Cultural Transmission (Other Keyword)
76-100 (145 Records)
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...
The Location for the Origin of Domesticated Sorghum in Africa: A Brief Review of Some Cultures in the Sahara, Nile, and Sahel (2023)
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...
Los temazcales de Cerro Jazmín, evidencia de uso práctico en la Mixteca Alta (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. 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...
Material Assemblage and Social Changes in Central Tibet, the Second and the First Millennium B.C. (2018)
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...
Mayan Spelling Conventions: Late Preclassic through Late Classic (2023)
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...
Measuring Cultural Relatedness Using Multiple Seriation Ordering Algorithms (2016)
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...
Measuring Lithic Complexity from the Lower Paleolithic through the Late Holocene (2019)
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...
Measuring Past Networks of Cultural Transmission: The Haskett Projectile Point (2023)
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....
Mirrors, a Mean to Look into Cultures (2024)
This is an abstract from the "And They Look into the Mirror for Answers: Mirror Analysis to Understand Its Holder" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. No matter what material they were made of, stone, metal, or crystal, or if it was cheap or expensive (gold, silver, copper, bronze, obsidian, or pyrite), mirrors are one of the most fascinating artifacts made by artisans in the past. The users of these items were normally high-class members of society...
Mobility and cultural diversity in central-place foragers: Implications for the emergence of modern human behavior (2015)
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...
The "Molecular Genetics" of Social Learning: Skill Acquisition and Individual Differences in Learning (2018)
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...
A Native American Music Replication Project: An Ethno-archaeomusicological Perspective (2021)
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...
Neolithic Group Sizes – Further Thoughts (2019)
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...
Neural Nets for Style: A Method for the Examination of Material Culture Variation (2019)
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...
New Discovery of Plant Remains in The West of Tibet (2019)
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...
The Northern Wei Temple Layout at the Yungang Grottoes in China and East-West Cultural Exchange (2019)
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,...
Of Eye Rings and Torches: The Fire Priests of Chichen Itza and Their Legacy in Aztec Tenochtitlan (2018)
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...
On the Role of Bifacial Points in the Construction of Past Identities and Boundaries in Southeastern and Southern Brazil during the Holocene (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological sites presenting bifacial points dated from the Holocene are common in southern and southeastern Brazil. Our studies have pointed out that the morphological and technological diversity of these bifacial points was much greater than it had been postulated in the past, indicating the presence of potential past boundaries and territories. However,...
Out of Mexico: An Archaeological Evaluation of the Migration Legends of Greater Nicoya (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Postclassic Mesoamerica: The View from the Southern Frontier" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ethnohistoric documents pertaining to the Greater Nicoya archaeological subarea document legends in which the inhabitants of western Nicaragua and northwestern Costa Rica traced their ancestry to migrations from the north, presumably in Mexico. Linguistic data indicate that speakers of Chorotega, an Oto-Manguean language, and...
A Phylogenetic Approach to Analyzing Lithic Stone Tool Morphology in Southern British Columbia (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As one of the most significant hydrological systems in British Columbia, the Fraser River drainage basin holds socio-cultural and economic significance both presently and in the past. Archaeologically, sites located within the vicinity of the Fraser River exhibit evidence of extensive trade and social networks between cultural groups from as far north as...
Places of Emergence: Water and Cave Ceremonialism in the Tz’utujil Region (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Place-Making in Indigenous Mesoamerican Communities Past and Present" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Throughout the highlands of Guatemala, Maya traditionalists believe that mountains and their associated cave openings are the “mouths of the world” giving access to spiritual realms inhabited by sacred beings that have influence over natural phenomena of importance to the outside world. Each of these caves or watery...
Polychromes and People at 76 Draw, New Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "25 Years in the Casas Grandes Region: Celebrating Mexico–U.S. Collaboration in the Gran Chichimeca" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. People of the Casas Grandes and Salado regions are known for their polychrome pottery. Often pottery from both areas are found at the same sites, but the degree of interaction between the areas is not known. Neutron Activation Analysis (NAA) was conducted on Ramos and Gila Polychrome...
A Population Graph Based Style Transmission Model (2019)
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. The now classic Neiman (1995) is a baseline for many influential applications of Cultural Transmission to explore Stylistic Variability in archaeology. It and many of its successors represent social interaction and generational development in a deliberately simplified way to facilitate the...
Preliminary Results of the Physico-Chemical Analysis and Manufacturing Traces of the Tesserae Mirrors from El Caño, Gran Coclé Archaeological Tradition (750–1020 CE) (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The study presented below aims to determine whether the mirrors of pyrite tesserae and iron ore tesserae not associated with bases, found at El Caño, are of local production or, on the contrary, came from Mesoamerica given their formal and material resemblance to those from that area. In order to achieve this objective, firstly, a formal typological...
The Pueblo Farming Project: A Hopi-Crow Canyon Archaeological Center Collaboration (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Pueblo Farming Project, or PFP, is a collaboration between the Hopi tribe and the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center. The Primary goal of the PFP is to investigate traditional Pueblo farming techniques and assess how they could help us understand ancient farming in The Mesa Verde region. The PFP established 5 experimental garden plots. Traditional Hopi...