Geoarchaeology (Other Keyword)
126-150 (715 Records)
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...
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...
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 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...
Determining the Impact of Major Storm Events on Ancient Peoples of Coastal Florida (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For this project, I assess the potential effects that periods of increased storm frequency and intensity may have had on the lives and behaviors of ancient coastal Florida populations. Using sediment grain size analysis, storm periods were retrodicted and organized into regional storm chronologies for 5 lake bed sediment cores within the East and Central,...
Developing a Geomorphic and Archaeological History of Painters Flat (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Painters Flat is a small basin along the California/Nevada border and has never been described in literature. This past summer, the Far Western Anthropological Research Group recorded numerous sites spanning the entire chronological sequence for the region. Along with archaeological data, I collected information on landforms, profiles, and outcrops to...
Developing A Minimally Invasive Protocol For Assessing Site Eligibility On The North Training Area, Camp Guernsey, Wyoming (2015)
The North Training Area of Camp Guernsey is located within the Hartville Uplift of eastern Wyoming, an area rich in archaeological resources particularly extensive formations of toolstone quality raw materials. Because of the potential for live training exercises to impact cultural resources, the Wyoming National Guard proposed the development of an experimental testing protocol of selected sites using minimally invasive methodologies that included geophysics and small diameter auger probes. ...
The Developing Tale of Sayles Adobe (2017)
The Sayles Adobe terrace site (41VV2239) rests within Eagle Nest Canyon 300 meters upstream from the Rio Grande confluence. The site name comes from E.B. Sayles’ 1932 sketch map of the canyon which notes an area of "sandy adobe" below Skiles Shelter. ASWT research began at Sayles Adobe this past spring with excavations focused on investigating natural terrace formation and cultural deposits buried within. Using a combination of old and new archaeological techniques, Sayles was quickly found to...
Development of a Quick, Easy, Cheap, Effective, Rugged, and Safe (QuEChERS) Method for the Analysis of Lipid Biomarkers in Archaeological Sedimentary Deposits (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Charred Organic Matter in the Archaeological Sedimentary Record" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The analysis of lipid biomarkers plays an important role in sedimentological studies because these compounds are representative of particular sources (plants, macrophytes, algae, bacteria, and animals) and are likely to persist after burial. Frequently, their analysis involves methodologies, such as ultrasound assisted...
Diachronic Changes in Late Pleistocene Ochre Technology at Mochena Borago Rockshelter, SW Ethiopia (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Excavations of the Late Pleistocene levels at Mochena Borago Rockshelter in SW Ethiopia, dating >50–35ka, have revealed one of the densest concentrations of modified ochre in eastern Africa. Here we consider technological variations of ochre and associated processing tools through studies of use-wear, trace elemental signatures, and artifact spatial...
Did Arroyo Formation Impact the Occupation of Snake Rock Village, a Fremont Dryland Agricultural Community in Central Utah ca. AD 1000 through 1200? (2023)
This is an abstract from the "The Socioecological Dynamics of Holocene Foragers and Farmers" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Fremont farmers of the northern Colorado Plateau grew maize at the margins of cultivation in western North America. Like other Indigenous farmers throughout the American Southwest, Fremont farmers used bundled agricultural niches where alluvial floodplains were the largest available site for cultivation. But dryland...
Digging Deep: Place-based Variation in Māʻohi Agricultural Production Systems across the Late Pre-Contact Society Islands, French Polynesia (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Supporting Practical Inquiry: The Past, Present, and Future Contributions of Thomas Dye" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Understanding the socio-ecological contexts of past agricultural systems in complex societies requires expansive datasets, particularly when the goal is to mesh top-down and bottom-up perspectives that generate data at different scales of analysis. Here, we bring together ethnohistoric and...
Digging the Anacostia River Landscape: Geoarchaeology and the Buried Past in the National Capital (2018)
The historic Anacostia River valley was a focal point for settlement by local Native American populations as well as European Colonial and post-Colonial populations. However, the valley floor had low-topographic relief, large marshes, and soils prone to erosion, leading to many grand efforts of dredging and land reclamation. Flooding led to further raising of the landscape in the early 20th century, and to the deeper burial of archaeological sites. Fortunately, the Anacostia River valley was...
Digital Archaeology at Sites 16VN3504 and 16VN3508 in Western Louisiana: Digital Preservation in the Face of Climate Change (2024)
This is an abstract from the "*SE The New Normal: Approaches to Studying, Documenting, and Mitigating Climate Change Impacts to Archaeological Sites" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Digital archaeology provides opportunities to help safeguard and disseminate archaeological knowledge in the context of climate change. As environmental shifts intensify, archaeological sites are increasingly at risk, necessitating urgent measures to protect their...
Dirt, dynasties, and devastation in North China: Geoarchaeological perspectives from the Luoyang Basin (2017)
Anthropogenic disturbance of alluvial systems is increasingly influential through time, but the interplay of climatic systems and basin hydrology complicate attempts to fingerprint how humans influence these systems. We evaluate the importance of climate change, fluvial dynamics, and anthropogenic environmental modification in forming the Holocene sedimentary record of the Luoyang Basin, a tributary of the Yellow River, located in western Henan Province, China. Our fieldwork indicates that an...
Dirt, Rocks, and Water: Irrigation Here, There, Then, and Now (2017)
Regional specialists spend most of their time studying many topics in one area. Indeed, it would be next to impossible to be an authority on a region and its complexities if one did otherwise. Topical specialists, travel widely and study numerous variations on a single theme. Each of these specializations has its pros and cons. Neither is superior to the other. They are complementary. This presentation focuses on ancient irrigation in the American Southwest and present-day parallels from other...
Disasters in Temporal Context: Linking the Past and the Present—The RVCC Puerto Rico Hub (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Equity in the Archaeology of Disaster, Past, Present, and Future" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The IPCC 6th Assessment Report (2023) highlights that human-induced climate change triggers widespread and rapid changes that disproportionately affect communities in socially produced conditions of vulnerability to disasters. Academic convergence is needed as we search for solutions. Archaeology stresses that past...
Discerning Paleolithic Places Rather Than Pleistocene Palimpsests: Olival Grande and the Early Upper Paleolithic in Central Portugal (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The expansive, open-air archaeological site of Olival Grande contains the earliest, well-dated Upper Paleolithic assemblage known from the Rio Maior vicinity. Fabric analysis, sedimentology, and geochemistry studies detail manifold site burial mechanisms, very slow rates of deposition, and significant post-depositional processes at the hillslope site. This...
Discovering Landscape Modification through Pollen Data Analysis at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello (2016)
Pollen analysis can advance our understanding of change and spatial variation in the landscape of Thomas Jefferson's Monticello plantation from its initial settlement in the 18th century to the present. In this poster, we present and evaluate data from an intensive, multi-year campaign of stratigraphic sampling conducted in the largely ornamental mountaintop landscape immediately surrounding Jefferson's mansion. Comparing these data to stratigraphic samples not from Monticello Mountain allows us...