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This is an abstract from the "New approaches to the intractable problem of dating rock art" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. <html> Over the past ten years, extensive characterization of San rock art has been conducted, leading to the identification of a wide range of coloring materials. The black paintings are composed of four classes of carbon-based materials: soot, charcoal, carbon black, and burnt bones, providing a potential avenue for...
The Complex Politics of Political Complexity, an Andean Example (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Cooperative and Noncooperative Transitions in the Archaeological Record" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In recent years, archaeologists have noted an oscillation between more pluralistic and more autocratic forms of governance in the same societies. This paper argues that our understanding of these transitions has been hampered by oversimplified models of political complexity. Decision-making today is often...
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...
Contact, Colonists, and Common Pool Resources: Insights from SIA of Terrestrial Fauna from North Carolina Coast and Interior in the Little Ice Age (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. In recent years, human skeletons have become less accessible to bioarchaeologists aiming to understand past lifeways through destructive chemical analyses—despite these methods being more affordable, accessible, and well-established than ever in the biological, social, and life sciences. Human skeletons provide the most direct evidence of how...
Contemporary Pueblo Perspectives on Ancestral Jewelry Production: Views from Santo Domingo/Kewa and Zuni/A:shiwi Pueblos (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. With the goal of understanding the deep history of jewelry making in the US Southwest, we are working collaboratively with Indigenous artists from Santo Domingo and Zuni Pueblos. This project involves three phases: 1) collections review of over 500...
Contextualising Great Basin Rock Art: dating symbolic behavior in a changing landscape (2025)
This is an abstract from the "New approaches to the intractable problem of dating rock art" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Volcanic Tableland in the Great Basin houses a rock art province with a wide array of archaeological sites created by First Nations peoples since the Late Pleistocene/Holocene transition. I look at how people in the past situated themselves in the landscape and structured their occupation patterns in the changing...
Council Houses and Shifts Toward Cooperative Political Governance in the Terminal Classic Maya Lowlands (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Cooperative and Noncooperative Transitions in the Archaeological Record" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Governance during the Classic period in the Maya Lowlands was heavily based on the institutions and relationships surrounding divine kingship, which was characterized by paramount rulers and their hierarchical relations with other political officials and the populace. This paper examines changes to this governing...
Cranial Bowls, Broken Bones, and Precious Bodies: The Presence of Teotihuacan at Tikal (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Landscapes of Death: Placemaking and Postmortem Agencies" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For decades, scholars have recognized ties between the Central Mexican metropolis of Teotihuacan and the Maya city of Tikal, particularly in the wake of a poorly understood event in AD 378. At Tikal, the strongest evidence for that connection comes from the southern edge of the site center, within a precinct centered around an...
Creatures of Care: Assembling Livestock Worlds within Archaeofaunal Datasets (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 builds on the work of Duclos and Criado to dive into the speculative potential of a framework of care by considering how archaeological worlds are constructed through multispecies relationships in diverse and multiple ways. Speculating about care requires acknowledging relationalities across categories. This has significant implications for...
Cultivating Inclusivity: Mentorship, Diversity and Career Development in Archaeology (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. This presentation explores the intersection of mentorship, diversity and career development in archaeology, drawing on my experiences as a non-traditional PhD student, graduate director and undergraduate mentor in UCLA’s Archaeology Mentorship Program (AMP), as well as my role as the upcoming...
Cultural Identity and Ceramic Practice in Northern Togo, West Africa (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Ceramics and Archaeological Sciences" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. <html> Togo, West Africa, is a unique cultural landscape with a diversity of groups making and utilizing pottery. This is particularly true for the Bassar area of northern Togo where four groups interact, the Lamba, the Kotokoli, the Konkomba, and the Kabiye. Several villages continue to make pottery and likely made it in the past. To clarify...
Cultural Site Stewardship Programs: Why Public Involvement Is Critical to the Long-Term Preservation of Heritage (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Collaborative and Community Archaeology" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Utah Cultural Site Stewardship Program (UCSS) will discuss the State of Utah’s effort to develop a united front when it comes to the safeguarding of cultural resources statewide. The UCSS Program was legislated into state code in 2020 and has rapidly become the largest public cultural site stewardship program in the nation, with over 400...
Curation at his 50th, reinterpreted- a suggested novel technological quantification. (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. Curation, a key concept in lithic analysis rooted in ethnography, was introduced by Binford to illustrate the adaptive strategies of hunter-gatherers and how provisional conditions influence their behavioral choices. Initially perceived as an...
Dating Rock Art – Context is everything (2025)
This is an abstract from the "New approaches to the intractable problem of dating rock art" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The developments of microscopy and in other scientific fields over the last five decades have changed the face of rock art research enabling researchers to make huge leaps and bounds in understanding early human art-making. Long term collaborations with Aboriginal communities in Australia have also allowed for continuing...
Decolonizing North American Zooarchaeology (2025)
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. Efforts to decolonize archaeology have amplified in the last few decades, as they have in other disciplines. By and large, these efforts have yet to extend robustly to zooarchaeology. In many ways, however, zooarchaeology is well-positioned to make unique contributions to the decolonial program. This is especially true,...
Deep Beneath the Surface: A Geophysical and Geomorphic Assessment of the Mary Rinn Archaeological Site (2025)
This is an abstract from the "The Future of Geoarchaeology: Student Research and Insights" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Mary Rinn archaeological site is interpreted as a village site, radiocarbon dated 850 – 1550 AD along Crooked Creek in Indiana County, Pennsylvania. However, there is nearly continuous evidence of human habitation within the Cowanshannck-Crooked Creeks watershed between 16,500 and 500 years ago, corresponding with the...
A Deep-Time Comparison Using Stable Isotope Data to Compare Gender-Based Protein Consumption (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Innovation and Population Dynamics in Drylands" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Gender differences in work, mobility, political status, and diet have long been topics of interest in demographic anthropology, archaeology, and biological anthropology. However, comparative studies of gender differences in diet and the consumption of resources over time, while standard for individual case studies, are rare. Drawing on...
Despots, optimization, and cooperative transitions in Maya society (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Cooperative and Noncooperative Transitions in the Archaeological Record" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Major evolutionary transitions in sociality are premised on the formation of cooperative groups and transformation of the collective group into an entity. Prior to the development of institutions, the kin group was the primary locus of cooperation and was limited largely by environmental and physical constraints....
Detecting the Use of Fuel with Autofluorescent Phytoliths (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Phytoliths are often found in archaeological contexts associated with cooking and burning, and where plant material has been used as fuel. Different methods have been applied to identify whether phytoliths have been fired and/or heated: morphological alterations, changes in color and opacity, refractive index, and Raman spectroscopy. None provide...
Developing an Accessible International Taphonomy Reference Collection Via a Symbiota-Based Online Data Portal (2025)
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. Fossil and modern bones and bone assemblages featuring a variety of taphonomic damage are used as comparative materials to help zooarchaeologists interpret evidence of taphonomic processes. However, current information systems used for managing and sharing museum specimen data often lack the necessary structures for...
Differentiating Chopping/Hacking Sharp Force Trauma Characteristics on Bone Following Burning of Remains (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bioarchaeologists and forensic anthropologists are often involved in the analysis and interpretation of perimortem trauma occurring to human remains with the goal of recognizing trauma characteristics that can be utilized in understanding the tool class used to inflict the trauma. Accurate interpretation of skeletal trauma also relies on the correct...
A Discussion of Animal Matters (2025)
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. A discussion of ethics in any area of archaeology requires input from a diverse array of people and perspectives. We aim to synthesize the main points from the session and allow a space for individuals to provide their experiences and insights on topics such as decolonization, best practices for specimen acquisition and...
Dispersed Iron Production in the Urban-Rural Interface of Great Zimbabwe (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Cooperative and Noncooperative Transitions in the Archaeological Record" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Great Zimbabwe, the major civilization south of the pyramids, had a vibrant metallurgical industry within the urban center, but the most significant iron production was located in the hinterland. Here, extensive clusters of natural draft furnaces—some with unique rectangular morphologies—alongside abundant tap...
Dogs in Space: An Application of Machine-Learning Geometric Morphometric Analyses for Species Determination of Large Canids Using Mandibles (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. A persistent issue in zooarchaeology is the differentiation of domesticated dogs from wolves and coyotes from fragmentary archaeological remains. This is particularly problematic in regions where size cannot be used as a factor, such as the North American northern Great Plains. This poster presents the use...
Drinking & Clubbing: Insights from Comparative Ethnology on “Invisible” Technologies (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. Human technologies have a long evolutionary history. However, most early technologies have perished over time, especially those made from organic materials. In the absence of archaeological evidence, comparative ethnology can provide valuable...