Cultural Transmission (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Davis.

Among large-scale societies, esoteric knowledge is often exploited for power, prestige, or status. In such a social framework, it becomes important to guard the transmission of esoteric knowledge, restricting access by exclusive mechanisms of indoctrination or co-option. When discovered, evidence of guarded knowledge often flags the attention of the archaeologist because of its often meticulous preservation. However, if the same knowledge were conspicuous, unguarded, and socially mundane,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Pool.

This is an abstract from the "El principio del fin, el inicio del principio: Arqueología de la transición del Formativo al Clásico en Los Tuxtlas, Veracruz, México" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Like a schizophrenic Mesoamerican Janus, the first centuries CE in the Tuxtlas region look backward or forward with neck-snapping deviation depending on where, when, and at what an observer looks. A millennium-old tradition of differentially fired wares...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael OBrien.

The timing of the earliest colonization of North America is debatable, but what is not at issue is the point of origin of the early colonists: Humans entered the continent from Beringia and then made their way south along or near the Pacific Coast and/or through a corridor than ran between the Cordilleran and Laurentide ice sheets in western North America. At some point they abandoned their arctic-based tool complex for one more adapted to an entirely different environment. The dispersal of that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Coburn.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Korean Peninsula and Japanese Archipelago have been intimately connected in many ways since the beginning of the peopling of both regions. However, the Mumun (Bronze age) period of the Korean Peninsula witnessed the most impactful interactions between the two groups. During this period the Jomon people of Japan and Samhan people of Korea started...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joshuah Lockett-Harris. Kathryn Reese-Taylor. Felix Kupprat. Armando Anaya Hernández. Debra Walker.

This is an abstract from the "New and Emerging Perspectives on the Bajo el Laberinto Region of the Maya Lowlands, Part 2" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological investigations at the ancient Maya site of Yaxnohcah, located in the Bajo el Laberinto region of the Maya lowlands, have demonstrated that the construction, maintenance, and elaboration of its central E-Group-style plaza-pyramid complex was integral to the multimillennial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Rangel. Ariana Juárez. Alejandro Valdes. José Luis Punzo Díaz.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology in South Central Michoacán México, Ongoing Studies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster examines continuity and change in prehispanic and colonial pottery production at Tzintzuntzan through a typological and petrographic analysis.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marc Zender.

This is an abstract from the "The Rollout Keepers: Papers on Maya Ceramic Texts, Scenes, and Styles in Honor of Justin and Barbara Kerr" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Paleography (from Greek παλαιό- ‘old’ and γράφε ‘writing’) was long understood as the study of the origins and development of signs (e.g., De Montfaucon, Paleaeografica Graeca, 1708), but since the welcome focus on ductus (i.e., shape, stance, and stroke-order in sign-formation)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andy Ciofalo. Corinne L. Hofman.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in the Archaeology of the Bahama Archipelago" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Precolonial foodways in the northern Caribbean have received restricted investigations. This paper is a synopsis of microbotanical residues extracted from clay griddles (flat cooking plates) excavated from three archaeological sites: El Flaco, La Luperona, and Palmetto Junction. Social identities are strongly linked to cultural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jorge Ulloa Hung.

The island of Hispaniola has been considered an initial place by the formation of creoles cultures in the Caribbean and the Americas. This consideration has been founded on the study of the socio-economic dynamics and cultural transformation generated by the European colonial irruption, specially the creation of first Spanish colonial settlement on the island. At the same time, generate an excessive dependency of archaeological data of ethnohistorical sources, and formalized a reductionist...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabrielle Vail.

Analysis of the iconography, hieroglyphic captions, and calendrical component of the Postclassic Maya codices, believed to derive from the Northern Maya Lowlands, provides important information about their possible antecedents. Portions of the Dresden Codex, for example, suggest clear links to the mural program painted on the interior of the Los Sabios structure from the site of Xultun, Guatemala, which includes a section with detailed calculations of a lunar cycle and another that may depict a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Raven Garvey.

Prehistoric boundary dynamics likely affected aspects of cultural transmission. Several lines of archaeological evidence indicate increased economic importance of bison and related inter-group tensions ca. AD 1300 in southeastern New Mexico, a boundary zone between the Pueblos to the west and cultures of the southern High Plains to the east. This paper presents preliminary results of a study centered on artifact variability and designed to test the hypothesis that model-based, biased cultural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Raven Garvey. Robert Bettinger.

The behavioral ecological approach Kelly champions in the Foraging Spectrum has clearly enhanced our understanding of hunter-gatherer diversity. Still, despite important developments in modeling and comparative analysis in the twenty years since first publication, occasional stark contrasts between groups living in similar environments suggest that ecological factors and adaptive behaviors cannot alone account for the impressive record of ethnographic and archaeological diversity. We consider...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Paige.

The past 5 years have seen new lithic studies inferring the degree of contact between and migrations of Pleistocene hominin populations (Tostevin 2013, Scerri et al. 2014). Their methodologies are grounded in a rigorously defined middle range theory, but independent tests of the approach have only recently begun. Bridging the gap between individual knapping events, and the trans-generational patterns we see in the archaeological record will likely require multiple approaches, including applying...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Boulanger.

The Paleoindian (ca. 13,000–11,000 calBP) record of eastern North America has long been characterized as exhibiting a remarkable variety of fluted-point forms. The temporal, spatial, and cultural significance of this variety remains poorly understood owing to a sparse radiocarbon record as well as to inconsistencies in nomenclature and traits used to define point forms. Building on previous studies, paradigmatic classification is used to create replicable fluted-point classes from a large...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David G. Hyde.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological investigations of historic industrial sites in the American West have long been dominated by questions surrounding power, resistance, and the emergence of class structures and ideologies. While these questions are still relevant, these sites offer the potential for a much wider range of anthropologically situated research that extends beyond...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joseph Mountjoy. Jill Rhodes.

This is an abstract from the "Coastal Connections: Pacific Coastal Links from Mexico to Ecuador" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Highly unusual tightly wrapped bundle burials of previously cleaned and carefully arranged disarticulated human bones dating to the Middle Formative have been discovered by archaeologists at three sites in western Jalisco, Mexico, one site on the Pacific coastal plain in far northern Sinaloa, Mexico and eroding out of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacob Sauer. Teresa Franco.

This is an abstract from the "Dedication, Collaboration, and Vision, Part I: Papers in Honor of Tom D. Dillehay" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Through multiple research projects, collaborations, and university appointments, Tom Dillehay impacted anthropological investigations throughout Chile, from the northern coasts of the Atacama desert south to the temperate forests of Patagonia, and the entire length of the Andes. Though multifaceted in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arturo De Lombera-Hermida. Geoffrey Clark. Xosé Pedro Rodríguez-Álvarez. Ramón Fábregas-Valcarce.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Northwest Iberia is a Paleozoic territory almost void of flint outcrops. The arrival of Cantabrian Upper Paleolithic groups, used to flintknapping, to a new lithological region implied a reorganization of their technological basis. The analysis of four lithic assemblages, ranging from the Aurignacian to the Final Magdalenian/Azilian, allows us to understand...

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

The potential to detect signatures of cultural transmission in stone tool technology is quickly gaining traction in Paleolithic archaeology (e.g. Tostevin 2012). These methods, rooted in middle range theory, remain to be tested through controlled experiment. This project uses experimental flint knapping and a social learning framework to test the hypothesis that signatures of direct cultural transmission can be detected in core reduction strategies. The participant pool included experienced...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cheng Liu. Nada Khreisheh. Dietrich Stout. Justin Pargeter.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite the extensive literature focusing on Acheulean bifaces, especially the sources and meaning of their morphological variability, many aspects of this topic remain elusive. Archaeologists cite many factors that contribute to the considerable variation of biface morphology, including knapper skill levels and mental templates. Here we present results...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Frachetti. Paula Dupuy. Taylor Hermes.

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 past 25 years has led to a completely new understanding of Eurasian Prehistory. Archaeometric analysis, landscape archaeology, and aDNA have allowed longstanding debates to be silenced, and fundamental principles underpinning key concepts such as social interaction,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Fish. Suzanne Fish.

We examine multi-ethnicity as a persistent and integral dimension within an overarching concept of Hohokam as a holistic archaeological tradition centered on O’odham peoples in central and southern Arizona. Internal and external multi-ethnic relationships of many sorts abound in the ethnography, oral history, and ethnohistory of descendant O’odham peoples in former Hohokam territory. Post-contact O’odham sources document the expansive geographic range and the multi-faceted nature of such...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Liping Yang.

This is an abstract from the "Technology and Design in 4th and 3rd Millennium BCE China" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The cultural sequence of the Wei River valley, as exemplified by Miaodigou Culture of the Middle Yangshao Period, represents a pinnacle as reflected in its masterfully crafted ceramics. The classical forms are pointed-bottomed amphorae, flat-bottomed bottles, coarseware jars, deep basins, and deep bowls. Of special importance are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eszter Bánffy.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The advent of the Neolithic period in Europe, as elsewhere globally, represents a powerful transformation in human history. In spite of important contributions, neither global explanations nor single-site-based case studies have so far led to a general model for the history (histories) of the transformation. This is what our new project intends to challenge....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Briggs Buchanan. Mark Collard.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The migration of Athapaskan (alternatively, Athabaskan or Na-Dene) groups from the Subarctic regions of northwestern Canada and Alaska to the American Southwest is one of the longest and best documented movements of Indigenous peoples in the Americas. The starkly different environment of the Southwest and the subsequent interactions with Southwest peoples...