Geoarchaeology (Other Keyword)
126-150 (847 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The results of on-site archaeological investigations alone are not enough to reconstruct landscape histories, because they provide incomplete information on past environments. In contrast, off-site sedimentary archives can provide information on the interaction of natural and human processes that modify the landscape. Our initial research on the sedimentary...
A Concealed Landscape: Historic Processes of Landscape Change at Cahokia Mounds, IL (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Geoarchaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ongoing geoarchaeological research studying the relationship between urbanism and environmental change at the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Cahokia Mounds has begun to unravel a pre-contact landscape concealed by historic land-use practices. Archaeological excavations and sediment coring conducted to understand the environmental conditions during the construction and...
Confluences: Canals, Wetlands, and Agroecosystems of the Ancient Maya in Northwestern Belize (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Wetlands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Wetlands played a crucial role in the subsistence methods of early complex polities, including the ancient Maya. The scale of canal development in the Birds of Paradise wetland field complex reflect the status, technological power, and agronomic wealth that wetlands provided to the ancient Maya in this region during the Maya Late Preclassic to the...
Connecting Survey and Fieldwork: Archaeology of the Core (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Palaeoeconomic and Environmental Reconstructions in Island and Coastal Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Based on a PhD research case study in the Croatian Adriatic, the paper demonstrates a step further into investigating coastal and submerged archaeology. Seabed mapping methods adopted from marine geology, such as side-scan and multi-beam sonar surveys and shallow water sub-bottom profiling are now...
The Constructed Subterranean Confronts Archaeology: Reviewing a Half Century of Ambivalence (2021)
This is an abstract from the "The Subterranean in Mesoamerican Indigenous Culture and Beyond" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeology has had an ambivalent relationship with the constructed subterranean dating back more than a half century. In the late 1960s, Good and Obermeyer investigated the cave at Oxtotipac, recognized it as man-made, and documented the fact that the material removed in the creation of the cave was used to construct a...
Constructing the Social Fabric of a Community: Household Service Relationships to the Ceren Village (2018)
Volcanic preservation allows for detailed reconstructions of a variety of social relationships and material boundaries at Ceren. Service relationships are inferred from proximity of households associated with special-function structures, such as the religious complex, the sauna and the community governance center. These data show a social function of providing service relationships from each household to the community. Socioeconomic functions are also evident in the form of other...
CONSUMER-GRADE DRONE MAPPING AND CENTIMETER-LEVEL INTERTIDAL GEOMORPHIC CHANGES AT THE SEABROOK MARSH SITE, HAMPTON, NEW HAMPSHIRE (2017)
The Seabrook Marsh site [SBM] in Hampton, New Hampshire is a ca. 3500-4500 BP multi-component site beneath 1-2 meters of salt marsh peat and exposed at a rapidly eroding shoreface. Like most intertidal archaeological sites SBM occupies a dynamic environment. Daily tidal fluctuations slightly modify surficial sediments, but on a monthly, seasonal, or annual scale the magnitude of changes is quite significant. The resulting landscape modifications range from minor erosion and deposition to...
Contextualizing European Copper Distribution Across the Seventeenth-Century American Southeast: A Geoarchaeological Approach (2015)
European alloy copper artifacts are frequently found in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Native American archaeological sites across Virginia and North Carolina. Smith and Hally (2014) ask a simple yet important question about these items: How were they obtained by Native Americans? While historical documents suggest possible mechanisms for European copper distribution (including trade and tribute), the most important clues about these objects come from their archaeological contexts. This study...
Continuity and Change on the Gobi Frontier: Geoarchaeology of Human Adaptations to Desertification in Southern Mongolia (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. The Northgrippian climatic stage of the mid-Holocene epoch in East Asia was marked by a period of pronounced warm/moist climatic conditions. This had a profound impact on the hydrology and vegetation in the northernmost region of the Gobi Desert located in southern Mongolia. Our geoarchaeological and archaeological...
Contributions from the Archaeological Record: Climate Proxies and El Niño-Southern Oscillation (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a complex climatic phenomenon that has shaped both the environment and human behavior on the North Coast of Peru for millennia. Currently, El Niño, a component of ENSO, occurs every 3-8 years. Often associated with heavy rains that penetrate this normally arid coastal desert, ENSO brings flooding, erosion, and an...
The Contributions of Vance T. Holliday to the Earth Sciences (2018)
Vance T. Holliday, the recipient of SAA’s 2018 Fryxell Award for Interdisciplinary Research, has devoted his career to applying geoscientific methods and theories in archaeological investigations. Vance’s scientific contributions, however, go beyond archaeology; he has played an important role in facilitating our understanding of landforms, sediments, and soils that provide the context for archaeological sites. The sites he has investigated, with a focus on their geomorphology, soils,...
Correlation of Prehistoric Settlement and Delta Development (1954)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. Most NADB-R records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us at comments@tdar.org.
Crafting Labor and Landscape (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Crafting Culture: Thingselves, Contexts, Meanings" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper revisits how landscape and mineral extraction have been contextualized in the third millennium BCE, Ganeshwar Jodhpura Cultural Complex (GJCC), Rajasthan, India. The GJCC has very specific formations of sites around resource-high regions particular to this landscape and time period that demonstrate a focus on copper production...
Crisis in Geoarchaeological Context: Reassessing Bronze Age ‘Collapse’ at Palaikastro, Crete, Greece (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Research on social change and ‘crisis’ demonstrates that both phenomena require analyses of longer-term processes and discrete local processes that need to be evaluated on site-by-site bases (Vigh, 2008; Visacovsky, 2017). The multi-scalar attention required to study crisis and change at individual Bronze Age settlement sites on Crete, Greece, has been...
Criss-Crossing Paths with Fred: Settlement and Subsistence from Colha to Maax Na (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Sessions in Honor of Dr. Fred Valdez Jr. and His Contributions to Archaeology, Part 1" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite working in large prehispanic Maya city centers such as Rio Azul, Fred Valdez to this day maintains that his strongest interest lies in small Maya communities and households. He is happiest when exploring how the average Maya lived, away from the pomp and circumstance of the ruling classes. My...
Current Paleoindian Research in Sonora (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Paleoindian Southwest" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological investigations over the past 15 years have revealed that approximately 13,000 years ago the northern half of the state of Sonora was an important and significant Clovis territory. Currently, 140 Clovis projectile point have been documented within Sonora; 50 as isolated finds and 90 having been recovered from six sites. A variety of site contexts...
Dating Late Pleistocene Archaeological sites in the Americas (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Geoarchaeology in First Americans Research, Part 1" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Geoarchaeological studies are critical to the evaluation of late Pleistocene archaeological sites in the Americas. One of geoarchaeology’s important contributions is to provide an accurate age for a site and its associated stratigraphy. Today, I will discuss best practices for the radiocarbon dating of bone. Laboratories currently use...
De-coding landscape heritage through cross-disciplinary studies in Pacific Oceania (2015)
Landscapes can be appreciated as heritage resources with complex natural and cultural histories, potentially studied through diverse data-sets and intellectual approaches. Toward illustrating some of these prospects, examples are presented from research across the Pacific Oceanic region, drawing on digital elevation models, coding of land cover and other geographic attributes, site-specific geoarchaeological testing, georeferencing of historical maps and images, and traditional ethnohistories as...
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...
Deep Histories and Persistent Places: Repetitive Mound-Building and Mimesis in the Jama Valley Landscape, Coastal Ecuador (2018)
This paper explores the notions of ‘material memory’ and human agency in deep time as expressed in the repetitive reconstruction of earthen platform mounds over some three millennia in the Jama Valley of coastal Manabí Province, Ecuador. Empirical evidence of repetitive mound-building is presented over a long stratigraphic record extending from approximately 2030 BCE to about 1260 CE, and special emphasis is given to the site of San Isidro, a major civic-ceremonial site and ‘persistent place’...
Deforestation of Pacific Islands Driven by a Combination of Land Use, Fire, and Climate (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Entangled Legacies: Human, Forest, and Tree Dynamics" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Remote islands in the Pacific Ocean experienced dramatic environmental transformations after initial human settlement in the last 3,000 years. Human causality of this environmental degradation has been largely unquestioned, but examination of regional records suggests a role for climate influences. Here we use charcoal and stable...
A Deposit is More Than the Sum of It's Artifacts: A Case Study from Centro Ceremonial Indigena de Tibes, Puerto Rico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "From Middens to Museums: Papers in Honor of Julie K. Stein" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Constructing the depositional history of an archaeological deposit requires identifying and describing the physical attributes of the sediment particles, including artifacts. Observable changes in the physical properties is the basis for distinguishing one archaeological deposit from another. The Ceremonial Center of Tibes,...
Detecting Transitions: Cultural and Environmental Changes Preserved in Archaeological Sediments from Western Liguria (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in the Prehistory of Liguria and Neighboring Regions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The reconstruction of Pleistocene human peopling along the Tyrrhenian coastline of Liguria is of critical importance. This region has yielded among the most recent evidence of Neanderthal occupation and the most ancient traces of modern humans in southern Europe. The reconstruction of the subsistence strategies of...
Determining Construction Materials and Soil Formation Processes at a Burial Mound in Northwest Mexico Using Soil Micromorphology (2015)
El Cementerio [SON P:10:8] is a late Ceramic period (cal. A.D. 943-1481) burial mound in Central Sonora, Mexico. The mound was constructed within the floodplain about 300 meters from the eastern bank of the Rio Yaqui. Micromorphology analysis (the microscopic analysis of undisturbed soils and sediments) was conducted in order to characterize the nature of the soils and sediments used to construct the mound. Samples were collected in situ from excavation units across the mound, with their...
Determining the Chronology of Reef Island Development for Constraining Initial Human Colonization of Pacific Atolls (2021)
This is an abstract from the "When the Wild Winds Blow: Micronesia Colonization in Pacific Context" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As recent worldwide news coverage has aptly reported, Pacific coral atolls are the most precarious landscapes for human settlement, yet many of them evidence continuous occupation for 2,000 years. Coral atolls are unique in their small size, low elevation, limited diversity of terrestrial flora and fauna, poorly...