Cultural Transmission (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mallory Matsumoto.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The area stretching from the Usumacinta River basin in western Guatemala into the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico, hosted key centers of Classic Maya political and cultural life (ca. 250–850 CE). Scribes and sculptors active across the region produced hundreds of stone monuments inscribed with texts in a common hieroglyphic script. Yet little is known about how...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brittany Bankston.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent scholarship has recognized that the foundational elements of the Ancestral Puebloan culture observed during the height of the Chacoan Phenomenon first began to appear during the Basketmaker III time period (AD 450-750), with the construction of kivas, the emergence of vast trade networks, and population aggregation. However, one interesting aspect of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ben Marwick. Liying Wang.

This is an abstract from the "Practical Approaches to Identifying Evolutionary Processes in the Archaeological Record" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Both neutral drift and selection cause the frequencies of artefact types in a archaeological sequences to vary over time. Discriminating between these two processes, based on a time series of artefacts from a site or region, if often important for answering archaeological questions. However,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Terance Winemiller. Virginia Ochoa-Winemiller.

This paper discusses the spatial, typological, and stylistic analyses of obsidian and ceramic artifacts recovered from El Chichicaste and Dos Quebradas, two prehistoric sites in the department of Olancho, Eastern Honduras. Using geographic information systems and 3D laser scanning technology, analyses revealed the extent of trade relationships that these two ancient communities maintained with sites in Mesoamerica and their southern neighbors in Central America. We argue that integration of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Raven Garvey.

This is an abstract from the "Old Technology, New Methodology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. To test hypothesized effects of cultural transmission on material cultural evolution, archaeologists primarily use the coefficient of variation (CV). Interpretation of archaeological CVs is necessarily comparative, and foundational papers have assessed variation across broad geographic regions, and relative to either theoretically-derived threshold CVs or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only R. Alexander Bentley.

This is an abstract from the "Paradigms Shift: New Interpretations in Mainland Southeast Asian Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Kinship is an important but often under-researched aspect of the rise of complex societies. Whereas early agricultural communities in Neolithic Europe and East Asia were patrilineal and patrilocal, the nature and impact of prehistoric kinship systems in Mainland Southeast Asia (MSEA) is becoming better...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victoria Sluka.

A pilot study of pile carpet variation and error is carried out on ethnographic Turkmen carpets. No such work has been previously published, and so this analysis provides basic data and conclusions on carpet variation, including type and intensity of variation, to be used as a starting point for further study of archaeologic carpet samples. Data is taken from six comparable carpets, informing on two aspects of carpet variation. The dimensions and knot densities of the carpets’ motifs are used...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Levi Raskin. Jonathan Reeves. Matthew Douglass. David Braun.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Variation in lithics has been used as a mechanism to infer diachronic aspects of hominin behavior. The emergence of the Acheulean industry is considered a major milestone in the evolution of hominin cognition. This perspective is predicated on the idea that Acheulean large cutting tools (LCTs) require mental templates imposed through knapping and that LCTs...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Ranhorn. David R. Braun. Francys Subiaul. Alison Brooks.

The ability to transmit cultural information with high-fidelity across generations is a defining trait of modern humans. It is unclear, however, how and when this adaptation emerged in the human lineage. The earliest forms of human technology—stone artifacts—required knappers to understand raw material mechanics, as well as geometry (volume reduction, angles), and physics. Thus, it is often assumed that the spread of lithic technologies involved some degree of information transmission. However,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Monica Katz.

This is an abstract from the "From Materials to Materiality: Analysis and Interpretation of Archaeological and Historical Artifacts Using Non-destructive and Micro/Nano-sampling Scientific Methods" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Hispanic Society has a small but very fine collection of colonial Spanish American lacquered objects, which are decorated with one of the more widely known indigenous lacquer techniques, barniz de Pasto. The Hispanic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Frank Winchell.

This is an abstract from the "Subsistence Crops and Animals as a Proxy for Human Cultural Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent analyses have established the location for the origin of domesticated sorghum occurring in the far eastern Sahel of Sudan during the fourth millennium BC associated with the Late Neolithic Butana Group. For over a half century, sorghum domestication has been hypothesized as occurring somewhere in the Sahelian...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Itzel Chagoya Ayala.

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. Al temazcal o baño de vapor de tradición prehispánica se le ha asignado connotaciones religiosas y medicinales, en algunos sitios mesoamericanos ha sido localizado en centros ceremoniales asociados a juegos de pelota, basados en construcciones significativas y representaciones pictográficas que dan muestra de su forma y uso. Pero...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Xinzhou Chen.

Compared to the relatively well-researched area of Eastern Tibet Plateau, the archaeology of Central Tibet has long been neglected. This paper offers a review of academic debates concerning the site of Qugong and analyzed the newly found materials in Bangga and Changguogou site. Based on the available materials and 14C dating data, I here propose a primary chronological framework in Central Tibet and revealed the cultural affiliations of Central Tibet with Central Asia, as well as the cultural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Mora-Marin.

This is an abstract from the "Coffee, Clever T-Shirts, and Papers in Honor of John S. Justeson" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper deals with the topic that inspired me to study with John Justeson: it traces the major spelling practices of Mayan writing from the Late Preclassic through the Late Classic periods. It employs the evidence from Late Preclassic and Early Classic inscriptions, some of which I have documented myself, as well as the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Madsen. Carl Lipo.

Seriation is a long-standing archaeological method for relative dating that has proven effective in probing regional-scale patterns of inheritance, social networks, and cultural contact in their full spatiotemporal context. The orderings produced by seriation are produced by the continuity of class distributions and unimodality of class frequencies, properties that are related to social learning and transmission models studied by evolutionary archaeologists. Linking seriation to social learning...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Paige. Deanna Dytchkowskyj. Charles Perreault.

This is an abstract from the "The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis and Human Origins: Archaeological Perspectives" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The extended evolutionary synthesis emphasizes the importance of understanding how the interaction of biological and cultural inheritance systems have shaped human evolution. Within the animal kingdom, modern humans possess a unique ability to transmit and maintain complex cultural traditions (Tennie et...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samantha Stone. Loren Davis.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology from Western North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Advances in technology such as 3D digital scanning and spatial analysis software have provided archaeologists with novel data. Specifically, these methods increase the researcher’s ability to measure artifact morphology and past networks of cultural transmission, to potentially track the movement of past peoples and ideas through space and time....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Luke Premo.

Although anthropologists have long recognized the importance of mobility to hunter-gatherer subsistence strategies, it remains unclear how mobility affects cultural diversity in subdivided populations. A better understanding of how mobility affects both total diversity and regional differentiation in selectively neutral cultural traits may provide us with an additional line of evidence for explaining the appearance of archaeological indicators of modern human behavior. Here, I introduce a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dietrich Stout. Justin Pargeter. Nada Khreisheh. Katherine Bryant. Erin Hecht.

Although commonly glossed as social "transmission," the acquisition of knapping skills requires extended interactions between social inputs and individual practice better termed social "reproduction." Individual differences in learning aptitude during this process provide both the raw material for neurocognitive evolution and a potentially significant source of variability in the lithic products used to infer patterns and mechanisms of Paleolithic social learning. Here we present results from an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Howell.

This is an abstract from the "Music Archaeology's Paradox: Contextual Dependency and Contextual Expressivity" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper chronicles an instrument replication and composition project, using archaeological materials, historic and ethnohistoric documentation, and interviews with archaeologists, music consultants, project commission personnel, craftspersons, composer, and others with a vested interested. Three instrument...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nigel Goring-Morris. Anna Belfer-Cohen.

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. The dominant paradigm concerning group size is frequently couched in terms of the "social brain hypothesis" (Dunbar 1998). On the other hand ethnographic evidence (Hill et al. 2014) posits much higher interaction rates amongst individuals than those based solely upon...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brendan Nash.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The cause of morphological variation in material culture has long been debated. This investigation into archaic projectile point variation from the Gault site in central Texas looks through the lens of social learning to suggest that different teaching and learning strategies represent the root cause of variation. These strategies may in turn reflect part of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Liya Tang. Xiage Wangdui. Yu Chun. Zhaxi Ciren.

This is an abstract from the "From Tangible Things to Intangible Ideas: The Context of Pan-Eurasian Exchange of Crops and Objects" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2017, one grain and 24 spikelets of barley and other prestigious burial objects were found in the No. 2 tomb which is located at Gepa Serul cemetery, Zanda, Tibet, Chian (the region of the upper reaches of Indus River). Up to now, Gepa Serul cemetery is the earliest known in western...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eun Gyeng Yang.

This is an abstract from the "New Thoughts on Current Research in East Asian Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite its critical role as a source for restoration works on Buddhist temples and pagoda, the Buddhist sites located in the upper plot of the Yungang Cave(雲岡石窟) have not been sufficiently studied. In this paper, location of sites and full information acquired through field trip and excavation data are presented. In particular,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cecelia Klein.

A number of enigmatic human figures in the imagery of late 9th-early 10th century A.D. Chichen Itza can be identified as fire priests, men whose task was to drill, tend, and/or oversee ritual fires reenacting the primordial birth of the sun from a flaming hearth at ancient Teotihuacan. Detailed analysis of the costumes, ceremonial responsibilities, and internal rankings of Chichen’s Itza’s fire priests reveals strong similarities to those of later Aztec fire priests as documented in painted...