Geoarchaeology (Other Keyword)
151-175 (619 Records)
The eco-socio-system of the wetlands (bajos) situated around the city of Naachtun is studied in relation with the water and soil resources (availability, use, management), between environment, climate and societies. The objectives are to characterize the evolution of the hydrosystems and agrosystems during the last 3 millennia and particularly during the Classic Period. The approach is systemic and multi-scalar, based on interdisciplinary works with geoarchaeological, geomorphological,...
Environmental Conditions of Northwestern Zimbabwe during the Transition from Foraging to Farming: Using Isotopes, Sediments, and Soils to Reconstruct Late Holocene Climate Change in Hwange National Park (2015)
Hunting-and-gathering in northwestern Zimbabwe was largely replaced by pastoralism and farming between ca. 2,000 and 1,200 years ago. In order to understand whether climate change influenced this transition, we collected environmental and archaeological data during a multi-year research program that included: rockshelter excavation, salvage excavation along eroding stream cuts, and geomorphological and soils analyses of various locales in Hwange National Park. The strontium, carbon, and oxygen...
The Environmental Conquest of West Mexico: The Lake Pátzcuaro and Malpaso Valley Case Studies (2017)
Though the next century will bring great environmental challenges the impact of global warming pales in comparison to the dramatic environmental changes associated with European Colonialism, beginning in the late 15th century. Chief among them is the Conquest of the Americas involving the breakdown of millennial-aged systems of land engineering and tenure, compounded by depopulation, and the introduction of the Euro-agro suite. Throughout Central Mexico the initial century of Conquest...
The environmental context of the Middle Pleistocene occupation at the Shishan Marsh, Azraq, Jordan (2017)
The Greater Azraq Oasis Area occupies a hyper-arid area of the Syro-Arabian Desert. Geomorphological and paleoecological evidence suggests that at times during the Pleistocene the region experienced moister conditions than at present. This particular study centers on the environment surrounding the Middle Pleistocene hominin occupation dated approximately 250,000 BP. Archaeological and archaeozoological remains from this occupation have provided significant information about the wide range of...
Environmental Effects of Cyclical Reservoir Drawdown on Archaeological Resources: A Preliminary Case Study from Fall Creek Reservoir, Lane County, Oregon (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Willamette Valley Project of the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) manages 13 reservoirs in northwestern Oregon. The USACE’s flood control mission requires annual water level drawdowns that expose the reservoir bed to cycles of lacustrine deposition, wave-action, and alluvial and colluvial erosion. Previous assessments of the impacts of...
Environmental Legacy of Precolumbian Maya Mercury: Using the Present to Understand the Past (2023)
This is an abstract from the "2023 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Timothy Beach Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Mexico and Central American region has a history of mercury use that began at least two millennia before European colonization in the sixteenth century. Archaeologists have reported deposits of cinnabar (HgS) and other mercury materials at Classic period (ca. 250–900 CE) Maya settlements across the region;...
The Ethnogeology of Sedimentation and Land Formation in the Lower Mississippi Delta of Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Lower Mississippi Delta is one of the most dynamic geological landscapes in world, experiencing a complex mix of alluvial sedimentation and coastal erosion. Additionally, both historic and prehistoric human populations have been drawn to this region by virtue of the extreme productivity of the estuarine environments created by the interactions between...
Evidence for Forest Clearance and Food Production in Lapita and Post-Lapita Fiji (2018)
Investigations at the site of Qaraqara have sought to determine the antiquity of forest clearance and food production in Fiji. Located over 25 km inland from the coast, archaeological excavation has indicated that the site was used for habitation and cultivation, producing a ceramic-rich deposit that extends to a depth of 250 cm. Geoarchaeological analyses of sediment cores from Qaraqara reached 500 cmbs, and document the formation of stable soils by 3000 BP, during the Lapita period. Plant...
Excavation of a Red Ochre Cache in a Natural Geological Kettle Formation in the Central Interior of British Columbia. (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Excavations of natural geological kettle formations are uncommon in Cultural Resource Management projects in British Columbia. Discovery of a large cache of processed red ochre is even more rare with only one similar ochre cache known to exist on the Canadian Plateau. Ochre is an iron oxide prevalent in the Rainbow Mountain Range, part of the Anahim...
Exploring Cultural Differences in Irrigation Canal Systems through Time at the Creekside Village Site, New Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Irrigation systems provided the foundation of many prehistoric and historic communities in the Southwest. Creekside Village near Tularosa, New Mexico, is a Jornada Mogollon site occupied from AD 400-1150 containing evidence of both prehistoric and historic irrigation systems. Geoarchaeological investigations of stratigraphic sequence and site formation...
Exploring Long-Term Environmental Dynamics and Human Transformation of Aquatic Spaces in Lake Texcoco, Mexico (2023)
This is an abstract from the "2023 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Timothy Beach Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lake Texcoco was the largest of the five lakes that existed in the Basin of Mexico. Drained almost completely in the early 1900s, most of its western part has been occupied by Mexico City’s metropolitan area, though its eastern part remains undeveloped, which permits exploring the prehistory of the lake. In addition...
Exploring the Interpretative Roles of Microarchaeology, Ethnohistory and Ethnoarchaeology for Structuring Daily Life in Pre-contact Hawaiian Houses (2018)
Ethnoarchaeology provides a useful tool for understanding material patterns in the archaeological record. However, caution must be exercised in the application of this method to avoid projecting data onto times and places that are no longer represented by contemporary practices. In this paper, the authors argue that ethnoarchaeology is most useful for projects that focus on the longue durée when used in conjunction with a combination of micro and macro archaeological methods. Specifically, the...
Exploring the Layers and Elements at the Center of Jefferson’s Retreat Landscape (2018)
Over the past seven years, archaeologists have examined three landscape elements that are central to the design of Jefferson’s Poplar Forest retreat. These include the rows of paper mulberries that flanked the house; the clumps of ornamental trees and oval-shaped flower beds located on the northern side of the structure; and the paved circular road that brought carriages to the steps of Jefferson’s octagonal retreat. This paper will discuss how soil studies have provided significant insight into...
Exploring the relationship between coastal geomorphic processes and archaeological site distributions in central Puget Sound of Washington State (2015)
Although the uneven distribution of precontact archaeological sites along the Puget Sound shoreline is widely recognized, limited research has been undertaken to systematically consider how this pattern may relate to local anthropogenic and geomorphic factors. In this study, we consider archaeological site distributions through the lens of shoreline geomorphology and discuss possible reasons for any observed relationships. Using publically available drift cell data, we categorized the shoreline...
Exploring the Unexpected Early Woodland Occupation at Smith Creek, Wilkinson County, Mississippi (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Smith Creek (22Wk526) is a multi-component Native American mound site in the Natchez Bluffs region of the Lower Mississippi Valley. Surface collections and excavations from 2013–2016 clearly demonstrated a dense Mississippian (AD 1200–1500) occupation at the site and suggested a Late Woodland (AD 750–1200) date for the construction of the mounds. However,...
A Fabric and Spatial Analyses of the Artifacts Recovered from the Ryan-Harley Paleoindian Site (8JE1004) in North Florida (2018)
The Ryan-Harley site (8JE1004) is a Suwannee point site located in North Florida along the Wacissa River. Ryan-Harley is significant because it is the only archaeological site in the Southeast United States where diagnostic Suwannee material has been recovered in-situ within a discrete geological layer through extensive excavations. A broad faunal assemblage interpreted as dietary remains was also recovered from the same stratigraphic layer as the Suwannee material. Taxa identified include...
Farming as a dominant subsistence strategy? : Organic geochemical analyses on potsherds from prehistoric Korean peninsula (2015)
This study attempts to understand prehistoric human subsistence in Korean peninsula using organic geochemical analyses on potsherds. Organic geochemical analyses strive to be precise about the types of food groups that were processed within a pot by attempting to isolate and identify the specific organic compounds trapped in the fabric of its wall or adhering to its surface in residues. Traditionally, the transition from foragers to farmers in the central part of the Korean peninsula has been...
Farming the Great Sage Plain: Mesa Verde Loess, Soils, and Agriculture (2015)
The Pueblo Farming Project (PFP) seeks to preserve traditional farming knowledge and educate the public concerning traditional farming practices and the place of corn cultivation in Pueblo cultures. Soil profiles inside and adjacent to project gardens reveal the impact of farming on soils over relatively small temporal and spatial scales. The Basketmaker Communities Project (BCP) focuses on better understanding the Basketmaker III Period, as well as the development of Early Pueblo communities....
Feeding a Citadel: Subsistence Practices (2023)
This is an abstract from the "La Cuernavilla, Guatemala: A Maya Fortress and Its Environs" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. La Cuernavilla is an ancient Maya site situated in the El Zotz Biotope in the central Petén of Guatemala. This study focuses on the paleoenvironmental changes, agricultural subsistence, and occupational trajectories of La Cuernavilla, based on data gathered from across the larger landscape between 2009 and 2017 on the Proyecto...
Filled to the Brim: Estimating Lowland Maya Reservoir Capacities by Combining Survey, Soil Cores, and GIS (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the limiting factors to settlement aggregation in the Maya lowlands is the availability of potable water. With few perennial surface rivers and lakes, the ancient Maya collected water from rainfall for consumption. In areas with high population densities, such as Classic period cities, this required engineering the built landscape to funnel water for...
Finding and Understanding Ancient Hohokam Irrigated Agricultural Fields in the Middle Gila River Valley, South-Central Arizona (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Finding Fields: Locating and Interpreting Ancient Agricultural Landscapes" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For over a century, archaeologists have investigated the vast network of prehistoric Hohokam canal irrigation systems in the lower Salt and middle Gila River valleys in southern Arizona. However, documentation of the agricultural fields in which prehistoric farmers irrigated their crops generally was lacking until...
Fire and Vegetation Dynamics: Blazing the Trail in Pre-contact Southern New England (2018)
The concept that Native Americans were using fire for wide spread vegetation control and subsistence procurement during the pre-contact period in Southern New England has long been excepted as common practice, leading to changes in the landscape and then settlement patterns. However, save for the accounts of early explorers and colonists, whose goal was to solicit the "new land" as a familiar landscape and not an unknown wilderness, there is little supporting scientific evidence. This paper...
Fire in the Early Pleistocene: Evidence for the Use of Fire by Hominins at the 1.5 mya Site of FxJj20 AB, Koobi Fora, Kenya (2018)
The Cooking Hypothesis contends that fire use became common in the Early Pleistocene and was part of a suite of characters that were associated with the appearance of Homo erectus. The morphological changes associated with H. erectus support this hypothesis. Archaeological evidence for the control of fire in this time period is generally sparse, and arguments for controlled fire at early sites have been controversial. Here we present evidence for fire use by early hominins at the open-air site...
Fire, Clay, and Microscopes: Micromorphology at the Little Bay Plantation Site in Montserrat, W.I. (2013)
Since the 1980’s the use of micromorphology in archaeology has grown and developed into an important tool for the analysis and interpretation of archaeological sites. Despite the increase in the use of micromorphology across the various sub-disciplines of archaeology, historical archaeologists have only just begun adopting these methods in their analyses. Micromorphology, the microanalysis of sediments and soils, can lend important information to the formation of, and activity within, historical...
Fires, Landslides, and All Manner of Varmints: site formation processes at high elevations in the VCNP (2015)
The Valles Caldera National Preserve in northern New Mexico encompasses a diverse landscape of grassy valleys, forested mountainsides, and rocky peaks, almost entirely more than 2600 m (8500 ft) above sea level. People have visited the area regularly for millennia to access large obsidian quarries and other resources. The long history of human activities has left us a rich archaeological record, but interpreting that record is complicated by the dynamism of the landscape; physical and biological...