Landscape Archaeology (Other Keyword)
526-550 (664 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Wilfredo Gambini, the then mayor of the Caceres District (upper Nepeña River Valley) Ancash, Peru, encouraged local campesinos to bring him any artifacts that were found in their local hamlets for his private collecting. From these interactions he compiled a database of archaeological complexes for the region, despite only...
Roads, Canals, and Agricultural Fields: Widespread Landscape Development Across Chapin Mesa, Mesa Verde National Park (2018)
Constructed roads affiliated with Ancestral Pueblo great house architecture are well documented in the cultural landscape of Chaco Canyon and elsewhere across the Colorado Plateau, but the potential for such features has received little attention on the Mesa Verde cuesta. This project examines the archaeological background and provides new insight into one such feature in Mesa Verde National Park. This feature, variously interpreted as a trail, road, and a canal, has been enshrouded in...
Rock Art at Chalcatzingo, Morelos: Methodology and Techniques for Recording, Documenting and Elaborating Preservation Strategies (2018)
This presentation describes the process of recording and documenting the pictographs found at the site of Chalcatzingo, Morelos, in central Mexico. It shows the way in which state of the art technology is used for the first time at the site for this purpose. Iconographic analysis, landscape archaeology and the analysis of painting techniques and materials are as well employed to enrich the interpretation of rock art at the site. Upon this basis we elaborate a hypothesis about their relations...
A Rock Art Depiction of a Desert Kite Hunting Drive Trap (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A recently discovered petroglyph panel in the Har Tzuriaz region of the southern Negev, Israel, depicts a typical desert kite, a form of drive trap used for millennia to hunt gazelle. The depiction closely approximates an actual desert kite located less than a kilometer away, but not in direct line of sight....
A Rural Travel Stopover at the Late Postclassic Maya Site of Mensabak, Chiapas, Mexico: Overland Trade, Cross-Cultural Interaction, and Social Cohesion in the Chiapas Frontier (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Dynamic Frontiers in the Archaeology of Chiapas" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A small rural stopover site in the frontier along overland Late Postclassic (ca. 1300–1500 CE) Maya and Aztec trade and travel routes was identified at Mensabak, Chiapas, Mexico. This site is similar in function to rural Old World and Andean caravan stop overs, such as caravanserai and way stations, where travelers and traders obtained...
The Sacred Landscape of Xunantunich, Belize (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Manifesting Movement Materially: Broadening the Mesoamerican View" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Early Maya communities centered themselves within a broader sacred landscape imbued with meaning through ritual practices. Centuries of movement through the landscape converted spaces into places that were deeply rooted in cosmology and social memory. Ritual practices at the center of the community and important places in...
Sacred Places and Rock Art Sites in the Sonoran Desert: Defining Common Patterns (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Sacred Southwestern Landscapes: Archaeologies of Religious Ecology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Based on landscape archaeology, achaeoastronomy, the analysis of rock art iconography, and ethnohistoric and ethnographic documents, this paper proposes to define the factors that determine the sacredness of rock art sites in the Sonoran Desert. Well characterized common patterns can be found in most of the rock art...
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...
San Juan Redware Economy: Tracking the Pottery of Montezuma Canyon to the Great Sage Plain (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. Montezuma Canyon, in extreme southeast Utah, was home to large populations during the Basketmaker III through PIII period (AD 500-1300). Potters located throughout this deeply-incised, 73 km long north-south running canyon, produced San Juan Redware pottery in abundance well-beyond the needs of the village. ...
The San Lorenzo Geospatial Project: Mapping the Olmec City and Landscape (2016)
For the past decade, we have applied a series of nested geospatial techniques to better understand the development and evolution of the Olmec city of San Lorenzo and the surrounding regional landscape. Built on a foundation of more than two decades of traditional archaeological excavation, settlement survey and artifact analysis, the geospatial project expands the coverage and confirms much of what is known about San Lorenzo’s evolution and settlement ecology. The project also provides...
Santuarios Mixtecos de origen precolonial: Una herencia viva (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Checking the Pulse: Current Research in Oaxaca Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. El tema de los santuarios y paisajes sagrados de origen precolonial en Ñuu Savi o Mixteca lo he estado investigado desde la arqueología, antropología, los códices y documentos coloniales. También han sido fundamentales las experiencias y aprendizajes que he tenido en diferentes rituales mixtecos. De esta manera, en esta plática me...
Satellite Remote Sensing and Archaeological Survey in Central and Western Regions, Ghana (2018)
Humans have inhabited southern Ghanaian forest for millennia, and nearly everywhere there are traces of human activity in the deep past. This paper discusses my integration of satellite remote sensing with traditional archaeological field methods to study longue durée continuity and transformation in both West African societies and the landscape itself. I am consolidating previous survey data and expanding upon them using several methods of archaeological survey and remote sensing with the...
Scarred Traces: Trees as Artifacts on the Northern Rio Grande (2018)
In the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument, at the confluence of the Rio Grande and the Red River, groups of ponderosa pine trees are dotted with peeled trees, scarred by surrounding animals and weather as well as by human consumption of the trees’ cambium. In most considerations of inner bark utilization, the threat of starvation is posited as the key motivation for bark-peeling. This landscape, however, lends itself to narratives that use trees as artifacts, among the full breadth of survey...
The Scatter between the Scatter between the Patches: A Tephrostratigraphic Approach to Low-density Archaeological Sites in the Eastern Lake Victoria Basin of Kenya (2017)
Among recent groups, foraging activities are unevenly distributed across the landscape. Archaeological traces of past foragers are also spatially variable as a result of multiple factors, including the redundancy of site use, a bias towards tasks that leave well-defined material traces likely to preserve into the present (e.g., stone tool manufacture), and local sedimentological factors that mediate site preservation through burial as well as subsequent recovery through erosion or excavation....
Sculpting the Landscape: Analyzing the Formative-Classic Period Built Environment at Los Guachimontones, Jalisco (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Regional and Intensive Site Survey: Case Studies from Mesoamerica" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Los Guachimontones is the quintessential and largest archaeological site of the Teuchitlán tradition or culture. Despite this, until recently our understanding of the site has been hampered in part by an overemphasis on excavations in the largest, most monumental guachimontón (or circular architectural groups). However,...
The Search for the Primary Source of Kings Canyon/La Poudre Pass Obsidian in Colorado (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During field survey in 2011, archaeologists for the Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest discovered obsidian nodules contained in ancient alluvial gravels of the Miocene North Park formation in Jackson County, Colorado. The Northwest Research Obsidian Studies Laboratory in Corvallis, Oregon, analyzed this obsidian using ED-XRF and determined that it was...
Searching for Cities: Problems and Solution in Tracing Han Dynasty Settlements in Nanyang and Ankang, China (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Populations of Early Medieval China: Developing Anthropological Approaches to Historical Archaeology in China" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents the results of technology assisted ceramic surveys, interviews, and GIS analysis undertaken in the Nanyang Basin during the summer of 2022. The Nanyang Basin has been the site of continuous human occupation for at least 5,000 years. While prehistoric sites...
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 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...
Seasonal Visibility and the Panoptic Plantation: Exploring the Use of “Fertile” Landscapes and 3D GIS Visualization Technologies on Plantationscapes (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Landscape approaches utilizing line-of-sight profiles and viewsheds to compute intervisibility are far from new techniques in archaeological research. Various well-known works have described the methods and theory used to map visibility on plantationscapes. However, due to a lack of technological capabilities, most have been forced to utilize incomplete...
The Seasonality of Ritual Sites in Viking-Age Scandinavia and Iceland (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Ephemeral Aggregated Settlements: Fluidity, Failure or Resilience?" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper will address Viking-age ritual sites (cult sites assembly (thing) sites) in Scandinavia and Iceland from the perspective of their seasonality. These sites were used for gatherings of various kinds seemingly at certain points of the calendar year. Calendrical rituals formed a key part of Viking-age religion,...
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...
Setting the Stage: The Landscape Archaeology of the Cedar Mesa Basketmaker II (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Transcending Modern Boundaries: Recent Investigations of Cultural Landscapes in Southeastern Utah" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Basketmaker II (BM II) many of the features that characterize succeeding Puebloan cultures were developed. There are two main BM II agricultural adaptations--the earlier canyon floodwater farming and the later mesa-top dry-farming. On Cedar Mesa, the earlier form is best known...
Settlement and Mobility in Early Colonial Tabasco, Mexico (2021)
This is an abstract from the "The Urban Question: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Investigating the Ancient Mesoamerican City" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the most pervasive changes in Mesoamerican early colonial period was the new form of urban and town configuration and their relations with the surrounding landscape. Native settlement abandonment, forced congregations, and changes in communication and trade routes profoundly...
Settlement Clusters: A Different Way of Conceptualizing Community (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Velarde Valley of the Northern Rio Grande, New Mexico, has received only limited attention from researchers. The area is known to have been home to several Classic Period Tewa communities, some of which were inhabited right up to the time of Juan de Onate’s settlement of San Gabriel in A.D. 1598. The area is also dense with historic and modern...