Geoarchaeology (Other Keyword)
76-100 (713 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Coastal Environments in Archaeology: Ancient Life, Lore, and Landscapes" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Some of the most immense anthropogenic shell-bearing archaeological sites in North America are located in and around the Prince Rupert Harbour, on the northern coast of British Columbia. The largest ancient villages have shell deposits upward of 10 m deep and over a hectare in area, resulting from a combination of...
Built Environments of Epipalaeolithic Southwest Asia: A Life History of Place (2019)
This is an abstract from the "More Than Shelter from the Storm: Hunter-Gatherer Houses and the Built Environment" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A place is structured and given meaning through human experiences at both individual and group levels. Places are created through repeated human action and made tangible in the landscape by material culture. These places become part of a built environment, marked by daily routines or habitus. At the...
Buried Soils and Human-Environment Interactions within the Three Rivers Region of Northwest 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. This paper reports on recent excavations from the Birds of Paradise wetland field complex where we studied an ancient ancillary structure situated among wetland fields along the lower Rio Bravo of northwest Belize. Here we synthesize previous studies from this broader wetland field complex that includes...
Calixtlahuaca Archaeological Project
This project will archive data and materials from the Calixtlahuaca Archaeological Project, a NSF-funded fieldwork investigation of an Aztec-period urban center near Toluca, Mexico.
Canals, Sacbeob and Defining Space in Ditched Agricultural Fields in the Three Rivers Region, Northwestern Belize (2018)
In 2016 the Northwestern Belize Lidar Consortium acquired nearly 300 square km of LiDAR imagery that covers large areas of ancient Maya agricultural systems, including ditched and raised fields, reservoirs, terraces, and sacbeob. This new imagery allows us to map beneath the canopy and shows that over nearly 20 years without LiDAR we studied only a small spatial sample of these complex systems. We have tested these systems with multiple excavations, and used multiple proxies such as...
Carbon Legacies of Dryland Agricultural Features in the Ancient Southwest (2018)
This paper presents the results of a meta-analysis of soil organic carbon measurements associated with pre-Columbian dryland agricultural fields in the southwestern U.S. and northwestern Mexico. In aggregate, rock alignments and terraces are associated with significantly higher organic carbon concentrations, and this effect is pronounced in sandy parent material. The results support a hypothesis that resource conserving features constructed by indigenous farmers continue to influence the ecology...
The Cascade Phase at the Kelly Forks Work Center Site, Idaho: Exploring Regional Variability Across the Intermountain West (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Cascade Phase archaeological culture has been recognized across a broad region of the Intermountain West including the Northern Rocky Mountains, Columbia Plateau, and Great Basin. Cascade Phase sites typically date to the early to middle Holocene period and are identified by a suite of stone tool types including foliate Cascade projectile points and a...
Cast Your Nets: The Island Economy and Ecology of Gotland Within the Larger Viking World (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In recent decades, more archaeological scholarships have been dedicated to understanding the types of exchanges that were occurring in the Viking world in the early Medieval period. Particularly, Gotland remains one of the key trading centers regarding smithed exported silver. Looking broadly at Gotland and its relations to other periphery sites, such as...
Castellated Rims and Silica Bodies: Rethinking Valdivia (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Innovations in Ecuadorian Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Initial attempts to explain the origins of pottery on the coast of Ecuador and in the rest of the Americas focused on transpacific contact. During the last few decades this debate has quieted as the Vegas and Valdivia phases of southwest Ecuador became better known. Nevertheless, there has remained a chronological hiatus between the two...
The Cave-Pyramid Complex: An Assessment of Its Impact after 25 Years (2023)
This is an abstract from the "The Subterranean in Mesoamerican Cultural Landscapes" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the 25 years since the publication of “Settlement Configuration and Cosmology: The Role of Caves at Dos Pilas,” a number of significant discoveries of architecture constructed in relation to caves have been made. The discovery of the man-made cave constructed beneath the Pyramid of the Plumed Serpent at Teotihuacan is perhaps the...
Cavetuns: Unexplored Theoretical Implications of a Discovery at Mul Ch’en Witz, La Milpa, Belize (2018)
In June of 2017, the Contested Caves Archaeological Project (CCAP), explored what was thought to be a partially capped chultun at the site of La Milpa, Belize. On entering, however, it became clear that the feature was actually a small, natural cave with a classic chultun-style entrance carved into it. Two of the cave’s three chambers contained small pools of water, which receded into the porous limestone, within days of their discovery. The pools make any possibility of storage infeasible...
The Central Plains Archaeological Survey: A Preliminary Report (2016)
Over the past five years, the authors have conducted a geoarchaeological survey in Northern Henan Province, China, to test three hypotheses of regional and global significance. First, many Chinese archaeologists consider this area void of archaeological remains. Based on our data, most archaeological material is far below the surface - approximately 5 to 8 meters. Second, the location of the Yellow River during the Bronze Age year is argued to flow to the south, entering the ocean near Shanghai....
Chaco Roads Project, Phase I: a Reappraisal of Prehistoric Roads in the San Juan Basin (1983)
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.
Chacoan Outlier Depopulation and 12th Century Arroyo Cutting near Zuni Salt Lake, New Mexico (2018)
Depopulation of Chacoan outlier settlements in the Cibola culture area near Zuni Salt Lake ~AD 1130 has been attributed to the onset of a persistent 50-year drought. Prior alluvial stratigraphy studies concluded that arroyo formation near these settlements occurred two centuries after this exodus and therefore was not a contributing factor. The present study used a larger sample of radiocarbon dates, including short-lived, charred plant material from alluvial contexts and tree-rings from several...
Challenges and opportunities of archeology in urban parks: An example from the Arch (2015)
Jefferson National Expansion Memorial is an anomaly in the National Park Service. The park was designated in 1935 as the first national historic site, memorializing America’s westward expansion, yet it is best known for the Gateway Arch, a modernist monument that towers over the city. Archaeological information from the St. Louis riverfront is sparse, but the park is located in an area that was densely settled from prehistory to the beginning of the twentieth century. In the late 1930s, NPS...
Changing landscapes of the Paleolithic/Neolithic transition in Taiwan (2017)
Toward understanding the Paleolithic/Neolithic transition in Taiwan, a paleo-terrain approach allows reconstruction of the ancient landforms and habitats of where people lived. Those ancient contexts help for us to situate the activities of people using their landscapes in different ways at intervals of 7000, 6000, 5000, and 4000 years ago. This approach needs to account for significant change in tectonic movement of land masses, slope erosion and re-deposition patterns, fluctuating sea level,...
A Characterization of Site Formation Processes at FxJj34, Northen Kenya (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Any inference of behavior based upon the spatial distribution of archaeological material requires an understanding of site formation processes. Natural agents, such as water flow, may be responsible for post-depositional alteration of buried materials and can result in spatial patterns which mask the behavioral processes associated with the initial deposition...
Charred Organic Matter in the Middle and Later Stone Record in South Africa: Exploring Multiple Anthropogenic Processes and Origins (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. Middle and Later Stone caves and rockshelters in South Africa are commonly rich in organic matter. The formation history of the organic component in the archaeological deposits is still unclear and several natural and anthropogenic processes can be considered. This paper will focus on a discussion of possible anthropogenic...
Chemical Diagenesis of Charcoal and Charred Organic Material in South African Middle Stone Age Rockshelter Sites (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. Several South African Middle Stone Age (MSA) sites contain deposits rich in anthropogenic materials whose preservation was impacted by extreme burial environments. The specific chemistries of the burial environments are evidenced by dissolution of archaeological materials and/or precipitation of secondary minerals. In sites...
A Chesapeake Bay Paleoindian Legacy: Marine Transgression, Shoreline Erosion, and Archaeology (2018)
The Chesapeake Bay at present encompasses approximately 4,479 square miles of estuarine water and it contains almost 12,000 linear miles of coastline. Numerous archaeological sites occur along the margins of the bay and its tributaries. Thousands of these sites are regularly threatened by the daily onslaught of wind and wave activity. The Delmarva Peninsula, which encompasses the eastern margins of the bay, has revealed approximately 350 Clovis-style fluted projectile points. Later and...
Chronological Investigations at Coastal Shell Mounds, Southeastern Brazil (2018)
Shell mounds (sambaquis) are a focus of scientific interest in Brazilian archaeology since the 1950´s and also for interdisciplinary approaches. Located along the Brazilian coast from north to south, they present geographical and chronological variabilities. This paper discusses the chronological aspects of large and small sized shell mounds located on the coast of São Paulo State, Southeastern Brazil. Radiocarbon dates suggest a long occupation of coastal hunter-gatherer-fisher groups spanning...
Chronometry at Bear Creek, a ~12,000 Year-Old Site in Western Washington (2017)
Extant deposits at the Bear Creek site are highly compositionally variable, including fibrous peat, fluvial sands, volcanic tephra, and diatomaceous earth, reflecting a series of significant Holocene changes to the local environment. Multiple methods were used to directly date each of these sediments, including radiocarbon dating, single-grain IRSL dating of feldspar, OSL dating of fine-grained quartz, and tephra dating. Results from independent chronometric methods were then integrated with...
Circum-Atlantic Responses to the Late Antique Little Ice Age (536-660 CE) (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Studies of North Atlantic cultures around the margins of the Bermuda Azores Subtropical High offer opportunities to observe parallel impacts on cultures on both sides of an ocean on four continents (Americas, Eurasia, Africa) as changes in global average temperatures influence the size and position of the High. Of special interest is the influence of the...
Cities of Clay: the Geoarchaeology of Tells (1986)
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.
Climate and Culture in the Caribbean and Western Atlantic Regions (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in the Archaeology of the Bahama Archipelago" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The islands of the Lesser and Greater Antilles were permanently settled as early as 8000 ybp, but the earliest human presence in the Bahama archipelago is dated ~1200 ybp, some 6700 years later. It has been noted that a connection between climate variations in the Caribbean/West Atlantic region may be the key to understanding the...