Geoarchaeology (Other Keyword)
676-700 (715 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The destructive effects of large dams on upstream archaeological sites has been recognized for many decades, resulting in passage of federal legislation and numerous large-scale archaeological salvage projects in the 1940s through 1970s. Considerably less attention has been paid to the effects of large dams on downstream archaeological resources. For the past...
Understanding Environmental Thresholds through Geoarchaeology: Case Studies from the Maya Lowlands (2016)
All depositional environments can leave complex records of environmental change over time. We consider floodplains, alluvial fans, and wetlands of the Maya lowlands at present day Neundorf, Belize. We have documented a rich history of sedimentation, water chemistry, and archaeological data that show a measurable environmental and archaeological signature that date back over 4,000 years in this region. This research uses soil geomorphology to study the chronology and processes of wetland...
Understanding Formation Processes of Archaeological Sites in Eolian Settings in the Petrified Forest National Park (2015)
Located on the southern edge of the Tusayan Dune Field in northeastern Arizona, the Petrified Forest National Park contains abundant archaeology sites located in dune settings. Past and recent archaeological survey has shown an apparent correlation between archaeological site locations and eroded dune blowouts. It is likely that sites are located in dune settings due to their favorable environmental setting; however, it is not clear if the apparent distribution of visible sites in relation to...
Underwater Geoarchaeology of Perennial Lakes in the Great Basin (2015)
Underwater archaeology in the Great Basin has been generally ignored because underwater researchers often do not associate this desert with inundated environments. Despite this misconception, many large lakes, marshlands, and rivers are found throughout the region. For instance, northern Nevada includes 168 sizable man-made perennial reservoirs that partially or completely cover 188 known sites. In addition, during the late Pleistocene large lakes of fluctuating size covered many of the valleys...
Underwater in the High Desert: Exploring Site Presence and Preservation on Drowned and Buried Lake Features (2018)
Walker Lake, NV, a high desert, perennial lake in the western Great Basin, has been subject to naturally changing water levels for over 15,000 years. Ranging in size from the southernmost branch of Pleistocene Lake Lahontan to a small alkali wetland, Walker Lake provided varying landscapes for people to use and live around through time. Fieldwork during summer 2017 investigated drowned river channels and beach features for depositional history, site presence, and site preservation. Submerged...
Underwater, terrestrial, and intertidal core extractions at the Walk Bridge, Norwalk, CT: An alternative to traditional Phase I survey (2017)
The CTDOT Walk Bridge Replacement Project in Norwalk, Connecticut presented several challenges, making it unsuitable for a traditional Phase I archaeological survey. The urbanized Area of Potential Effect (APE) has been heavily industrialized since the mid-19th century. The pervasive ground disturbance, landmaking, and hazardous soil contamination that characterize the APE presented obstacles to typical survey methods such as hand-excavated shovel test pits. Documentary research identified...
Unpacking the Geoarchaeologist’s Geospatial Tool Bag: A Case Study Using Predictive Modeling on the Central Coast, Pismo Beach, California (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Geoarchaeology Research" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While geographic information system (GIS) based modeling applications are not new to archaeological practice, they offer a suite of tools and techniques for building a robust geoarchaeological dataset when used judiciously. Such models utilize geologic unit and age, soils, slope, aspect, distance to water, distance to known resource procurement areas, or other...
Unraveling the Site Formation Process at Finch (47JE0902): A Multicomponent Habitation in Southeastern Wisconsin (2015)
The Finch site is a multicomponent open-air habitation located in southeastern Wisconsin. Archaeological excavations conducted at the site yielded numerous artifacts and cultural features indicating recurrent and/or continuous occupation (or use) spanning twelve thousand years, from the Early Paleoindian through Late Woodland periods. The site is situated on the rim and side slopes of a kettle basin formed in matrix-supported glacial till overlying outwash and glaciolacustrine deposits. The till...
Unsettling Infrastructure: The Feral Qualities of Water in an Archaeological Tale of Railroads and Pipelines (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Unsettling Infrastructure: Theorizing Infrastructure and Bio-Political Ecologies in a More-Than-Human World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The eastern Great Plains of North Dakota and west-central Minnesota are home to the remnants of one of the world’s largest ancient glacial lakes, Lake Agassiz, as well as the United States’ longest river, the Missouri. These two powerful water entities shaped and disrupted the...
Updates on the Geoarchaeology of the Latest Pleistocene and Earliest Holocene at the Page-Ladson site, Florida (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Page-Ladson site in the Aucilla River basin in northwestern Florida, a drowned terrestrial locality, contains strata with well-preserved organic materials in archaeological contexts, allowing us to create absolute cultural chronologies, recreate paleoenvironments, and discuss human subsistence strategies. For the past several years, we have been...
An Urban Micromorphological Perspective on Neopalatial Environmental Changes at Bronze Age Palaikastro, Crete (2018)
Transitional phases between settlement periods on Bronze Age Crete are often associated with ‘natural’ destructive events. However, it is unclear whether these ‘natural’ destructive events and subsequent shifts in material practices were influenced by anthropogenic or environmental processes. For example, the end of the Neopalatial period on Crete occurred in the LM IB period; some researchers view LM IB destructive fires as indicative of human action during a phase of social and political...
Urban micromorphology at Bronze Age Palaikastro, Crete: Evidence of transitions (2017)
Sequences at Bronze Age Cretan settlement sites are defined by destructive events, natural or anthropogenic, that capture cultural material in a particular time and space. The traditional approach of studying urban archaeological contexts based on these snapshots of material culture is not completely suitable for analyzing transitional phases that occur between these events. However, detailed micromorphological examination of the sediments present in these transitional stratigraphic sequences...
Urban Organization and Agricultural Practices at Las Huacas, Chincha Valley (AD 1100-1570) (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In modern times the Chincha Valley is one of the most productive agricultural valleys of Peru, and its offshore islands were rich in guano — bird excrement that is a potent fertilizer — that was exploited by foreigners from the Colonial into the Republican Periods (AD 1523-1879). While the importance of the valley’s agriculture and resources is well known...
Use of Different Time and Space Scales in Geoarcheological Research: An Example from Northern Alaska (1985)
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.
Using Geoarchaeological Methods to Evaluate Site Integrity at Dali, Kazakhstan (2015)
Dali, a site located in the Bayan-Zherek Valley in Semirech'ye, Southeastern Kazakhstan, is a multi-phase Bronze Age pastoralist settlement (3rd-2nd millennia B.C.). Recovered artifacts include combustion features, bones, ceramics, lithics, bronze metals, and potentially in situ wall constructions. Radiocarbon dates cannot conclusively suggest that the stratigraphic sequence is in situ due to geological unconformities and high energy colluvial system, so geoarchaeological methods were employed...
Using Geoarchaeological Methods to Identify Intact Buried Mounds at the Mitchell Site, Illinois (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in Geoarchaeology and Environmental Archaeology Perspectives on Earthen-Built Constructions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Mitchell site is a major Mississippian (1050–1400 CE) mound center located roughly 10 km north of Cahokia Mounds, Illinois, the largest mound center in North America. At a minimum, Mitchell consisted of 11 earthen mounds; however, only one mound is visible today. In 1960, salvage...
Using Ramped Pyrolysis and Oxidation (RPO) to Date and Characterize Geoarchaeological Deposits: A Pilot Study from the Ancient Mesopotamian City of Ur (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Geoarchaeological sediments represent robust archives of human-environment interactions. Given the growing importance of paleoenvironmental research in anthropology and the absence of critical chrono-stratigraphic and ecological evidence from challenging contexts/regions, opportunities to refine chronological frameworks through novel instrumentation are...
Using Sediment Chemistry to Define Ancient Activities (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Underwater Maya: Analytical Approaches for Interpreting Ancient Maya Activities at the Paynes Creek Salt Works, Belize" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Soil chemistry is used in the Maya area to evaluate ancient activities not readily identified through architecture and artifact assemblages. We evaluate ancient activities at Ta’ab Nuk Na salt work, one of the largest underwater sites in Paynes Creek National Park, with...
Using soil geomorphology to understand dry-farmed agriculture in eolian sediments in northeastern Arizona (2017)
The Petrified Forest National Park in northeastern Arizona has a long record of prehistoric occupation, including within extensive deposits of semi-stabilized dunes and sand sheets. It has been hypothesized that during the Pueblo periods, inhabitants farmed these eolian soils. Eolian sands are not typically conducive to dry-farmed agriculture; however, dune farming is known ethnographically, and has been inferred in archaeological contexts on the southern Colorado Plateau. This paper...
Using the Archaeological Record to Better Understand Models: An Australian Case Study (2017)
In Australia’s desert regions, different conceptual models are sometimes used to explain patterning in late Holocene surface deposits. Among these patterns are distributions of radiocarbon determinations, which have been concurrently explained as generated by intermittent occupation by hypermobile foragers, or growing semi-resident populations of broad-spectrum hunter-gatherers. This paper shows how models connected to the language and logic of record formation can help resolve competing...
Vegetation of Indian Mounds and Middens and Marshes in Plaquemines and St. Bernard Parishes, Louisiana (1936)
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.
The View from the Ground: How Geochemistry Informs Our Understanding of the Regal, Ritual, and Residential Character of Actuncan (2018)
The archaeological investigation of Actuncan in western Belize included the geochemical analysis of one of the largest and most diverse sets of activity surfaces in the Maya world. Over 1200 soil, sediment, and plaster samples from four major architectural complexes representing regal, ritual, and residential locations were assayed using ICP-MS. The results allow a uniquely "atomic" perspective on the changing use of urban space over roughly 900 years, ca. AD 100-1000. This research identifies...
The View from the Trenches: Tying Paleoenvironment to Archaeology at Rimrock Draw Rockshelter (35HA3855) (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Current Perspectives on the Western Stemmed Tradition-Clovis Debate in the Far West" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The 2018 fieldwork emphasized trench excavation across the relict stream channel directly in front of the rockshelter. Sedimentary deposits comprise a well-stratified, five-part sequence of bedrock basalt overlain by a gravel bed of rounded cobbles and boulders; dark gray blocky to massive cienega...
View of the site (2015)
View of the excavation from the entrance. We use two total stations, one for each half of the cave.
Village Aggregation and Native Subsistence Practices at a Middle Woodland Mound Center, Gulf Coast Florida, USA (2018)
Current research at Garden Patch (8DI4), a Middle Woodland mound center with circular village construction in northern peninsular Gulf Coast Florida, provide quantitative insights into the timing and temporality of monument construction and village aggregation. Here, we combine previously modelled radiocarbon assays with new isotopic data on season of collection and habitat of exploitation. The four-phase model of site occupation when combined with the new isotopic data provide new insights into...