water (Other Keyword)

1-25 (38 Records)

6k Years of Land Use in South Asia: Sustainability, Power Relations, and Tropical Variability (2018)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathleen Morrison.

Tropical environments vary significantly in terms of rainfall and seasonality; these differences make a difference in the kinds of land use strategies that work over the long term. This paper reviews some of the opportunities and constraints of tropical environments in South Asia, considering the range of land use practices deployed over the last 6,000 years in this region. I argue that some practices which could be called sustainable also come at a high cost in terms of human dignity,...

Ancestors in Cosmologies (2010)

DOCUMENT Full-Text Linda Cordell. David Freidel. Kelley Hays-Gilpin. Tim Pauketat. Christine VanPool.

This article discusses the role of ancestors in New World cosmologies. Specifically, it gives examples of how ancestors mediate cosmologies through sensory experiences, things, and places. In Eastern North America, ancestors were engaged in posts, bundles, stars, mounds, and temples. In the American Southwest, “conceptual packages” of wind, water, and breath represented the cosmological force shared by humans, ancestors, and places. Mesoamericans transformed the dead into ancestors by...

Aventura’s Watery Landscape: Communities of People, Water, Houses, and Ancestors (2023)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kacey Grauer.

This is an abstract from the "Households at Aventura: Life and Community Longevity at an Ancient Maya City" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Water was essential for the longevity of ancient Maya cities, and Aventura was no exception. The site’s watery landscape consists of pocket bajos, defined as karstic depressions less than 2 km2 in area. While they are seasonally inundated today, this paper presents data from excavation, oral histories, and...

Bones Thrown into a Water-Hole (1993)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bengt Edgren. Frands Herschend. M Backe. K Lidén. Gretha Arwidsson. A-M Hansson. L Holmquist Olausson. B M Johansson. M Klockhoff. H-Å Nordström.

This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the EXARC Bibliography, originally compiled by Roeland Paardekooper, and updated. Most of these records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us using the...

Chumash water bottle (2014)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Campbell.

Class I Cultural Resource Inventory for the Cedar City District of the Bureau of Land Management, Part I Cultural Resource Overview (1983)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard A. Thompson. G. B. Thompson. J. Embry.

This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. Most NADB-R records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us at comments@tdar.org.

Comparative Water Histories: An Outline of Contrastive Juxtaposition as Method in Anthropological Archaeology (2016)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Harrower.

Anthropology has long been marked by tension between emphasis on commonalities among histories and cultures on one hand, alongside emphasis on histories and cultures as unique, contingent, and exceptional on the other. Vernon Scarborough is one of few who have pioneered new understanding of water among ancient societies through both focused study of particular regions, as well as broad, synthetic comparison of water among ancient societies worldwide. In an era marked by a daily increasing...

Cosmology in the New World

PROJECT Santa Fe Institute.

This project consists of articles written by members of Santa Fe Institute’s cosmology research group. Overall, the goal of this group is to understand the larger relationships between cosmology and society through a theoretically open-ended, comparative examination of the ancient American Southwest, Southeast, and Mesoamerica.

Distilling Seawater: an experiment (2010)

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Wescott.

Equitable Water Access for Detroiters in the Early 20th Century (2020)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katharine E. Blatchford.

This is a poster submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The city of Detroit’s population quadrupled from 285,000 people in 1900 to nearly a million in 1920. This growth created enormous demands on the city’s infrastructure and its ability to provide residents with basic services. Access to clean water was vital to the health and quality of life of city residents. This research uses material culture, historic documents, and Geographic...

The functionality of birch bark for holding liquid (2007)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tine Schenck.

Giving Form to Flow: Modeling Paleohydrology in North-Central Coastal Peru (2021)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Leclerc.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In coastal Andean archaeology, long-standing interest in water and cultural dynamics is intensifying, especially with diminishing glacial water supplies in the coast’s headwater regions. However, archaeologists who have hinged their hypotheses on the availability or management of water resources have frequently overlooked or disregarded the non-linear ways...

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in Ancient Water Systems. Comparative remarks along the axes of small- large and dry-wet (2016)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maurits Ertsen.

In Scarborough’s comparative work, when explaining the differences between Old and New World water systems, the differences between small-scale, local and imperial, large systems are important focus points for defining these differences. Furthermore, much of Scarborough's work suggests that the wetness and dryness of these worlds matter as well. Building on these key notions of the importance of environmental conditions in building understanding of water systems, this paper discusses the growing...

Great Zimbabwe's Water (2017)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Innocent Pikirayi. Federica Sulas. Tendai Treddah Musindo. Elton Munyaradzi Sagiya.

In southern Africa, Great Zimbabwe has long been the focus of research, debates and preservation as the remains of what was once the urban centre of a vast state system. As new research findings are reframing the development of the Zimbabwe civilization in the region, local environmental settings and natural resources at Great Zimbabwe remain poorly understood. Using approaches in geoarchaeology, this paper presents Great Zimbabwe as a living landscape. New soil sequences from within and around...

In hot water: experiments with natural springs and vegetable dyes (2005)

DOCUMENT Citation Only G Dean.

Land Use, American Fork Canyon-Provo Peak Planning Unit Land Use Plan, Uinta National Forest (1974)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sherman B. Boyce. N. E. Corbridge. A. Godfrey. J. Kimbal. W. F. Savage.

Natural Springs: A Critical Life Force in ancient Costa Rica (2017)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine Dixon. Rachel Egan. Nancy Gonlin.

Water is a life sustaining substance, sought after, fought over, and revered in both the past and present. The relationship between humans and water resources is an essential component of our human history that warrants archaeological focus. Natural springs have been identified as key locations of archaeological remains throughout the Americas – places inherently intermixed with practices of drinking, bathing, cooking, and worship of the divine. In Costa Rica, the documentation of Silencio Phase...

Of Water and Ancestors: Landscapes of Resilience Throughout Aventura’s Long History (2024)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kacey C. Grauer.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This paper explores how water contributed to community resilience throughout centuries of occupation at the Maya site of Aventura, Belize. While human-landscape relations changed with shifting sociopolitical and ecological contexts, water and ancestors remained consistently important. During Classic Period occupation, households...

Ontologies of Water on Peru's North Coast (2016)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Weismantel.

The power of water is all-important in the long history of Peru’s North Coast: the arid environment, the transformative effects of irrigation, and the devastating force of the ENSO (El Niño) ecological phenomenon. Archaeological theorizing about North Coast societies has often focused on the shaping force of water; this paper suggests bringing emergent thinking about the human/nonhuman relationship to bear on this topic. Twentieth century Western science saw water as something to control through...

Ontologies of water: intensities and magnitudes (2017)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Weismantel.

Increasingly, the effects of global warming take the form of destructive movements of water, whether vanishing bodies of water that create desertification or floods that damage human habitations and take lives. The extensive archaeological record of the North Coast of Peru offers a place to study long-term human strategies for living with the dangerous and unpredictable movement of water. Despite frequent earthquakes, floods and torrential rains that re-shape land- and sea-scapes, humans...

Ostrich egg canteens. Staying hydrated in the Land of Little Rain (2010)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Vincent Pinto.

Race and the water: the materiality of swimming, sewers and segregation in African America (2017)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul R. Mullins. Timo Ylimaunu.

Few dimensions of the color line were monitored as closely as access to American rivers, beaches, and swimming pools, which became strictly segregated in the early 20th century. This paper examines the heritage of color line inequalities in Indianapolis, Indiana's waters, where beaches were segregated, African Americans were restricted to a single city pool, and waterways in African-American neighborhoods still accommodate sewer overflows. Despite that history, a new wave of urbanites is now...

Rapa Nui: The influence of Freshwater sources on Prehistoric Settlement distribution (2015)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tanya Zeferjahn. Michelle Baroldi. Chris Lee. Carl Lipo. Matt Becker.

One of the many mysteries of Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile) is how the ancient inhabitants survived with so few sources of freshwater. The scarcity of freshwater suggests that water resources may have been a constraining factor in settlement growth, patterning, and distribution. As a first step of addressing this hypothesis, we conducted field work to identify classes of terrestrial sources of freshwater and compared them to early settlement distribution. From May-June, 2014, we generated...

Reconstruction of the 7000 year old bucket from Erkelenz-Kückhoven followed by experiments scooping water. Report on an experiment that failed (2007)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anne Reichert.

Reconstruction of the 7000 year old bucket from Erkelenz-Kückhoven. Report on an experiment that failed again (2008)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anne Reichert.