Cultural Transmission (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meghann Vance.

This is an abstract from the "The Paleoindian Southwest" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation provides a summary of what is currently known for the Lime Ridge Clovis site, as well as more recent data on Clovis sites, or components thereof, from Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, Utah. The data are fleeting, but suggest a trend comparable to the adjacent Nevada and Arizona regions for diminished size and boldness in blade...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Enrico Crema. Anne Kandler. Clémentine Straub.

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. Since the seminal works by Neiman (1995) and Shennan & Wilkinson (2001), evolutionary archaeologists and anthropologists have been trying to infer social learning strategies by analysing the temporal frequency of different cultural variants in a population. These early applications directly employed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Dye. Caitlin Buck. Robert DiNapoli.

This is an abstract from the "Constructing Chronologies I: Stratification and Correlation" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The joint posteriors of Bayesian calibration can be analyzed with Allen's interval algebra to guide phyletic seriation, which comprehends the three modes of artifact change recognized by evolutionary archaeologists, including anagenesis, cladogenesis, and reticulation. Using the example of beads recovered from stratigraphically...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Luis Manuel May Ku.

This is an abstract from the "Current Dynamics of Heritage Values in the Americas" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. El Azul Maya-Maya Ch´oj. Inicié con mi investigación hace aproximadamente dos años atrás tratando de pigmentar mis esculturas y cerámica con el Azul Maya. Tras cuatro meses de buscar la planta Ch´oj (Indigófera suffruticosa mil) al fin dí con ella. Cuando la encontré estaba en su período de floración y fruto, tuve que esperar a que los...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Xiaoli Qin. Xiaohan Zhao.

This is an abstract from the "Resources and Society in Ancient China" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Songze cultural period, there were two distinct technological pathways for the production of pottery cooking vessels, including Ding (tripod) and Yan (steamer), used in the vicinity of Lake Taihu. In areas like southern Jiangsu, Shanghai, and Jiaxing, plant debris was commonly mixed with clay to create fiber-tempered vessels. In...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam Rorabaugh.

Recently anthropologists have increasingly recognized the role that the control of knowledge has in the production and reproduction of social inequality in small scale societies. In the case of the pre-contact Coast Salish of the Pacific Northwest, ethnographic data emphasizes the role that the control of elite prerogatives had in the maintenance of their status. Drawing upon cultural transmission models, these social relationships would be reflected not only in the prestige goods often...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul King. Franz Manni.

This is an abstract from the "Body Modification: Examples and Explanations" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Across continents, material evidence of body piercing jewelry abounds in the archaeological record. However, the varying procedures and processes of piercing, healing, and stretching these wounds for adornment remains unfamiliar to most archaeologists. This PowerPoint presentation discusses the early self-experimentations that led to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joao Marreiros. Ivan Calandra. Lisa Schunk. Walter Gneisinger. Eduardo Paixao.

This is an abstract from the "Variability: A Reassessment of Its Meaning, Afforded Range, and the Relation to Process" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Understanding artifact variability observed in archaeological assemblages may untangle key dynamics marking the evolution of major human behavioral traits. Variability likely reflects technological changes allowing early hominins to respond to dynamic Pleistocene environments and evolving...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Norberto Baldi.

Archaeological investigations in the Caribbean region of Greater Chiriquí conducted over the last two decades have documented occupations dating to the second millennium BCE. Similarities in material culture suggest local and trans-isthmic cultural relationships within Greater Chiriquí and a pattern of scattered hamlets associated with the exploitation of marine and lowland ecosystems. In order to provide a model for this settlement pattern, we offer a theoretical model based on ethnohistorical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Simon Davies.

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Research into the Late Pleistocene of Europe" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper will evaluate the role of transferable techniques in Paleolithic technical innovations. I shall consider the interlocking technical aspects of mastic, ceramic, ground food, and pigment production, together with the technical overlaps in working wood and osseous materials. In addition, I shall consider the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Renata Araujo. Mercedes Okumura. Astolfo Araujo.

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. Geometric morphometrics is a powerful analytical method developed in evolutionary biology to study, quantify, and compare shape variations in biological specimens. Archaeologists have been applying geometric morphometric methods (GMM) to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Rockwell.

Explanations for the rapid appearance of Clovis technology across the North American landscape as a population migration. Detractors from this hypothesis argue that the spread of Clovis more closely resembles the movement of a technology through a small, highly mobile population. Using a computer simulation approach this paper explores the conditions under which it would be possible for such a technological spread to occur. This simulation explores the requirements of population size,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Raven Garvey.

This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology I (QUANTARCH I)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Reconciling the archaeological record’s coarse grain with the person-to-person information exchanges central to cultural transmission (CT) models will allow us to better tap this powerful body of theory. Previous efforts at reconciliation demonstrated that within- and between-assemblage coefficients of variation (CV) are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeanne Gillespie.

This is an abstract from the "Animal Symbolism in Postclassic Mesoamerica: Papers in Honor of Cecelia Klein" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the Tratado de supersticiones (1626) Hernando Ruíz de Alarcón documented invocations and prayers to pre-Hispanic divinities to assure a good catch/hunt or to protect against poisonous/painful bites/stings. This confirmed that these divinities remained important the local consciousness even 100 years after...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Cummings.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Scattered evidence across North America points to the use of a common piece of refuse and a common human desire: broken pottery and playing games. A small sherd can be transformed with minimal effort into a circular disk which can be used as game pieces, counters, or toys. They were used in indigenous sports, European colonist gambling, and as playthings...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alison Brooks. John Yellen.

While interest in the role of social learning in the Paleolithic has focused extensively on stone artifacts, very little attention has been paid to social learning in living forager populations. In this paper we report on many years of fieldwork among the Jun/wasi of northwestern Botswana and Namibia. We argue that most cultural transmission in relation to domains such as technology, language and food acquisition was informal, and was acquired in the context of close daily relationships between...

DOCUMENT Citation Only George Biddle. Umazi Munga. David Braun. Olivia Weibe.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Humans are distinct in their ability to transfer information between individuals with remarkable fidelity. Although this feature defines our lineage, the antiquity of this distinction is not well known. This is due to difficulties in deciphering levels of information transfer in Paleolithic assemblages. Recently, several new techniques were developed to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nolan Ferar. Claudio Tennie. Mark Moore. Alexandros Karakostis. Elena Moos.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human culture’s unique complexity depends upon the ability to faithfully transmit know-how over generations. Given other primates do not exhibit a similar capacity, when hominins began to transmit know-how between one another is a key question for human evolution. In the archaeological record, the reoccurrence of stone artifact forms is often taken as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Grace Turner.

Once the British Parliament abolished the trans-Atlantic trade in African captives the Bahamas became a primary locale for the re-settlement of these persons. Between 1811 and 1860 some 6,000 liberated Africans, as they were called, were re-settled in the Bahamas. These Africans served apprenticeship periods of six to sixteen years, at the end of which they were to be free. Archival documents and archaeological evidence suggest that these indentured Africans were able to maintain a stronger...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gizeh Rangel De Lázaro. Marcelo Sánchez-Villagra. Stacey Ward. Caitlin Raymond. Laura Wilson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Intentional cranial modification (ICM) represents one of the most outstanding biocultural practices of the past in the Americas, resulting from a millennial evolution within distinct cultural territories. When the Europeans first arrived in the Caribbean in 1492, ICM was a widespread tradition among most of the native populations of the continent. Here we...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Chamberlin.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper considers whether processes of symbolic conflict propel change in the spatiality of social groups from ethnographic and archaeological vantage points, particularly with respect to the mobility of agents positioned differently within and at the edges of nascent communities such as small villages. Of special interest is the interaction between...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Callaghan. Brigitte Kovacevich.

This is an abstract from the "Making and Breaking Boundaries in the Maya Lowlands: Alliance and Conflict across the Guatemala–Belize Border" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper we use frequency distributions of ceramic types and modes to identify and assess the presence and strength of permeable ceramic boundaries between sites in the northeastern Peten and west central Belize in the early Middle Preclassic through Postclassic periods. We...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gilbert Tostevin. Luke Premo.

Ethnoarchaeology has shown that culturally learned behavior is structured in its performance in many ways. For archaeologically-visible artifactual behavior, this performance is structured both geographically, in terms of where the artifacts are made and used on the landscape (what Ingold calls "the taskscape"), as well as temporally, in terms of the sequential nature of operational chains which can be distributed among taskscape locations. Yet cultural transmission theory has not yet explored...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Stewart. Kyra Pazan. Genevieve Dewar.

This is an abstract from the "From Veld to Coast: Diverse Landscape Use by Hunter-Gatherers in Southern Africa from the Late Pleistocene to the Holocene" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Multidisciplinary research suggests Marine Isotope Stage 5 (~130–74 ka) was an important evolutionary stage in African deep history. Population expansion and growth spurred changes in material culture and the exploration of previously unoccupied regions and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christina Friberg.

The ‘Mississippianization’ of the Midwest unfolded during the late 11th and early 12th centuries as interactions with Cahokia influenced aspects of local community organization, ceremonialism, material culture, and access to exotic raw materials. For local peoples, these encounters and affiliations also facilitated interactions between Mississippian groups beyond Cahokia. The direct proximity of the Lower Illinois River Valley (LIRV) to the Greater Cahokia area enabled certain social, political,...