Geoarchaeology (Other Keyword)
551-575 (715 Records)
Raw Artifact & Chemical Data
Real Alto and the Origins of Valdivia (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent geomorphological analysis of shoreline deposits in Manabí and Santa Elena provinces (Ecuador) provides evidence of significant mid-Holocene marine transgression. Newly obtained radiocarbon dates from relict coastal features places these changes to the Valdivia Phase (4400 to 1500 cal BC). Arguments for and against this phenomenon are reviewed with...
A Reanalysis of the Weitas Creek Site (10CW30): An Early Nez Perce Upland Hunting Camp (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Bitterroot Mountains mark both an ecological and social margin between the Southern Columbia Plateau and the Plains region. The Nez Perce (Nimíipuu) Tribe traditionally followed a seasonal subsistence cycle routinely crossing these ecological and social boundaries, referencing long-term landscape and resource knowledge while negotiating complex social...
Reaping the Rewards of Incipient Agriculture from the Land to the Sea and the Mangroves In Between (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Archaic to Early Formative transition, the Soconusco populations began adopting more sedentary subsistence strategies and investing more in their local environments. Evidence from sediment cores demonstrates that during the Archaic, populations were burning inland landscapes and starting to grow maize. The environmental effects of incipient...
Reassessing Agricultural Potential in Chaco Canyon: Exploring the Link between Soil Salinity and Soil Texture (2018)
Determining the soil salinity of a site can aid in the assessment of the agricultural potential of a particular area, thus enabling researchers to draw conclusions about the potential for cultivation and subsistence intensification. Studies pertaining to soil salinity in Chaco Canyon often argue that the electrical conductivity (EC) levels within the area—a standard proxy measure of soil salinity—were too high for maize farming in many areas of the canyon, drastically limiting the potential...
Reconstructing a Maya Agricultural Wetland on the Rio Bravo Floodplain, Northwestern Belize (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Ancient Maya Landscapes in Northwestern Belize, Part II" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Birds of Paradise wetlands have been a subject of recent intensive study within Northwestern Belize. We now recognize this fluviokarst wetland has undergone extensive modification of field building and channelization during the Maya Classic (1650-1050 BP) with use possibly extending into the early Maya Postclassic (1050-700...
Reconstructing a Paleoindigenous Communal Space: Living under the Trees in the Atacama Desert, Chile, 12,800–11,200 cal yrs BP (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Humans arrived in the Atacama Desert 13,000 years ago, facing one of the harshest landscapes on Earth. They settled in a rainless stretch of land with scattered patches of biotic resources fed by rainfall in the Andes. They established social networks with people from different environments, creating essential bonds to maintain viable populations. However,...
Reconstructing the Ancient Maya Wetland Fields of the Central Rio Bravo, Belize (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. Lidar acquired in 2016 in northwest Belize revealed an expanse of ~7 km2 of ancient Maya raised fields and canals along the Rio Bravo floodplain near the ancient Maya site of Wari Camp. This is half of all the wetland field area found from lidar in this region. Excavations and multiproxy data provide the first...
Reconstruction of pyrotechnology connected with the earliest pottery. Micromorphology and -FTIR at Xianrendong and Yuchanyan, South China. (2018)
The sites of Xianrendong (Jiangxi) and Yuchanyan (Hunan), China, contain the earliest pottery yet discovered, dating respectively 20,000 cal BP and 18,600 cal BP. This pottery is found in otherwise Late Paleolithic, hunter-gatherer contexts. To understand human activities at these caves we employed micromorphology and -FTIR on the sediments. Here we present the results of analysis of the layers containing combustion episodes, which suggest low heating temperatures at both sites. and infer...
Regional Applications of Geoarchaeology in Alaska (1988)
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.
Remembering the People in Peopling Narratives: Landscape Learning as a Bridge between Traditional Knowledge and Archaeology (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology and Landscape Learning for a Climate-Changing World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The debate over the Peopling of the Americas is one of grand narratives and contested archaeological evidence. The Landscape Learning Framework provides a mechanism for approaching the archaeological record at a difference scale, allowing us to rehumanize the study of population expansions in the terminal Pleistocene....
Remote Sensing Survey at Spring Lake, San Marcos, TX (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Spring Lake forms the headwaters of the San Marcos River. The area surrounding the lake has hosted prehistoric peoples since the Paleoindian era and remains a place of cultural reverence for contemporary Indigenous communities. In the early 20th century, an amusement park, hotel, and golf course were built around the lake which brought thousands of patrons...
Residential Trajectories of Commoner, Elite, and Noble Spaces at Actuncan, Belize (2018)
This paper summarizes the archaeological investigations of ten residential units at Actuncan that likely represented three distinct social strata: commoner, elite, and noble. We explore the trajectories of these residences from the Preclassic to the Terminal Classic period. Data suggest that although political authority in the Mopan River valley shifted throughout Actuncan’s long occupation, many commoner residences maintained local identities and residential continuity through time. However,...
Results from Test Excavations of NAB-00533: Apparent Nenana-Aged Occupation from the Northern Copper River Basin (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. NAB-533 is a buried multi-component prehistoric site located in the northern Copper River Basin. National Park Service archaeologists engaged in compliance testing originally recorded the site in 2016. During the 2017 and 2018 field seasons NPS Archaeologist Lee Reininghaus led a project to conduct test excavations at NAB-533. These excavations revealed a...
Revealing Woodland Period Landscape Use at Rat Island, Hamilton Ontario Using Itrax™ XRF Soil Chemical Analysis (2018)
With its ability to identify slight changes in chemical signatures from small easily obtained soil cores, Itrax™ core scanning provides an unparalleled opportunity to understand anthropogenic impacts on soils and explore the history of landscapes. Located in Lake Ontario less than 500 meters off the shore of Cootes Paradise, Rat Island (AhGx-7) enabled the integration of multi-element x-ray fluorescence analyses into a traditional excavation program. This small island, initially surveyed and...
Revisiting Julie K. Stein’s "Archaeological Sediments in Cultural Environments": The Nexus Between Lithostratigraphy and Geoarchaeological Research in the Great Plains and Central Lowlands, USA (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. In her seminal 2001 book chapter, Archaeological Sediments in Cultural Contexts, Julie Stein emphasized that identifying and characterizing sedimentary deposits at archaeological sites is crucial to understanding the geologic context of the cultural deposits as well as site formation processes. Archaeologists have taken heed of...
Revisiting Kelly Forks (10CW34): Current and Future Research at a Western Stemmed Tradition Occupation in the Nez-Perce Clearwater National Forest, Idaho (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Kelly Forks Work Center Site (10CW34) is located in the Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forests, Idaho, and has an occupation sequence spanning the terminal Pleistocene (Western Stemmed Tradition or WST) through the historic period. The site is within the homelands of the Nimíipuu (Nez Perce) Tribe, in an upland area traditionally important for late...
Revisiting the Laguna Tortuguero Paleoenvironmental Record in Puerto Rico: New Data for an Old Record (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. I present an interpretation of a 5 m sedimentary sequence from Laguna Tortuguero, Puerto Rico, based on new radiocarbon dates, X-ray diffraction, magnetic susceptibility, and carbon isotope data. I also highlight the merits of revisiting old but significant paleoenvironmental records to understand past...
Revisiting the Submerged Shell Midden at Sabine Pass: Preliminary Core Results from the NOAA Exploration Mission: Paleolandscapes and the ca. 8000 BP Shoreline on the Gulf of Mexico Outer Continental Shelf (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Submerged Paleolandscape Investigations in the Gulf of Mexico" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over 40 years ago Coastal Environments Inc. pioneered a phased approach to identify prehistoric occupations on the now submerged outer continental shelf of the Gulf of Mexico. This work homed in on a target in the Paleo-Sabine Valley and identified one of the first in situ, submerged prehistoric sites known in the Americas....
Riparian Oases and Environmental Variation during the Archaic Period in Southern Arizona, 4000 to 2000 BP (2016)
Late Archaic forager-farmers in the Sonoran Desert lived in a resource-rich but water-poor environment. Rivers that flowed through major valleys supported lush riparian habitat, creating linear oases bounded by foothills covered by desertscrub vegetation and “sky island” mountain ranges. Hunting and foraging in these diverse ecosystems supported small but stable populations throughout the region, and by 4000 BP low-level maize agriculture was incorporated into the subsistence diet....
The Rise and Fall of the Forest Canopy: An Application of Compound-Specific Stable Isotopic Analysis to a Holocene Sequence of Soils as a Record of Human Impacts in Southern Belize (2018)
Derived from lipid-rich plant tissues (primarily leaf waxes), long chain n-alkanes are a durable organic biomarker whose relative abundance is used in paeloecological studies as a proxy marker of plant species composition, and as an indicator of biomass burning. Isotopic composition of individual n-alkane components preserves signals that reflect both hydroclimate and canopy height. These properties can be employed to examine spatially integrated signals of anthropogenic land clearance in lake...
Rock Magnetic Characterization of Florida Pottery (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The methods used in artifact provenance in archaeological research is constantly being added to and updated. Identifying the geographical origin of the artifacts can provide information about past mobility patterns and interaction networks. There are a number of mineralogical and elemental methods currently used to characterize pottery composition, but they...
The Rockhouse Hollow Rockshelter, Ohio River Valley (2015)
Recorded within the sediments of Rockhouse Hollow rockshelter in the Hoosier National Forest in southern Indiana is a rich history of prehistoric occupation spanning 10,000 years. Unlike any other site in Indiana, Rockhouse Hollow has produced artifacts from all prehistoric cultural time periods, with the notable exception of the Paleoindian Period. Although the site had already been looted for decades, excavations in 1961 produced a wealth of lithic and faunal data that have not yet been...
Rocks in Our Heads: Recent Investigations in Knife River Flint Quarry Area (2015)
The Knife River flint primary source area was one of, if not the primary source of lithic material in the Northern Plains. Knife River flint was a major trade item from the Paleoindian through the protohistoric. Over the past several years, archaeologists from Metcalf Archaeological Consultants, Inc. have conducted projects within the Knife River flint primary source area located in north-central North Dakota. Many of these projects either directly or indirectly have been in support of oil...
Rockshelters as Late Quaternary Geoarchaeological Records in the Bighorn Mountains, Wyoming (2015)
Rockshelters in Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains have a long history of archaeological research resulting in a rich dataset of geological and paleoecological information that provides a context for the region’s 12,000 year cultural record. In this study we focus on three deeply stratified and well-dated rockshelters to meet three primary objectives. First, we apply Bayesian statistics to each record to create an age model that contextualizes stratigraphic variability and contrasts autogenic and...