Geoarchaeology (Other Keyword)
501-525 (619 Records)
Archaeologists have investigated many aspects of rockshelters in the Bighorn Basin, Wyoming, but questions remain about the role of these sites within regional settlement patterns. It is clear that the Bighorn Basin is a moisture-controlled ecosystem and that variability in environmental moisture levels produces dramatic changes in both animal and plant populations. Changes in environmental moisture also appear to affect human population levels, and past settlement and subsistence patterns. This...
The role of pedogenesis in palaeosols of Mexico basin and its implication in the paleoenvironmental reconstruction (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Legacies of The Basin of Mexico: The Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization, Part 1" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Most of the paleoenvironmental information for the Basin of Mexico for the basin comes from sedimentary proxies, which unfortunately are incomplete for the terminal Pleistocene and the Holocene. In this paper, we present a temporal and spatial reconstruction of past soil cover in the...
Roques de García Rockshelter: Preliminary Results from Micromorphological and Biomarker Analysis from a Combustion Structure (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 Roques the García rockshelter is an aboriginal site located in Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. Its archaeosedimentary sequence is characterised by a high presence of combustion structures. In this study we present the preliminary results from a micromorphological and biomarker analysis of one of the structures.
Sakwitz’ob: There’s Gypsum in Them Thar Hills (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster documents the discovery in 2018 of a large ancient Maya gypsum quarry in southern Campeche, Mexico. The quarry extensively mined a regionally prominent hill (witz), likely making it a white beacon within the ancient landscape. Nearby sites appear to include gypsum workshops. Gypsum mines have also been recently discovered near El Zotz, Peten. We...
Salt Pollution and Climate Change at Chaco Canyon, New Mexico (2016)
In order to determine if the water management systems of ancestral Puebloans caused salt pollution during periods of climatic change and increased aridity, sediment samples were collected from ancient irrigation features and reservoirs in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. Today, these features are filled with sediments. Periods of climate change were determined with AMS radiocarbon and OSL dating. Soil salinity was measured using a conductivity cell and plotted against age in order to illustrate changes...
Sand Dunes and Related Eolian Features of the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley (1978)
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.
Sand, Rivers, Glacial Lakes and the Prairie-Forest Border: A Doc Holliday Student Heads North (2018)
In this paper I link ongoing research along the eastern shore of Glacial Lake Agassiz (GLA) to Doc Holliday, the person who made it possible. Doc instilled in his students an interdisciplinary mind-set, and taught them to emphasize archaeological questions first and to consider past human groups as active agents of paleoenvironmental change as well as sophisticated responders to it. My research up North began where the ancestral Sheyenne River entered GLA from the west. After patient mentoring...
Sea Level Rise and Shell Mound Inundation within the Islais Creek Estuary, San Francisco, California (2018)
Situated on the southeast edge of San Francisco, the Islais Creek estuary was infilled during early development of the city. Recent geoarchaeological coring searching for prehistoric sites underlying this urban landscape has documented a complex sequence of Holocene landforms deposited as sea level rise transformed the ancestral Islais Creek valley. This exploratory work also identified, in a variety of stratigraphic contexts, an extensive ancestral Native American shell mound that was occupied...
Searching for Clues of Neanderthal Occupation and Mobility in Combustion Structure Residues: A Micromorphological and Biomarker Study of El Salt Unit Xb, Alcoy, Spain (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 Neanderthal lithic and faunal record shows a short-term occupation, high mobility trend throughout Eurasia. Although combustion structures, which are numerous and well preserved in most Middle Paleolithic sites, play a central role in short-term occupations, they have not been sufficiently investigated from a...
Searching for Late Pleistocene Deposits: Recent Geoarchaeological Investigations of the Aucilla River, Florida (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Liquid Landscapes: Recent Developments in Submerged Landscape Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Within the mid-channel sinkholes of the modern Aucilla River in northwest Florida, dozens of late Pleistocene archaeological sites lie inundated in both surficial and buried contexts. Despite four decades of dedicated research, however, only three of these sites have been securely dated with geoarchaeological...
Searching for the Early Archaeological Record in the Big Bend Region of Southwest Texas: A Lithostratigraphic Approach (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. During the 1930s and 1940s, Kirk Bryan and Claude C. Albritton Jr. studied the stratigraphy of late Quaternary alluvial fills in the Chihuahuan Desert of the Big Bend region, southwest Texas. A significant outcome of that work was the recognition of three stratigraphic units that were differentiated based on...
Searching for the First Americans Along Oregon’s Ancient Coast: New Methods and Upcoming Research (2017)
To date, efforts to search for and investigate Pleistocene-aged sites along the Northwest Coast have been largely limited to subaerial landforms and deposits. Beginning in 2017, the search for early coastal sites will extend onto Oregon’s outer continental shelf. These search efforts will be supported by the use of a GIS-based model that makes predictions about the foraging potential of reconstructed late Pleistocene-aged coastal landscapes. We review the modeling methodology and how...
Searching Oregon’s Outer Continental Shelf for Submerged First Americans Sites: Theory, Methods, and Recent Discoveries (2018)
If the First Americans initially migrated into the New World from northeastern Asia along a coastal route, we should expect to find the earliest evidence of human occupation in the Americas in submerged sites along the northeastern Pacific Rim. Late Pleistocene-aged human coastal migrants would undoubtedly exploit high ecological productivity zones of ancient estuaries and bays that once existed along paleocoastal landscapes. A systematic approach to the discovery of First Americans coastal...
Secrets from Within the Shell: Exploring the Differences between Shell-Bearing and Shell-Free Deposits at 40DV307 along the Cumberland River, Tennessee, USA. (2016)
The Bell Site is a multicomponent prehistoric site located along the Cumberland River in Central Tennessee. Archaeological fieldwork conducted in the summer of 2010 and 2012, including riverbank profiling, auger testing, unit excavation, and column sampling, revealed a long and dynamic occupational history of the site. Here, we integrate multiple lines of evidence including paleoethnobotany, zooarchaeology, and geoarchaeology, to unravel the site's complex (pre)history and explore the functional...
Sediment Geochemistry and Household Spatial Analysis: Social Organization and Housepit Floors from Three Millennia of Occupation at the Slocan Narrows Site, Interior Pacific Northwest (2018)
House floors in archaeological contexts often lack the density of artifacts and in situ placement to be able to fully reconstruct the spatial organization of activities. Geochemical analyses of sediments provide an alternative line of evidence for understanding household organization and potentially changing social systems. This study presents geochemical analyses of living floors from several pithouses at the Slocan Narrows site in the Upper Columbia river area of interior British Columbia. In...
A Sediment Granulometry Approach to Anthropogenic Landscape Impacts (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sediment granulometry, also known as Particle Size Distribution Analysis (PSDA), is the analysis of the frequency of differently sized particles present in a sediment sample. I present a new workflow for applying PSDA to understanding past human impacts at the landscape scale. The workflow combines PSDA of both the fine (0.1 to 1,000 microns) and coarse...
Sedimentary and Taphonomic Contexts of Quaternary Vertebrate Fossils in the Northern Rocky Mountains (2018)
Quaternary vertebrate assemblages from the northern Rocky Mountains can be used to understand the biogeographic consequences of climate change. Some localities contain strata from before the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), while others consist mostly of Late Glacial and Holocene deposits. The Merrell Local Fauna is from a stratigraphic sequence in Centennial Valley. Radiocarbon dates range from >52,000 to 19,000 BP and fossils are in lacustrine deposits, fluvial sediments, and a debris flow. The...
Sediments as Artifacts: Geoarchaeological Analyses for the Understanding of Social Processes and Subsistance Strategies (2016)
Caribbean and Lowland Neotropical archaeology has emphasized the importance of human relations with their environments, from plant and animal domestication to ceramic production, agriculture, and settlement patterns. However, in most excavations, sediments have often been overlooked and simply discarded without further consideration. Sediments hold the micro and macroscopic evidence of human behavior in the past. By ignoring them, we ignore important pieces of the puzzle that can help us ask and...
Settlement and the environment in the northwestern Great Basin (2016)
The Holocene in the northwest Great Basin is characterized by episodes of severe drought punctuated by abundant rainfall. Prehistoric people settled widely across the area against this variable ecological backdrop. Excavations for the Ruby Pipeline project have produced a wealth of data on prehistoric settlement patterns and chronologies in the northwestern Great Basin. In this paper, multiple lines of evidence are used to reconstruct chronologies of occupation that have been obscured by...
Shaheen: Early Holocene to Contact (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Shaheen area on the west coast of Prince of Wales Island, Southeast Alaska is a crenulated stretch of coastline protected from outside waters and fed by multiple freshwater streams. Paleoshoreline modeling following Carlson and Baichtal's predictive model (2015) suggested areas suitable for early Holocene settlement. Recent investigations have identified...
Shared Practices and Identities in the Northern Settlement of Actuncan, Belize (2015)
This poster examines how urban families developed and shared neighborhood identities at the Maya city of Actuncan, Belize, ca. AD 800-900, a time when the city experienced rapid population growth as surrounding centers, including Xunantunich, declined. To investigate household relationships, this research considers the nature and location of activity patterns in and around three commoner households to infer shared practices and the shared identities that those activities both enabled and...
A Shell Mound in a Rockshelter? Geoarchaeological Analysis of Shell-bearing Facies at Maximiano Rockshelter, Iporanga County, São Paulo State, SE Brazil (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Maximiano archaeological site consists of a limestone rockshelter embedded in the Brazilian tropical Atlantic Forest of SE Brazil. Excavated in the late 1970s by an amateur archaeologist, this 40 × 5 × 3 m rockshelter setting contains lithics, bone artifacts, and faunal and human remains dating between ~11,712 and 6796 cal yr BP. Located in a region...
Simmons at DRI: Years of Famine and Triumph (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Pushing the Envelope, Chasing Stone Age Sailors and Early Agriculture: Papers in Honor of the Career of Alan H. Simmons" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Prior to his long and distinguished professorial career at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, Alan Simmons spent eight years in Reno at the Desert Research Institute (DRI), an independent soft-money component of Nevada’s university system. For a young Near Eastern...
Site Formation and Karst Processes during the Last Glacial Cycle at Lapa Do Picareiro, Portugal (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Paleolithic cave site of Lapa do Picareiro is located on the upper slopes of the Serra de Aire limestone massif (571 m asl) about 100 km northeast of Lisbon, Portugal. The cave is a single chamber (15 × 15 m) with >10 m of sedimentary fill, mostly limestone éboulis clasts and muddy sediment in pore spaces. During the last glacial stage, the cave...
Site Formation Processes at the Spring Valley Site (23CT389), Ozark National Scenic Riverways, Southeast Missouri (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Spring Valley site (23CT389) is a stratified, multicomponent site associated with a co-alluvial fan in the Ozark National Scenic Riverways, southeast Missouri. Temporally diagnostic bifaces indicate components dating from the Middle Paleoindian to the Middle Archaic periods (ca. 10,800-5,500 14C yr BP). A detailed study of site formation process at 23CT389...