North America: Northern Southwest United States (Other Keyword)
1-25 (42 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Lidar Research in the US Southwest" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. <html> A distinctive system of terrain modification consisting of large areas of near-invisible, widely-spaced, quasi-parallel linear ridges (berms) was first identified by Hurst and Willian in 2014 during archaeological survey. Despite an apparent association with a Puebloan road and great house, questions about the age and origin of the originally...
The Application of Lidar in the Documentation and Protection of Chacoan Great Houses (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Lidar Research in the US Southwest" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Chacoan great houses, dating to the tenth and eleventh centuries AD, are one of the most impressive and enigmatic categories of Ancestral Pueblo architecture in the Southwest. Affordable and convenient lidar scanning applications now allow us to generate extraordinary images and scaled interactive models of these structures. Lidar products can...
Applying Behavioral Ecology to Help Restore Indigenous Socioenvironmental Systems in the Bear River Basin (2025)
This is an abstract from the "*Behavioral Ecology in the Mountain West" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Indigenous land-use decisions influenced plants and animals across North America for thousands of years. These dynamics were disrupted by settler-colonial invasions, leading to declines in ecosystem function and health. Restoring Indigenous socioenvironmental systems and the cultural keystone species they support requires first identifying how...
Are Big Data Better Data? A Historical Evaluation of Dinetah Navajo Tree-ring Data (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Tree-Ring Materials as a Basis for Cultural Interpretations" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The tremendous expansion of research and computing power in the past few decades has resulted in the creation of large databases in many fields, and archaeology is no exception. But what have we really learned? In the early 1990s, astronomers searched the skies with the most advanced technology of the time. They addressed such...
Are Mountains Marginal? (2025)
This is an abstract from the "*Behavioral Ecology in the Mountain West" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mountain environments, the treeless parts above 10,000 ft specifically, are traditionally viewed as less productive, more difficult of access, more physiologically challenging, and for those reasons, marginal to their subalpine counterparts. The ideal free distribution (IFD) of Fretwell and Lucas (1969) provides a means of testing this “marginal...
Beyond Hillshade: Raster Methods for Distinguishing Chacoan, Historic, and Modern Era Roads Signatures in LiDAR, Cedar Mesa, Bears Ears N.M., Utah (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Lidar Research in the US Southwest" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Documentation of precontact and historic roads/trails can suffer from subjective identification criteria by the average archaeologist. This is due to frequently subtle physical expressions that compromise our ability to accurately map them with consistency, and ultimately manage them. This presentation will review LiDAR data processing, analytics, and...
The Circle of Life: Variability and Distribution of Loop Roads in the Ancient Southwest (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Lidar Research in the US Southwest" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological studies of roads in the Southwest have historically concentrated on the straight roads that connect larger communities, however thanks to the increasing availability of regional LiDAR, new and unexpected dimensions of ancient infrastructure are beginning to surface. This technology has revealed an impressive number of circular...
The Comb Wash Great House Community in Regional Context: New Insights from Federal 1-m Lidar Data (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Lidar Research in the US Southwest" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Comb Wash Great House was the first ancient Puebloan community center in Utah west of Comb Ridge to be formally recognized and described in the archaeological literature (W. H. Jackson 1875). It was ignored for more than a century before Owen Severance recognized and documented several Puebloan road swales there in the late 1980s. Subsequent...
Dendrochronological Recognition of Two Traumatic Events in Navajo History: The Fearing Time/Long Walk and the 1918 Influenza Pandemic (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Tree-Ring Materials as a Basis for Cultural Interpretations" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over recent centuries the Navajo of the Southwestern U.S. have faced several traumatic periods that affected their culture and lives. Two of the most dynamic of these were the Fearing Time/Long Walk of the 1850s and 1860s and the 1918 Influenza Pandemic. The Fearing Time resulted in the Navajo seeking refuge and safety in...
Dendrochronology at the Pile-Dwelling Site of Lucone D (Brescia, Italy): Chronology, Building Reconstruction and Wood-Use Practices (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Tree-Ring Materials as a Basis for Cultural Interpretations" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Early Bronze Age Lucone D pile-dwelling settlement, a UNESCO World Heritage site component, is located in the basin of Lucone di Polpenazze del Garda, northern Italy. It has been excavated, by Museo Archeologico della Valle Sabbia from 2007 to today. Over 400 samples already subjected to dendrochronological analysis allow...
Drought, population pressure, and inequality drive inter-group conflict in the precontact U.S. Southwest (2025)
This is an abstract from the "*Behavioral Ecology in the Mountain West" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. To anticipate relationships between future climate change and societal violence, we need theory to establish causal links and case studies to estimate interactions between driving forces. Here, we couple theory from human behavioral ecology with a machine learning approach to investigate the long-term effects of climate change, population size,...
Ecosystem Control and Costly Signaling: An Integrated Analysis of Holocene Hunting in the Bonniville and Wyoming Basins, USU (2025)
This is an abstract from the "*Behavioral Ecology in the Mountain West" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We explore and integrate different currencies that may underlie large-game hunting to guide a trans-Holocene analysis of variation in artiodactyl utilization using archaeofaunal data-sets from predominantly open-air sites from the Bonneville and Wyoming basins. The available empirical data continue to suggest that artiodactyls yield consistently...
The Examination of A Brownware Assemblage: An Overview of the Sanchez Site Ceramics (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Sanchez site (AZ CC: 2: 452 (ASM)) has a brownware assemblage (ca A.D. 100 to 500) dating to the period when ceramics were first manufactured in the American Southwest. This site is a cerro de trincheras settlement or hilltop site near Safford, Arizona on the upper Gila River between the Mogollon and Hohokam cultural regions. It was primarily occupied...
Explaining Differential Settlement Patterning in the Sierra Nevada (2025)
This is an abstract from the "*Behavioral Ecology in the Mountain West" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Different ethnolinguistic groups in the Sierra Nevada exhibit substantial variability in settlement patterning, particularly in the intensity of their use of montane and alpine environments. Due to the similarity of environments throughout the range, these differences are not readily attributable to differences in environment or environmental...
Exploring the Limits of USGS Lidar Data (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Lidar Research in the US Southwest" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the last several years, the US Geological Survey has released lidar data for southeastern Utah, including digital terrain models (dtms) with 1m resolution. The publicly-available USGS dtms are useful for examining and mapping features within archaeological sites, but the resolution is sometimes insufficient for this purpose. Working from the...
Extending the Use-Lives of Ancestral Pueblo Kivas and Great Kivas: A Tree-Ring Perspective (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Tree-Ring Materials as a Basis for Cultural Interpretations" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeological concept of "architectural continuance” refers to the extended longevity of selected buildings and, especially, to the efforts made by those structures’ owners or caretakers to keep them in service over time. Archaeological evidence for the continuance of ancestral Pueblo kivas and great kivas shows how these...
Fremont Architecture: Examining Evidence for Regional Consistency in Structure Function Despite Variability in Structure Forms (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 Fremont period (ca. AD 300 to 1400), individuals in the eastern Great Basin aggregated into larger and more permanent settlements, and these settlements clustered together across the landscape. Within many settlement clusters, sites exist containing structures that, on the surface, appear both architecturally and functionally distinct from...
Gambel Oak Acorns as a Food Resource in the Great Basin, Colorado Plateau, and Southwest (2025)
This is an abstract from the "*Behavioral Ecology in the Mountain West" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This project addresses the understudied presence of Gambel Oak acorns in the archaeological record of the mountain west. While ethnographic data indicate that some Indigenous groups in the region consumed Gambel Oak acorns, their recognition in archaeological contexts has been limited. Recent ethnoexperimental work shows Gambel Oak acorns have a...
Geophytes, Starch Granule Analysis, and Human Behavior in the Northern Great Basin, North America (2025)
This is an abstract from the "*Behavioral Ecology in the Mountain West" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Geophytes have been a crucial, energy-rich food source for Indigenous peoples in the northern Great Basin, playing a vital role in their diet, culture, economy, and environmental management practices. Beyond mere sustenance, geophytes hold profound cultural significance and reflect sophisticated ecological knowledge and adaptive strategies. In...
Ground Truthing Lidar Anomalies in the Great Sage Plain of Southeastern Utah (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Lidar Research in the US Southwest" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Review of lidar data from southeastern Utah has found anomalies that some researchers have interpreted as an extensive network of prehistoric landscape modification features from the late Ancestral Puebloan occupation of the Great Sage Plain. These anomalies appear as parallel clusters of alignments on lidar, but field observations have not found them...
Historically Contingent: Case Studies in the Interpretation of Tree-Ring Date Distributions (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Tree-Ring Materials as a Basis for Cultural Interpretations" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. After 95 years of archaeological tree-ring dating in the American Southwest, there are now tens of thousands of tree-ring dates with which scholars can guide their analyses. When dealing with randomly distributed datasets, large samples sizes can mean more reliable statistical inferences. When dealing with spatially,...
<html>Creating a Strontium Isotope (<sup>87</sup>Sr/<sup>86</sup>Sr) Baseline from Rodent Teeth for Archaeological Applications in Utah</html> (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. <html> Few strontium (Sr) isotope studies have focused on the eastern Great Basin of North America, and because Sr ratios vary regionally and stratigraphically, establishing an isotopic baseline is often the first step in being able to interpret Sr values in their archaeological context. Such isotope baselines can help in determining local vs nonlocal...
<html>Re-evaluating the Dietary Significance of Gambel Oak Acorns (<i>Quercus gambelii</i>) in the Great Basin, Colorado Plateau, and Southwest: Evidence from Experimental Foraging, Direct Bomb Calorimetry, and Tannin Extraction</html> (2025)
This is an abstract from the "*Behavioral Ecology in the Mountain West" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ethnographic evidence documents the exploitation of Gambel oak (Quercus gambelii) acorns as a food resource in the Great Basin, Southwest, and Colorado Plateau. However, a paucity of identified macro- and micro- botanical acorn remains in the archaeological record has resulted in a critical underestimation of the significance of the resource for...
Human Settlement and Subsistence derived from Starch Granules on Ground Stone Tools in southern Nevada, USA (2025)
This is an abstract from the "*Behavioral Ecology in the Mountain West" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study integrates starch granule analysis, botanical surveys, and comprehensive site analysis to shed light on the relationship between local plant resources and past human settlement and subsistence activities. Starch granule analysis on ground stone tools has the potential to reveal information about plant foods that have been processed...
The Impact of Climate on Human Foraging during the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition (PHT) in the Northwest Great Basin (2025)
This is an abstract from the "*Behavioral Ecology in the Mountain West" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For decades, archaeologists have interpreted the material record of the Pleistocene-Holocene transition (PHT; ~14,500-9000 cal BP) to suggest that the first peoples in North America specialized in large game hunting. Increasing evidence, however, is documenting considerable temporal and spatial variability during the PHT across North America. In...