Geoarchaeology (Other Keyword)
526-550 (619 Records)
Woodpecker Cave is a small, limestone rock shelter occurring on a drainage of the Coralville Reservoir in Johnson Country, Iowa. The site was originally excavated in 1956 by Warren Caldwell and has been the home of the University of Iowa archaeological field school from 2012 to 2016. The University of Iowa excavations identified Late and Terminal Woodland materials with a high concentration of roofspall contributing to the archaeological deposits. When combined with recent terrestrial LIDAR...
Social geoarchaeology: A case study of structural organization at Peyre Blanque, Ariège (2015)
Recent studies of structural remains at Magdalenian open-air sites have provided valuable insights into patterns of occupation and intra-site spatial organization. However, interpretations of activities that may have occurred within the structures have primarily been limited to understandings of the repetition and duration of such activities. Determining more detailed use-of-space within the structures has been challenging at many sites due to site disturbance, not only from natural and...
Soil and Water Chemistry: Aguada Fenix, Tabasco and Northern Belize (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Preclassic Maya Social Transformations along the Usumacinta: Views from Ceibal and Aguada Fénix" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Most of the Yucatan has no vestige of rivers; humans and ecosystems rely on rainwater catchment and soil and ground water. Along the southern margins of the Peninsula, however, lie rivers in Belize and Quintana Roo to the southeast and Tabasco and Campeche to the southwest. This paper...
Soil and Water Management in the South Kohala Field System, Hawai‘i Island (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Geospatial Studies in the Archaeology of Oceania" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The South Kohala Field System (SKFS), Hawai‘i Island, is a network of contoured and sloping field borders first constructed in the prehistoric period but utilized into the 19th century. Many features are located below the 750 mm rainfall isohyet, the lower boundary for rainfed agriculture in Hawai‘i. In order to sustain agriculture in...
Soil Carbon Persistence and Influence in the Early Anthropocene of the Maya Lowlands (2023)
This is an abstract from the "2023 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Timothy Beach Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Coupled studies of Maya Lowlands soils and geoarchaeological exploration provide insight into neotropical soil and atmospheric carbon cycle dynamics in space and time, and soil carbon’s role in defining the Early Anthropocene. This paper tests the hypothesis that soil carbon persistence differs in time, space, and...
Soil Chemical Analysis of the Floors of Walled Enclosures within the Mirador Basin (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Multidisciplinary Investigations in the Mirador Basin, Guatemala" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Geochemical analyses of soils and floors have proven useful in the interpretation of ancient human activities. Lidar images of the Mirador basin have brought to light Preclassic walled enclosures in the Mirador basin. Soil chemical analysis in combination with lidar and excavation data helped determine the ancient...
Soil Chemical Traces of Ancient Human Activities at Montezuma Village, UT (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Research in Montezuma Canyon, San Juan County, Utah" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Many of the elements associated with foodstuffs and mineral ores were deposited in the surface of soils and floors of ancient dwellings. Phosphorus and certain heavy metals remain chemically sorbed on soil and floor particles. Soil samples were collected from ancient patios of two structures associated with the...
Soil Conservation Past and Present: A Study of Archaeological Raised Fields in North Coastal Peru (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Humble Houses to Magnificent Monuments: Papers in Honor of Jerry D. Moore" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Casma Valley, on the central-northern coast of Peru, is home to a relatively unique system of raised agricultural fields. Relicts of prehispanic culture, these fields are unusually well preserved. The most significant research on these fields was completed by Jerry Moore, along with excavations of the nearby...
Soil Fertility and Chronology at the RapaNui Rano Raraku Megalithic Statue Quarry (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. Rano Raraku on Easter Island (RapaNui) is famous as the source of the megalithic moai statues. Past research by the Easter Island Statue Project (EISP) documented and mapped the statues. Other studies, based on coring the freshwater lake in Rano Raraku, identified microbotanical evidence of a cultivated landscape inside the...
Soil Nutrient Variability in the South Kohala Field System, Hawai‘i Island (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The uplands of Kawaihae 1 ahupua‘a, Hawai‘i Island, contain a dense fixed-field agricultural field system built, utilized, and occupied by Hawaiians from as early as the 17th century into the 19th – early 20th century. This field system includes a diverse array of agricultural practices including fixed-field agriculture, planting mounds, terracing, and water...
Soil Quality and Agricultural Productivity of Eolian Landscapes in Petrified Forest National Park (2018)
The Petrified Forest National Park in northeastern Arizona contains extensive sand sheets and dunes. Archaeologists have long recognized the importance of the eolian landscape for prehistoric agriculture. Archaeological sites dating from c. 200-1400 A.D. correlate with eolian landscape features, which suggests that eolian soils were used for dry-farmed dune agriculture. Eolian soils are not always conducive to dry-farmed agriculture; however, dune farming is known ethnographically, and has been...
Soils in Archaeology (1992)
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.
Soils, Sedimentary Rocks, and Scale: Recent Geoarchaeological Investigations at Colha, Northern Belize (2018)
The Maya site of Colha is located on a karstic doline that is dominated by Tertiary and Pleistocene limestone and marls. This low-lying area, known locally as the Cobweb depression, encompasses a complex wetland system that is affected by Holocene sea level rise, human-induced vegetation changes, and both natural and anthropogenic erosional sequences. The dynamic landscape, coupled with a long history of human occupation, places this site in a complex geographic and cultural position within the...
Soils, Sediments, Archaeology, Micromorphology, and Vance Holliday (2018)
Soils are different from sediments. Many of these differences have been revealed by Vance Holliday during his career, through field work and numerous publications that have significantly influenced all disciplines. Nevertheless, there is a tendency to treat any soft stuff that is being excavated as "soil", and this confusion needs to be continuously corrected. Here, I present a number of examples of the use of archaeological micromorphology to highlight the distinctions between soils and...
Sourcing a Secret Recipe: An XRF Study of Barbadian Ceramics (2015)
During the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, enslaved African and poor white potters produced redware vessels in eastern parishes across the British Caribbean Island of Barbados. While potters predominantly catered to the burgeoning Barbadian sugar industry, they also crafted domestic vessel forms that emerged as key fixtures in local markets. Despite their economic impact, Barbadian potters are archaeologically invisible: The utilitarian wares they produced are nearly identical to...
Sourcing a State: A Systematic Survey and Statistical Analysis of Wyoming Archaeological Assemblages of Lithic Raw Materials (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This pilot study will systematize the spatial distribution of lithic raw materials in Wyoming by using statistical methods. It revisits decades of curated assemblages from the University of Wyoming Archaeological Repository and places them on the geological landscape using GIS and cluster analyses. Through a systematic sampling strategy of the lithic raw...
Sourcing Building Stones in the Ancient Mediterranean: A Review of 25 Years of Provenance Research at the Wiener Laboratory (2018)
From its very inception, the Wiener Laboratory at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens has fostered and supported the integration of geological techniques and methodologies into archaeological research programs in the eastern Mediterranean Basin. One such area of focus includes provenance studies of rocks used in architectural and sculptural programs spanning from the prehistoric to Late Antiquity. By tracing the source quarries of ancient artifacts and features, archaeologists...
Sourcing the Black "Marble" Knight’s Tombstone at Jamestown, Virginia, USA (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Opening the Vault: What Collections Can Say About Jamestown’s Global Trade Network", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The goal of this project was to determine the source of Jamestown’s Knight’s tombstone. From 1627, it is the oldest such tombstone in the Chesapeake Bay, USA region. We chose a geoarchaeological approach using the fossils contained in the stone to determine its source. We sampled two archived...
Spatial and Sedimentological Analyses of Redeposited Paleoindian Projectile Points from McFaddin Beach, Texas (2016)
McFaddin Beach (41JF50), in Jefferson County, Texas, is a 32 kilometer-long beach, stretching from High Island in the west to Sea Rim State Park (next to the mouth of the Sabine River) in the east. Since the 1950s, artifacts from almost all periods of Texas pre-history have been recovered on this beach. The projectile points found on McFaddin Beach are redeposited material from an offshore, submerged location. Results indicate that projectile point distribution is significantly correlated to...
Spatial and Small-scale Geoarchaeological Analysis of a Middle Archaic Antelope Trap in Northeastern Nevada, U.S.A. (2015)
Great Basin Antelope Traps are ideal laboratories due to their feature system level focus on one set of subsistence behaviors (antelope hunting). By combining data collected using LiDAR, GPS and GIS, our analysis in the Liza Jane Trap focused on the spatial patterning of lithic artifacts and the location of small-scale landforms. The geoarchaeological analysis indicates relatively stable landforms modified by cultural-transforms. Analysis to locate small-scale landforms was performed to locate...
Spring Creek Drainage - Geoarchaeological Explorations along the Southern High Plains Eastern Escarpment, Northwest Texas (2018)
The Spring Creek drainage, part of the upper Brazos River system, is located along the Southern High Plains eastern escarpment breaks near Post, Texas. Steep and confined vertical channel incision typifies the breaks and the drainage is and was fed by numerous springs emanating from the Ogallala Formation. Geoarchaeological research along a 774m transect from Macy Fork to 222m below its confluence with Spring Creek proper has documented a continual depositional record spanning the latest...
Stable Isotope Analysis Applied to the Reconstruction of Paleoenvironment and Landscape Use during the Middle and Early Upper Paleolithic at Üçağızlı I and II, South-Central Turkey (2018)
Stable isotope analysis of δ13C and δ18O in herbivore tooth enamel from the archaeological sites of Üçağızlı I and II in south-central Turkey is used to explore human responses to environmental change during MIS 3 in the eastern Mediterranean. Although changes through time in local ambient moisture are associated with changes in the local animal communities, they generally do not correlate with proxies for site occupation intensity, and thus do not indicate depopulation or shorter site stays...
Staying Afloat: A Comparative Case Study of Angkor Wat and Tikal’s Management of Water (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation is a large-scale comparative case study of two distinct regions to see how their use and control of water was similar given their environments but different from social, political, and cultural perspectives. Specifically, I examine the sociopolitical nature of Angkor Wat as an expression of ancient Khmer culture and the Classic Maya city of...
Stratigraphic Evidence for Large Floods in Canal System 2, Phoenix, Arizona (2015)
Recent excavations conducted downstream from Park of Four Waters have provided new evidence of damaging floods within System 2 between AD 1050-1400. Two main canals contain stratigraphic evidence of uncontrolled Salt River. One canal (Hagenstad) contains evidence for two floods, the last one causing the alignment to be abandoned. The other canal (Woodbury's North), contains a flood deposit that filled the channel and led to its abandonment. A combination of ceramic, 14C, and luminescence ages...
Stratigraphy and Radiocarbon Chronology at McDonald Creek: A Multicomponent Pleistocene-Holocene Site in Central Alaska (2021)
This is an abstract from the "McDonald Creek and Blair Lakes: Late Pleistocene-Holocene Human Activity in the Tanana Flats of Central Alaska" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. McDonald Creek, located in the Tanana Flats ~55 km south of Fairbanks, Alaska, rests on an isolated remnant of an ancient alluvial terrace of the Tanana River that hugs the southeast corner of a monadnock rising from the flats. While testing the site, we discovered a...