Cultural Transmission (Other Keyword)
1-25 (145 Records)
This is an abstract from the "The South Caucasus Region: Crossroads of Societies & Polities. An Assessment of Research Perspectives in Post-Soviet Times" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The materials discovered at the Grakliani settlement and necropolis (Eastern Georgia) date from different periods and cover the stratigraphy presented below: 1. The Paleolithic Age with an upper Pleistocene paleontological site; 2. Neolithic; 3. Chalcolithic; 4....
3D Reconstruction of Early Spanish Colonial Hybrid Ceramics from Ciudad Vieja, El Salvador (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The primary serving vessel at the sixteenth-century Spanish colonial site of Ciudad Vieja, El Salvador, is an indigenously produced brimmed plate made in the form of Italianate majolica. These vessels were produced in a Mesoamerican technological tradition and were painted with a modified version of designs found on pre-Hispanic Pipil pottery in southeastern...
aDNA analysis of prehistoric salmon remains at Housepit54 (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Salmon were a critical resource in the Indigenous economies of the Pacific Northwest. There are five Pacific Salmon species that spawn within the Fraser River and its tributaries: sockeye (Oncorhynchus nerka), Chinook (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha), coho (Oncorhynchus kisutch), pink (Oncorhynchus gorbuscha) and chum (Oncorhynchus keta). Since each species...
An Agate Basin Point from Michoacán, Mexico (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Late Pleistocene Stemmed Points across North America: Continental Questions and Regional Concerns" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A complete black obsidian Agate Basin Point was found in a rockshelter in the state of Michoacán, Mexico, during the excavations realized by the CEMCA team. Despite the fact that the stratigraphy of the shelter had been completely disturbed, this point was found associated with a complete...
An Agent-Based Model to Explore the Relationship between Archaeological Assemblages, Past Social Networks, and Cultural Dynamics (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The need to relate static archaeological sites to the dynamic processes responsible for their formation is central to the utility of archaeological data for testing hypotheses about the lives of prehistoric humans, and how ecological and social changes affected them. Here we use an agent-based simulation to investigate how different factors influence the...
Akimel O’Odham Traditional Knowledge Regarding Platform Mounds (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Why Platform Mounds? Part 2: Regional Comparisons and Tribal Histories" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Platform mounds play a prominent role in the Akimel O’Odham creation story, but few archaeologists have considered the implications of this knowledge. The story names each of the mound leaders along the middle Gila River, and provides specific descriptions of the special abilities they possessed. The story also...
Ancient DNA Investigations of Possible Casas Grandes – Chalchihuites Interactions (2018)
Paquimé, the political and religious center of the Casas Grandes culture, demonstrates extensive evidence of Mesoamerican influence, including macaws, architectural characteristics such as ballcourts and platform mounds, and mortuary practices in the form of modified trophy skulls and human sacrifice. The role of Mesoamerican influence on the development and florescence of the Casas Grandes culture remains an important but contentious research question for the late prehistoric...
An Approach to Fitting Transmission Models to Seriations for Regional-Scale Analysis (2015)
At scales where individual copying events are not measurable but the regional archaeological record is rich enough to support models more detailed than phylogenies, seriation can play a unique role as a diachronic measurement tool for linking cultural transmission models to data composed of assemblages of artifact class frequencies. As a first step towards fitting cultural transmission models to regional-scale transmission scenarios, we develop a iterative deterministic seriation algorithm. We...
Archaeology in the Plaza: Public Display of the Past in Banamichi, Sonora (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Just off the main highway, the Ruta del Río Sonora, in Banámichi, Mexico, is the Plaza de la Piedra Histórica (Plaza of the Historic Rock). Raised upon the shoulders of Ópata / Teguïma inspired stone figures is a petroglyph originally found in the floodplain below. The imagery on the rock was interpreted by archaeologist William Doolittle in 1984 as "the first...
The Archaeology of Forgetting, and the Dorset (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Forgetting, an attendant to culture change, is the stuff of history. When cultural innovations, exchange, and adoption occur, previous customs, knowledge, technology, and other dimensions of culture are lost—they are forgotten. This paper considers the phenomenon of forgetting and its permutations—the passive forgetting that is more or less an accepted...
Are Lithics and Fauna a Match made in Prehistoric Heaven? (2017)
Lithic artifacts and animal bones form the bulk of the material remains of the Paleolithic. This has led archaeologists to interpret these two types of finds as tethered components of subsistence systems. Differences observed through time and space in the lithic repertoire were considered as functional adjustments, designed to maximize gains from a diverse faunal resource base. While we do not challenge the general notion that lithic artifacts were used (also) for exploiting faunal (and other)...
Artifact Networks, Cultural Transmission, and Polynesian Settlement (2015)
The colonization of Polynesia was a motivated dispersal of culturally related human populations on a massive geographic scale. The settlement of distant oceanic islands involved the development and sharing of technological information specific to local environments, including exclusively stylistic aspects of artifact design. A reassessment of artifact comparisons from a neo-Darwinian evolutionary perspective continues to provide information regarding social interaction among island communities....
Assessing Variability in Refitted Lithic Reduction Sequences at Boker Tachtit (Israel) (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Distinguishing cultural relatedness from independent convergence in lithic technological behavior requires high-resolution behavioral data. Arguably, the best source of such high-resolution data comes from refitted reduction sequences because these sequences illustrate the procedural steps taken by individuals to produce stone tools. But much remains to be...
Behavioral Correlates of Population Growth: a Speculative Example from the Middle Chattahoochee (1984)
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Big Data Investigation of Persistence in Ethnically Homogenous and Heterogeneous Communities on the Late Nineteenth-Century Central Great Plains (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Big Ideas to Match Our Future: Big Data and Macroarchaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeological record captures the material fallout of social processes operating at multiple temporal and spatial scales. Here I explore generational and supra-generational social processes of colonizers inhabiting a foreign and dynamic landscape under complex social conditions. Patent and census records allow for a big...
A Big Look at Small Tools: An Analysis of the Emergence and Dispersal of Microliths in Eurasia (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Big Ideas to Match Our Future: Big Data and Macroarchaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The appearance of microliths and their rapid spread throughout Eurasia is one of the major developments in the evolution of Paleolithic technologies, since microliths and microblades, as part of complex modular tool packages, became the dominant technology in the Pleistocene (around 25,000 years ago) and persisted into the...
Body Modifications in the Collections of the Musée de l’Homme (Paris) (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Body Modification: Examples and Explanations" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Musée de l’Homme hosts several collections corresponding to body modification practices. The collections correspond to body piercing (prehistoric artifacts, casts of living individuals from the nineteenth century, and early photographic images) and to other types of body modification: intentional cranial modifications of various types and...
Borrowing and Inheritance: Testing Cultural Transmission Hypotheses in the Bridge River Housepit Village (2017)
Cultural transmission is an evolutionary process that involves the transfer of information between people that over time can lead to the establishment of cultural traditions. This approach permits development of hypotheses regarding the cultural evolutionary process in a variety of contexts. In this paper we examine cultural transmission between generations by analyzing the effects of vertical and horizontal inheritance using archaeological data from the Bridge River housepit village. The Bridge...
"British", "Irish" and "Continentish": Practising Comparative in the Later Prehistory of North-Western Europe (2018)
Projecting back notions of "British", "Irish" or "European" back into prehistory does not go without problems as, explicitly or not, these concepts are closely associated with the rise of nation-states, and still echoed in yesterday's and today's turbulent politics. And yet, even advocating a simple geographic meaning for these terms does not prevent any problems, as it raises theoretical and methodological issues regarding the choice of location and scale of case-studies to be analysed. In the...
Can we talk about modern human behavior in non-Homo sapiens? (2018)
Discerning what makes Homo sapiens distinctive among the rest of the species on the planet has been a difficult task. One suggestion has been our use of symbolic culture, the use and transmission of symbols intergenerationally. There is much discussion, however, about who the first ‘symbol users’ were, partly due to debates as to what actually makes something ‘symbolic.’ In this paper, I discus how anthropologists first came to use symbol as the sine qua non of modern human behavior. Then, using...
A Canadian Perspective on Later Paleoindian Technocomplexes and Emerging Genetic Data (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Paleo Lithics to Legacy Management: Ruthann Knudson—Inawa’sioskitsipaki" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ruthann Knudson had an abiding interest in the later Paleoindian world and an affinity for Canadian research, keeping in regular touch with colleagues across the 49th parallel. Geneticists consistently identify three clades in the early prehistory of the New World: an ancient Beringian population in Alaska, and...
Chacmool or Not Chacmool? Was a Mesoamerican Monumental Stone Sculptural Tradition Adopted in Eastern Costa Rica? (2018)
The unique monumental stone sculptural form known as a "Chacmool" —a reclining human with an offeratory bowl on its abdomen— first appeared in the late Epiclassic period in Mesoamerica, most notably at the Toltec site of Tula in Central Mexico and the Maya site of Chichen Itza in the Yucatan. The form is known across Mesoamerica in archaeological contexts from Michoacán, Mexico to Guatamala and El Salvador. It persisted in Central Mexico to the time of the Aztec empire and European Contact, when...
A Characterization of Archaeological Sites in the State of São Paulo: Some Notes (2024)
This is an abstract from the "“The South Also Exists”: The Current State of Prehistoric Archaeology in Brazil: Dialogues across Different Theoretical Approaches and Research Agendas" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo, different pottery producers are described ethnohistorically, and the most expansive is the Tupiguarani Tradition. However, pre-European population relationships between the Tupiguarani and other...
Chipped Stone Production, Scavenging, and Trade in Spanish Colonial New Mexico: New Evidence From San Antonio del Embudo (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Chipped stone is often found in archaeological deposits at 18th and 19th century settler villages of northern New Mexico, though there has been little critical assessment of settler traditions of lithic production and use. In this poster, we discuss an assemblage of over 500 chipped stone artifacts recovered from the small plaza site of San Antonio del...
Conceptualizing Eurasian Steppe Space, Place and Movement (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Wheels, Horses, Babies and Bathwaters: Celebrating the Impact of David W. Anthony on the Study of Prehistory" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The scholarly contributions by David Anthony have added significantly to current understandings of prehistory in the Eurasian steppes. Drawing on multiple lines of evidence, ranging from historical sources, archaeological data, genetics and linguistics, he has developed...