of data from excavations at pre-contact earthen mound sites have allowed for a number of repeated practices of construction, use, modification, and abandonment to be...
Linking Rock Art and Archaeology: A Case Study from the Southwestern Sierra Nevada Foothills (2025)
This is an abstract from the "The Value of Rock Art: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Current Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis, Part I" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Diverse rock art has been recorded at archaeological sites in Yokohl Valley, Tulare County, California. A confidential private development was proposed for the Yokohl Valley, serving as the impetus for the identification and recordation of rock art that is associated...
Linking the knowns with the knowns: articulating submerged landscapes at the mesoscale (2025)
This is an abstract from the "<html>Twenty Thousand Leagues (and Years!) under the Sea:<i> </i>Exploring the Place of Seashores in Prehistoric Socio-economic Systems</html>" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Studies of submerged landscapes tend to fall into two categories: landscape-scaled assessments or focused investigations of individual sites. This bipolar orientation isa functio n of the nature of submerged palaeolandscape studies, which face...
Living with the Cold: Ethnographic Analogies for Cold Weather Adaptation during the Upper Palaeolithic of Central and Eastern Europe (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Exploring the Intersection of Ethnography and Technology: Understanding the Evolution of Human Technologies through Ethnographic Research" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The human body is not naturally well adapted to the cold. Despite this, we have succeeded in penetrating some of the most extreme environments across the globe. In recent years, discussion of the origins of the ‘human thermal environment’ has gained...
The long road: the role and the limits of ethnoarchaeology in the study of pastoralism (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Modelling Human Behaviour through Ethnoarchaeology: Ethnoarchaeology as Long-Term Traditional Knowledge (L-TeK)" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the mid-20th century, pastoralism was largely misunderstood, particularly within the context of land degradation. Major international bodies placed the blame for widespread desertification and environmental damage in drylands on pastoral practices. This narrative dominated...
Making Machine Learning More Accessible and Useful in Archaeology: Insights from Chronology Building (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Practice, Theory, and Ethics of Machine Learning in Archaeology" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While machine learning is beginning to appear in the archaeological literature, most archaeologists remain unfamiliar with this potentially useful analytical toolkit. Over the past decade, we have been exploring machine learning as a robust way to help address a significant challenge of the archaeological record:...
Mapping Seasonal Sites: A High-Resolution Ethnoarchaeological Analysis of Material Culture and Faunal Remains in Mobile Pastoralist Campsites (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Modelling Human Behaviour through Ethnoarchaeology: Ethnoarchaeology as Long-Term Traditional Knowledge (L-TeK)" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This ethnoarchaeological study employed a high-resolution mapping strategy to investigate the distribution of artifacts and faunal remains at mobile pastoralist campsites used repeatedly in winter and summer in Mongolia. Through detailed surface surveys, we explored how...
Mapping Zoological Baselines Through Time in the Bear River Range: When Archaeology Meets Wildlife Science (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Machine-Learning Approaches to Studying Ancient Human-Environmental Interactions" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Zoological baselines are key data sets when evaluating climate issues and wildlife conservation projects. This project looks at three types of ecological surveys in the Bear River Basin. 1) A zooarchaeological survey of two cave assemblages, 2) modern camera trap data, and 3) modern museum live trapping...
A Marxist Archaeologist (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Praxis Makes Perfect: Celebrating the Academic Life and Times of Randy McGuire" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Interpretive frameworks in archaeology over the last four decades have significantly benefitted from engagements with Marxian theory. One of the chief proponents of these engagements, obviously, has been Randall McGuire. Given his prolific and widely respected scholarship about a great range of theoretical,...
Maya Blue: Unlocking the Mysteries of an Ancient Pigment (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Ceramics and Archaeological Sciences" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As one of the world’s most unusual pigments, Maya Blue consists of a nano-structured hybrid of the inorganic clay mineral palygorskite and the organic dye indigo derived from extracts from the leaves of plants in the genus Indigofera. Used from the Late Preclassic into the early colonial period, Maya Blue, among other meanings, was a symbol of...
Mending the Leaky Academic Pipeline through the Mentoring of Historically Marginalized Undergraduates in Anthropology (2025)
This is an abstract from the "From the Lab to the Field: Pioneering Approaches to Undergraduate Mentoring in Archaeology" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. At every stage along the academic pipeline, mentoring is crucial for the success of minoritized scholars. While the number of mentoring initiatives focused on graduate students and early career faculty is growing, less focus has been placed on earlier intervention - at the undergraduate level -...