Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Mennear.

This presentation will discuss the public perception and communication of the Bioarchaeology of Care approach and the accompanying Index of Care program. The ethical considerations of the methodology, as an integral feature of working with human skeletal remains, will also be considered and discussed within a consideration of who ‘owns’ the past and, more specifically, who (if anyone) owns the remains of individuals. In particular it will focus on individuals who are described as disabled, or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Gowland.

The elderly are the most neglected demographic in archaeology. In today’s youth-obsessed society the elderly are consistently denigrated, particularly those perceived to be physically or mentally frail. This negative construction is partly a consequence of an unprecedented ageing population, often conceptualised as problematic and burdensome to society. A related and growing concern in contemporary populations is the physical abuse of the elderly, believed to be an escalating, demographically...

DOCUMENT Citation Only George Crothers. Justin N. Carlson. David Gárate. Matthew Litteral.

Approximately 2.28 ha of Matacanela were surveyed using an electromagnetic induction meter to measure near-surface variations in magnetic susceptibility and/or conductivity. Eight distinct areas were selected for survey deemed most likely to reveal Late Classic or Postclassic occupation or landscape features based on topographical features, LiDAR imagery, and surface finds. The primary areas of interest were off-mound and plaza areas containing domestic or non-elite contexts. The largest...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marcie Venter.

The Matacanela Archaeological Project is a two season effort to more fully understand the transformation of lowland Mesoamerican society at the end of the Classic period. Our particular focus is Classic collapse and Postclassic reorganization in the Tuxtla Mountains of the southern Gulf lowlands. Like other lowland regions (e.g., the southern Maya lowlands) that experienced political decentralization, demographic upheaval, environmental, and climatic change, collapse was not complete or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shayna Lindquist. Xochitl Leon.

The Matacanela Archaeological Project (MAP) seeks to add to the greater understanding of the Classic to Postclassic transition, within the Gulf lowlands of Mesoamerica. Within the surface obsidian assemblage analyzed from the first season of this two-year project, distribution patterns and source frequencies delineate a definite Classic presence, reflecting certain hallmarks of surrounding established Classic period sites. In this paper, we present the obsidian recovered, and further consider...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Xochitl Leon Estrada. Heather Seale.

In this presentation we discuss data collection strategies implemented in the Matacanela Archaeological Project and provide initial interpretations of these data. Field work, completed in the summer of 2014, consisted of systematic surface collection, geophysical survey, and mapping. This discussion focuses primarily on data acquired through surface collection. Using these data, we address the architectural organization of the site, identify possible areas of craft production, and site...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mauricio Cuevas. Carl Shields.

This talk compares methods used for the topographical mapping of the archaeological site of Matacanela. Specifically, we compare the results of the GIS processing of LiDAR data collected and distributed for no charge by the Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía with the results of traditional topographical mapping, undertaken using a Sokkia total station. For the purposes of project planning, the LiDAR data was processed, and maps were generated using GIS. These LiDAR-based data enabled...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maximiliano Sauza. David Gárate.

The town of Zapoapan de Cabañas, located south of Lake Catemaco, Veracruz is adjacent to the archaeological site of Matacanela. Even though little historical continuity exists between the archaeological site and the contemporary settlement, perceptions that Zapoapan’s inhabitants have about the site are informative because they suggest how the site is internalized and integrated into daily life. The historical memory of the inhabitants of Zapoapan de Cabañas, through oral tradition and the reuse...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lourdes Budar.

This presentation offers a historiographic review of investigations that have documented and interpreted the stone monuments from the archaeological site of Matacanela, located in the Tuxtlas Mountains of southern Veracruz, Mexico. This study is designed to reconstruct the possible spatial location of these sculptures in an effort to improve our understanding of their original on-site contexts. In addition, the Matacanela sculptural corpus will be compared with the monuments and stylistic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sara Rosiles Hernandez. Philip J. Arnold III.

Prior archaeological research in the Sierra de los Tuxtlas, southern Veracruz, Mexico demonstrates significant sociopolitical transformations spanning the Formative through the Postclassic periods. Ongoing fieldwork at the site of Matacanela, located within the central portion of the Tuxtla Mountains, is contributing to this understanding. This paper discusses the results of the first season of fieldwork at Matacanela with a focus on patterning in the distribution of surface ceramic material....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sandra Wheeler. Lana Williams. Tosha Dupras.

Human burials and mortuary practices are the result of cultural attitudes and ideological beliefs that have been selected and shaped by the living for the dead. These beliefs and concomitant mortuary practices have changed through time, thus the treatment, space, and place for the dead varies, particularly in the context of the very young. While it is likely that adults were given the opportunity to make decisions about their own place of burial, treatment of the body, or grave assemblage, in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anne Austin.

Intrusions into the burial chamber directly impact the mortuary assemblage, often erasing the purposeful placement of grave goods and destroying the peaceful preservation of the body. So what can these palimpsests of havoc actually tell us about original mortuary practices? In this talk, I answer this question through analysis of Theban Tomb 290, the ancient Egyptian tomb of Iry-Nefer. This tomb, studied in 2013-14 as part of the French Institute mission at Deir el-Medina, contains up to 70...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carol Redmount.

El Hibeh is an isolated urban site some three hours south of Cairo. The walled town was founded at the beginning of Egypt’s Third Intermediate Period, when it reached its greatest importance, and was occupied for approximately a millennia and a half--at least into Coptic/Early Islamic times. Hibeh was an important provincial town during Egypt’s Third Intermediate Period (early first millennium BCE) after which it lost much of its regional significance. The town mound is surrounded by burials cut...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Yohe.

, considerable data regarding the human remains, both from human skeletal remains and mummies has been garnered from controlled excavation of Byzantine (Coptic) burials and surface collections of disturbed graves dating to as early as the Third Intermediate Period. This paper summarizes those data and compare with similar osteometric information from other areas of Middle Egypt. SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brenda Baker.

Our understanding of ancient Nubian mortuary traditions principally derives from monumental elite cemeteries such as Kerma, El-Kurru, and Meroe and the 1960s salvage excavations in Lower Nubia. More recent work in Upper Nubia, in northern Sudan, however, has revealed substantial regional variation. Assessment of habitation, rock art, and cemetery sites from the Mesolithic through Christian periods in the Bioarchaeology of Nubia Expedition (BONE) project area on the right (north) bank of the Nile...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Sevara. Brenda Baker.

The Bioarchaeology of Nubia Expedition project area stretches for over 30 kilometers along the right bank of the Nile in northern Sudan, from the modern village of Abu Tin at the top of the Great Bend west to the area across from Shemkhiya. Many of the numerous archaeological resources located within the concession have principal funerary components from multiple time periods, and their placement in the landscape with regard to specific topographic and environmental features is difficult to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lissette Jimenez.

Throughout the Roman Period in Egypt, decorated shrouds with images of the god Osiris were used in mortuary rituals and wrapped around the mummified body of the deceased. Full-length painted images of the dead in the guise of Osiris, flanked by Egyptian funerary scenes, were effective modes of representation that reveal how gender was used to facilitate the transfiguration of the deceased and aid his or her journey in the afterlife. This paper examines gendered expressions of self-presentation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Wissler.

Patterns of disease manifestation in individuals and within a community reveal how health is affected by social and economic identity. Differences in wealth and social status can lead to disparities in diet, living conditions and healthcare. This interaction is explored using data from skeletal remains and grave architecture from the Predynastic Cemetery N7000 at Naga-ed-Der, located in Upper Egypt. In his Ph.D. dissertation, Stephen Savage (1995) organized individuals into six spatial clusters...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rita Lucarelli.

The collection of texts and illustrations known as the ancient Egyptian "Book of the Dead" was especially en vogue on papyrus from the beginning of the New Kingdom through the Graeco-Roman period. However, abridged versions of Book of the Dead texts and vignettes have also been widely used to decorate a number of other funerary and magical objects. Among others, the anthropoid coffins produced during the Third Intermediate Period and the 25th Dynasty present a few intriguing features in relation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alicia Cunningham-Bryant.

Although Greco-Roman Egypt has received more scholarly attention, the contemporaneous Meroitic civilization of Nubia deserves recognition as an important culture in the history of North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean world. Examination of the archaeological evidence from the Meroitic civilization of Sudan (ca. 400 B.C.E. to ca. 400 C.E.) presents the opportunity to further current understandings of evolving cultural interaction on the fringes of several distinct world powers (namely Egypt,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Deanna Kiser-Go.

Egypt is well known for its long-running funerary traditions, and one of the most fruitful avenues of research on the topic is the study of decorated tombs at the ancient site of Thebes (modern Luxor). The cemetery complex that served this large settlement and religious center during the New Kingdom (ca. 1550-1070 BCE) contains thousands of graves. This paper examines two nearly contemporaneous tombs that although commissioned to hold the burials of different men, have a great deal in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Kaiser.

It is often said that the practice of mummification became a veritable business during the Late and Roman periods, when it was extended to include not only the elite, but also those on the lower end of the status scale. The increase in the number of bodies being embalmed led to the widespread adoption of more expeditious techniques, sometimes resulting in mummies that, though outwardly pleasing in appearance, concealed nothing but a jumbled mess of bones beneath their wrappings. The non-elite...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Minor.

As the ancient Nubian Classic Kerma kings undertook military campaigns into Egyptian territory (1700-1550 BCE), their mortuary practices grew to include mass inhumation of their subjects within their burial tumuli. The tumulus of the second Classic Kerma king (KX) contains over 300 human sacrifices and is the largest group found at the site. The sacrificed Kermans were arranged in the tumulus corridor alongside Egyptian statues taken as spoils of war, emphasizing the king’s control of internal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Helen Pollard.

A major enemy of the Aztecs during the Late Postclassic Period, the Tarascan State nevertheless exchanged key commodities within the Mesoamerican world by means of markets, local and long-distance traders, and gift exchange. Sixteenth century documents known since the 19th c have indicated that Nahua merchants exchanged goods with Purepecha merchants at major Tarascan fortified frontier settlements such as Taximaroa. However new research on recently translated documents and new archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Hare. Marilyn Masson.

Considering luxury production activities in Mayapán's urban landscape reveals new data regarding a complex and diverse economic system. We explore the evidence for luxury production activities at households attached to elite palaces at this Postclassic Maya capital city. Surplus crafting at Mayapán varied according to scale, intensity, and the value of surplus items. Crafting of valuables such as effigy censers, figurines, copper objects, and stucco sculptures, was more closely supervised (or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Janine Gasco.

Our work on Late Postclassic Xoconochco/Soconusco has been greatly influenced by research carried out by Frances Berdan, particularly her focus on the Codex Mendoza and other Aztec documents and her approach that integrates multiple disciplines. In this paper I use ethnohistoric and archaeological data to review the role of the Soconusco region as an Aztec Tributary Province. More specifically, I examine what these data seem to tell us about how the Aztec conquest and the subsequent collection...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara Stark.

A systematic evaluation of emulation of powerful capitals using ceramic comparisons requires consideration of (1) degrees of similarity, (2) legacy traditions, and (3) depositional contexts and sample sizes. This analysis uses ceramics from the Mesoamerican Gulf lowlands on the west side of the Lower Papaloapan River to compare with ceramics from Teotihuacan during the Early Classic Period and from the Aztec Triple Alliance during the Late Postclassic Period. Replication, imitation, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karl Taube.

One of the most striking deities of the Aztec pantheon is Ehecatl-Quetzalcoatl, a duck-billed being embodying such ethereal concepts as rain-bringing wind and the breath of life. He is in jarring contrast to Quetzalcoatl, who although embodying the same concepts of wind, is a quetzal-plumed rattlesnake in Aztec thought. This study argues that in contrast to the plumed serpent, Ehecatl-Quetzalcoatl constitutes a relatively recent introduction of an avian wind deity from eastern Mesoamerica into...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leonardo López Luján. José Luis Ruvalcaba Sil.

Mexico is a not a country rich in native gold deposits, especially compared to Colombia, Peru, or Bolivia. This would explain why the precious metal was always used rather sparingly in Mesoamerican civilizations. A good example is Tenochtitlan (1325–1521 AD): after thirty-seven years of archaeological exploration in the city’s sacred precinct, the Templo Mayor Project (1978-2015) has recovered only a meager set of gold artifacts, in contrast to the tens of thousands of metamorphic greenstone,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael E. Smith.

In discussions of Aztec society, the economy and inequality are typically treated as separate realms. The former is discussed in terms of production, exchange, and consumption, while the latter is framed around nobles versus commoners and various hierarchies. Although no one would claim that these two topics are unrelated, the full extent of their interconnection is rarely acknowledged. We cannot understand Aztec economic processes and institutions without reference to patterns of inequality,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Blanton.

We all know of Frannie Berdan’s many contributions to historical scholarship, archaeology, art history, and Aztec studies, but my goal in this paper is to assess Frannie’s influence on the growth of economic anthropology during a time when the discipline was just beginning to rethink the anti-market theories of Karl Polanyi. The principal institutional context of change was the Society for Economic Anthropology, of which Frannie was a founding member and a founding board member. In the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kenneth Hirth. Sarah Imfeld. Colin Hirth.

Although merchants were an important component of the prehispanic and post-conquest landscape, not much is known about the internal organization of merchant groups and the structure of their respective communities. This paper examines the size, composition, and internal organization of the small merchant community of Santa Maria Acxotla located in the Puebla-Tlaxcala basin of highland Mexico. Census data collected 39 years after the conquest suggests that specialized merchant communities...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alan Sandstrom.

Pilgrimage is a "dynamic concrete isolate" found throughout the world at all levels of socio-cultural integration. Pilgrimage involves a journey to a significant geographic location and a return to the place of origin. Pilgrimage shades into tourism and a pilgrim's destination may range from the site of a miraculous appearance of a deity to Graceland. In Mesoamerica, pilgrimage has become a major focus of archaeological research. Sites with ritual associations and little evidence of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Deborah Nichols.

Frances F. Berdan and Patricia Rieff Anawalt begin their magnificent four-volume edition of the Codez Mendoza by offering the following words to Mesoamerican scholars, "ce qualli obtli." "May you find the good road." Frances Berdan’s road to understanding the Aztec world crosses subfields of anthropology, ethnography, ethnohistory, archaeology and linguistics. As one of the most influential and productive scholars of the Aztecs, her road runs opposite the trend in anthropology of increasing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Robertshaw. Laure Dussubieux. Freda Nkirote.

Two of Frannie Berdan’s abiding research interests are the concept of ethnic identity and the application of scientific analyses to archaeological problems. These two topics intersect in research on pottery in East Africa. Pioneering work in the 1970s by Simiyu Wandibba led to the recognition of several ceramic ‘wares’ represented among Neolithic and later assemblages from Kenya and northern Tanzania. The occurrence on some sites of more than one ware in the same occupation horizon challenged...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Umberger.

A fascinating aspect of Frances Berdan's new text, Aztec Archaeology and Ethnohistory (2014), is the section in Chapter 8 on warrior regalia as inalienable possessions. This topic is explored by Berdan in a rich discussion that merges Annette Weiner's framework with Berdan's own exhaustive knowledge of written and pictorial manuscript sources on the Aztecs. I would like to take this exploration into the realm of material evidence, by examining particular sculpted examples in the Aztec World. ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Filloy. María Olvido Moreno Guzmán.

This paper examines a well-known Mexica chimalli (shield), possibly from the sixteenth century, currently found among the holdings of the National Museum of History, Chapultepec Castle, Mexico City. The importance of this study lies in three fundamental aspects: 1) very few Mexica shields have survived; 2) the examples found outside of Mexico have not been fully analyzed; and 3) the chimalli now residing at Chapultepec Castle was originally taken from the Basin of Mexico to Europe during the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kurt Rademaker. Gordon Bromley.

The Central Andean region poses numerous environmental challenges, including hyper-aridity, rugged topography, strong seasonality, uneven spatial distribution of biotic resources, and high altitude, yet this area was colonized successfully in the Terminal Pleistocene. However, the archaeological record shows considerable discontinuity through the Terminal Pleistocene-Early Holocene transition, with site occupation hiatuses or abandonments often interpreted as having stemmed from unfavorable...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marvin Kay.

Excavations by W. Raymond Wood and then by Ronald A. Thomas first exposed late glacial/early post-glacial archaeology in 1961 and 1962. In 2012 renewed excavations by Arkansas Archeological Survey personnel re-exposed 1960s test units of up to 3m thickness to further evaluate the unusually deep deposit and its stratigraphy; and to collect sediment, associated artifacts, and radiocarbon samples. Compared to Rodgers Shelter and Big Eddy, two well-dated alluvial archaeological sites in the western...

DOCUMENT Citation Only D. Shane Miller. David Anderson. Kelsey Meer.

The Tennessee and Cumberland River Valleys have a rich history of archaeological research and provide a valuable dataset for exploring the relationship between climate and culture during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition. In this paper, we provide an overview of available archaeological and environmental data in this area, and argue that there were significant changes in diet, technological organization, and landscape use that are most likely related to environmental change. Home to some of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pablo Arias. Esteban Álvarez-Fernández.

Cantabrian Spain is a privileged area for a diachronic study of the relationship between human societies and the marine resources. The region can boast one of the highest densities of Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic sites in Europe, and a long and dense tradition of archaeological research, especially in the coastal areas. Moreover, its continental shelf is very narrow, so the preserved sites are closer to the late Pleistocene shoreline than in other parts of the Continent. This paper...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Gurova. Clive Bonsall.

Any discussion of Neolithization of the part of the Balkan Peninsula that lies within the territory of Bulgaria has to confront two seemingly long-established and incontrovertible ‘facts’ – the abrupt appearance of a fully developed Neolithic ‘package’ c. 6100/6000 cal BC, and the virtual archaeological ‘absence’ of a pre-Neolithic (Mesolithic) substratum. This paper focuses on two inadequately discussed aspects of the ongoing debate surrounding the spread of farming across SE Europe: 1) the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Javier Fernandez-Lopez De Pablo. Samantha Jones. Magdalena Gómez Puche. Francesc Burjachs.

The central Mediterranean region of the Iberian Peninsula witnessed two major environmental processes affecting early and middle Holocene hunter-gatherers: rapid sea-level rise, with the consequent flooding of coastal plains; and the replacement of open-landscape by forest- taxa. In this context, much less is known regarding how the 8.2 kyr cal BP climatic event impacted Late Mesolithic human populations. Using multiple lines of archaeological and paleoenvironmental evidence, in this paper we...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ivana Radovanovic.

Material culture record from the Danube Iron Gates Mesolithic reflects a variety of hunter-gatherer adaptive strategies, including shifts in the foraging methods, changes in preferential choices for the raw material extraction, and a variable use of the same locations for residential and/or aggregation camps covering over five millennia. Archaeological debates however remained focused mainly on a few hundred years of the local hunter-gatherers’ interaction with the incoming food producers during...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thijs Van Kolfschoten. Anastasia K. Markova. Andrey Y. Puzachenko. Alexei N. Tikhonov. Pavel A. Kosintsev.

More and more we become aware of the impact of climate change on our natural environment. The fossil record shows how extensive that impact can be. The woolly mammoth, the emperor of the animal kingdom during the Late Pleistocene, dominated the fauna of Eurasia for thousands of years, but the territory of the species shrunk dramatically; rather recently the woolly mammoth, together with for example the woolly rhinoceros and the giant deer, became extinct. Other species flourished due to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Benjamin.

Human response to sea-level rise is an important aspect within the broader topic of coastal prehistory. Sites found on today's continental shelf directly contribute to the archaeological record and are, in some cases well preserved under water. Recent emphasis on continental shelf archaeology, or submerged prehistory, has encouraged prehistorians to embrace underwater archaeology in order to fully appreciate past lifeways and adaptation to sea-level change in the final Pleistocene and early...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robin Skeates.

This paper reconsiders the significance of a generally warmer and wetter climate, expanded plant ranges and sea level rise to human groups in mainland and island Italy between the Final Upper Palaeolithic and Early Neolithic. Fundamental cultural changes in demography, subsistence strategies and social organization certainly coincided broadly with these environmental changes, and do suggest a degree of human adaptation, although the cultural resilience of hunter-gatherer lifestyles should not be...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Miquel Molist.

In this communication we will deal with the symbolic documents that the archaeological excavation at Tell Halula (Syria) (7800-6500cal BC) have provided. The documents are essentially symbolic paintings representations on the walls of houses, figurines and a rich funerary objects. This documentation provides exceptional discussed the symbolic world of the first farmers while data confronts economic and social communities of emerging farmers. SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rosemary Joyce.

Neolithic Çatalhöyük poses an interpretative challenge: while there is evident distinction among houses in elaboration, concentration of mortuary remains, and generational persistence, this did not translate into the kinds of material advantages that can be discerned as dietary privilege or preferential mortuary treatment. This has led to the characterization of the people of the site as "fiercely egalitarian". In this paper, I reconsider the established facts from the perspective of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gunes Duru.

Continuity Phenomenon that lasted for thousands of years in Central Anatolia could be one of the reasons of a distinctive or local process of neolithization in Central Anatolia when compared to the Core Area or the PPN world.The rapid changes, the fast innovations in PPNB, defining discontinuity, have brought a development momentum to the region, however all these PPN began to loose power in their most glorious period. Aşıklı never became part of this system, the people found solutions within...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marion Benz. Kurt W. Alt. Vecihi Özkaya.

Until the end of the 1990s, southeastern Turkey was considered a secondary center of Neolithisation. However, excavations in the context of the Ilisu Dam project have shown that there was a long local tradition of permanent settlement since at least the Epipaleolithic. Evidences from Körtik Tepe indicate strong commitments to the site and to households. Social and emotional relationships were consolidated by intense ritual behavior, including burials beneath house floors, the increasing use of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nigel Goring-Morris. Anna Belfer-Cohen.

Shared historical memory is a given feature of every human society as a basic component of group identity and cohesion. With increasing tendencies towards sedentism the material culture evidence for communal memory increases, as reflected in spatial correlates at both the inter- and intra-site levels. It appears that social stress, deriving from increased community sizes and staying together for prolonged periods of time in close proximity, amongst others, raised the need for mechanisms to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicola Lercari.

3D technologies, remote sensing, geographic information systems, and virtual reality have changed the documentation and interpretation process of Çatalhöyük (Berggren et al. forthcoming 2015). Work at Çatalhöyük Building 89 has allowed a new methodology of data capture, processing, visualization, and analysis of stratigraphic layers based on digital technologies (Forte et al. 2012). On the other hand, virtual reconstruction of Neolithic buildings rebuilt in the same place has been little...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lee Clare. Oliver Dietrich. Jens Notroff. Joris Peters.

Processes of early sedentism are associated with the agglomeration of complex hunter-gatherer populations within the ‘confines’ of spatially limited permanent settlement systems, possibly with ‘fixed’ territorial claims, and with an economy based on stored harvests of wild cereals and pulses, and broad-spectrum hunting. Against this background, the emergence of social hierarchies and identities has long been an area of discussion among archaeologists. Be this as it may, we still find it...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christina Tsoraki.

The destruction of buildings by fire, either deliberately as a ritual act or accidentally, is among the most interesting elements of Neolithic Çatalhöyük, in central Anatolia, not least for the patterns of deposition of material culture at the time of destruction. Burnt Building 77, a well-preserved structure excavated by the current project, stands out in many respects, but one of its intriguing features is the large number of clustered grinding tools and other stone objects that seem to have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Douglas Baird. Andrew Fairbairn.

This paper explores the degree to which the spatial ordering of Neolithic settlements may be related to the nature of households and their inter-relationshps and where symbolic and cosmological factors may have had a role, using evidence from central Anatolia, notably from Boncuklu, where practices antecedent to those at Çatalhöyük are well attested. Still influential is a ‘ Domestic Mode of Production’ model in which it is proposed that increasing household autonomy in the Neolithic reflects...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Bridges.

This paper reexamines notions of imperial collapse by looking at recent archaeological work at the eponymous capital of the Vijayanagara Empire and at settlements of one of its subordinate regional polities. The Vijayanagara Empire is well-known archaeologically through work at its primary capital at modern day Hampi, Karnataka, India, which is today recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The former primary capital city was intensively occupied until just after the empire suffered a serious...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Paris. Elizabeth Brite.

Eric Wolf's seminal work, Europe and the People Without History (1982), drew our attention to the periphery as an important locus of anthropological inquiry. By examining "people without history," Wolf was able to show that social complexity before the modern era was not a process that laid solely in the development and decline of isolated societies. Rather, both ancient and modern forms of social complexity rest upon the interconnections among peoples at global scales. This perspective has...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Roberto Lopez Bravo. Elizabeth H. Paris.

Despite the sociopolitical instability and depopulation observed at numerous sites in the Southern Maya Lowlands during the 9th century A.D., often referred to as the "Maya Collapse," numerous politically and geographically peripheral sites do not show evidence of these characteristics. Many of the small cities and towns of the Central Highlands of Chiapas maintained their roles as political centers throughout the Late Classic-Early Postclassic period transition, and also experienced demographic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hiroko Inoue. Christopher Chase-Dunn. Eugene Anderson. Alexis Álvarez. Christian Jaworski.

This is an examination of one of the implications of the hypothesis of semiperipheral development: that major increases in the sizes of polities have been attained by the conquests of semiperipheral marcher states. We use the comparative evolutionary world-systems perspective to frame our study of upsweeps of the largest polities in four regional world-systems and in the Central system since the Bronze Age. Each of the twenty-two identified upsweeps is examined whether it is an instance of a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lynne Rouse.

As in many regions of the Old World, the end of the Bronze Age in southern Central Asia is marked by a prolonged period of social "collapse" toward the end of the 2nd millennium BC, during which the size, arrangement, and apparent sphere of influence of agriculturally-based population centers changed. Discussions of this period focus primarily on the loss of visible markers of social hierarchy and inter-regional trade networks, but as our collective knowledge of mobile pastoralists in Eurasian...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Allen. Kathleen Forste.

The site of Tsoungiza, situated in the Nemea Valley of southern Greece, offers a glimpse into processes of agricultural and land-use practices in the Mycenaean hinterland and their intersection with the waxing and waning of Mycenaean political, economic, and social control. After abandonment in the Early Helladic III period (ca. 2,000 B.C.), the site was re-occupied during the late Middle Helladic III (ca. 1,650 B.C.), at a time of regional population expansion associated with the rise of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Brite.

The deltas of the Aral Sea lie within an internal drainage basin where critical water resources are prone to unpredictable change. The nature of this resource landscape discourages the emergence of enduring centralized states and was a key factor that led to the peripheral status of the deltas in world history. Nevertheless, complex social institutions did develop there in the early 1st millennium B.C. – late 1st millennium A.D., and these were based on especially diverse and flexible economic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erana Loveless.

"Reactive foragers" are people who switched to intensive foraging in reaction to crises. They are largely a people without history because their turn to foraging decreased their archaeological visibility and increased their remoteness from the centers of civilization where written history is concentrated. Ironically, while colonialism was often a driver for reactive foraging it also introduced the keys for reactive foragers to succeed in some cases. Reactive foraging can explain the loss of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Mixter.

In recent years, scholars working in the Classic period Maya periphery questioned traditional narratives of the 9th century Maya collapse by pointing to settlements along the periphery of the lowlands that appear to have maintained relative cultural and demographic stability. However, this generalization obscures dramatic sociopolitical changes these communities implemented to remain successful through the collapse. In this paper, I argue that populations on the periphery relied on a locally...

DOCUMENT Citation Only E. Anderson.

World temperatures are now back up to the range last seen in the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), a time known to have caused droughts in many areas, warmer moister weather in others. The droughts may have destroyed lowland Maya civilization, as well as Pueblo III culture, and may also have impacted Khmer civilization in Cambodia, and other tropical cultures. Recently, Mongolia has been shown to have had warmer weather, which would have made life easier for forest and grassland Mongols, though...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eleni Asouti.

Prevailing theories concerning the role of climate change in the transition from foraging to farming in SW Asia view socioeconomic change as a response to climate deterioration (push theories) or improvement (pull theories) which caused resource depression or abundance respectively. With this paper I propose that periods of socioeconomic and cultural innovation correlate with periods of climatic instability, which occurred at the timescales of direct human experience of the landscape (i.e., at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tim Denham.

Early cultivation practices and plant domestication in the New Guinea and Island Southeast Asian regions were largely based on the vegetative propagation of a range of plant types – including root crops, shrubs, grasses and herbs – as well as the transplantation of palms, pandans and trees. The character of early agricultural practices within these regions, as well as in tropical rainforest environments elsewhere, requires different conceptual and methodological approaches than have been adopted...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gyoung-Ah Lee.

Through a lens of niche construction perspective, this paper examines evolving enterprise of plant managements in different ecological and cultural contexts in Mid-Holocene China. Along a stretch of the Yellow River, bulging communities, facing different challenges of changing climates and ecological constraints, constructed agricultural and socially intertwined niches. Multiple Yangshao communities in the Yiluo valley and those in Guanzhong Plain are such examples. Drastically different from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elisabeth Hildebrand. Anneke Janzen.

Characterizing the patterns and processes of early food production across Africa is difficult because the continent’s large landmass, diverse physiography, and regionally specific environments and crops hinder generalization. Due to these challenges, accounts of early food production in Africa tend to be narrative syntheses: they either present a detailed sequence of developments in one specific region, or ‘follow’ the spread of food production from the earliest herding in the eastern Sahara...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fiona Marshall. Jose Capriles.

Animal behavior, diverse strategies of human management and environmental selection all contribute to domestication processes. Recent research suggests human control of breeding may have been less important than assumed and that breeding of captive animals with wild relatives significantly influenced domestication processes. Less social transport animals from extreme environments experience high levels of environmental selection and are especially likely to encounter wild relatives. Slow growth...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gary Crawford.

Agriculture in the Northeast is a secondary development with research focusing on migration as a result of population growth in agricultural centers and the introduction of maize, bean, squash , sunflower and tobacco and the subsequent consequences of their introduction. Unlike pristine/primary origins whose explanations are couched in complex ecological considerations, be they interactive (ecological engineering, niche construction) or based in HBE (human behavioral ecology), ecological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chris Stevens.

Studies of evolutionary change within selected traits for rice indicate a period of interaction from the cultivation of morphologically wild plants (Oryza rufipogon) to the eventual farming of domesticated rice (Oryza sativa ssp. japonica) that lasted around 3000 years. The shift from the collecting of wild foods to dependence on cultivation was equally protracted. While rice was likely taken into cultivation in a number of areas across China it is only in the Lower Yangtze between 6000 to 3000...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melinda Zeder.

Widely accepted models for the diversification of subsistence economies that preceded the domestication of plants and animals in the Near East frame this key transition in the context of demographically induced resource pressure following a diet breadth model of forager decision making. Many of the supporting arguments for this scenario are open to an alternative view that casts these developments within the context of resource abundance and enhanced predictability. Contrasting explanatory...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leilani Lucas. Dorian Fuller.

Southwest Asia is one of the earliest and most documented centres of agricultural origins. With the expansion of archaeobotanical and zooarchaeological datasets within this region it is now more possible to unravel the evidence on a broader regional scale revealing a more complex picture with multiple centers and pathways of plant and animal domestication. Through a comparison of recent evidence this paper examines the multiple pathways towards domestication and the transition to agricultural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eleanor Kingwell-Banham.

It is still unclear if India saw an independent domestication of rice, and so the origins of Oryza sativa indica, as distinct from the Chinese rice O. s. japonica, are shrouded in mystery. However, there is very early evidence dating to c.9000 BP of wild rice exploitation, and perhaps of crop management, from Northern India. Once rice becomes widely reported within the archaeobotanic record, there is long term evidence for low impact agrarian practices across the subcontinent, including shifting...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dorian Fuller.

Recent archaeobotanical evidence has provided important, although limited evidence, for the steps on the domestication trajectory for Pearl Millet in western Africa (Mali, Mauretania) and Sorghum in eastern Africa (Sudan), during the middle Holocene (3000-1000 BC). Both were exploited by and domesticated by societies that in the Sahelian and northern Savannas, and practiced mobile herding alongside hunting and low-level cultivation, but full-scale agricultural dependence may not have emerged...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine Hastorf.

Most scholars agree that territoriality and commitment to a landscape participated in the domestication syndrome and agriculture. The geophyte Solanum, the potato, is a particularly engaging crop to study domestication origins, being a stem tuber, with wild species growing throughout the Andes of South America, it is only with recent genetic research that we know its likely location of domestication. Wild potatoes continue to be found in potato fields today, aiding the diverse varieties still...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Huw Barton.

This paper considers the idea that the origin of swidden agriculture in the tropics arose from long-term practices of fallow management. In various forms, these ideas have been expressed before (particularly in South America), though swidden systems are normally thought of as being introduced into mainland and island Southeast Asia along with rice and taro ‘agriculture’ from southern China. This paper suggests instead that certain ‘domesticates’ may have been integrated into a pre-existing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charlene Murphy.

India possesses a unique Neolithic transition to sedentism and agriculture which has shaped the cultural and ecological trajectory of the subcontinent. In the early Holocene South Asia was a subcontinent of hunter-gatherers. By 2000 years ago it was mostly inhabited by farmers, supporting densely populated river valleys, coastal plains, urban populations, states and empires. South Asia appears to have been host to a mosaic of processes, including local domestication of plants and animals, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Koji Mizoguchi.

The controlled discursivization of various undiscursivized/practical archaeological taken-for-granteds, ranging from micro-culturally-constituted traditions in artifact classification to grand meta-theoretical inclinations, is a constitutive function of archaeological theorization. How can it be implemented in the manner which most effectively enhances the potentiality of one’s archaeological investigation and practice depends on the purpose of the investigation and practice, and on the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Mrozowski.

One way of situating the empirical research that often accompanied European colonialism is to view it as an instrument of imperialism. This legacy stands a major impediment to the kind of collaboration that is an essential part of the growth of indigenous archaeologies. Yet empirical research remains an important part of archaeology. Used in a collaborative framework it can provide powerful evidence that can augment and refine indigenous histories, especially those being disputed by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dr. Kathryn Arthur.

This paper focuses on the relationship between material culture and living peoples as constructed through an African perspective of what it means to be in existence- ontology. It is critical that we precedent descendant theories of the human and nonhuman world to produce meaningful narratives of the past, to avoid alienation and ethnocentrism. The Borada-Gamo of southern Ethiopia offers that their worldview enlightens their knowledge of technology. Material culture as spiritually animated has...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Walz.

In this paper, I discuss alternative interpretations of findings from an interdisciplinary archaeology project in East Africa. I share the way in which my experiences as an archaeologist among people and on landscapes enriched and altered my original understanding of communities and the region's history. Interactions with Zigua healer-historians alerted me to indigenous concepts of time and space and the role and significance of ancestors and healing, which inevitably offered more robust and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alice Kehoe.

As contract firms have become employers for the majority of archaeologists, evidence-based practice is demanded. Universities have responded by creating contract programs separate from traditional doctoral tracks. Some glorify theory construction, some others—where some of our presenters are affiliated—are responding to mandated public involvement by encouraging faculty and students to seek to work with local and descendant communities. Action archaeology, Kleindienst and Watson called it in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Audrey Horning.

Negotiating the politics of the present while staying true to the evidence of the past is the central challenge of responsible, ethically-engaged archaeological practice: the line between the archaeologist and the citizen is never clear cut. Questions of moral obligation and the imperative to respect multiple perspectives are of particular resonance when dealing with contested histories in conflict-ridden and post-conflict societies. Archaeology in these contexts carries risks, but also the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only George Nicholas.

Following 15th-century philosopher’s Wang Yangming’s statement that "Knowledge without action is not real knowledge," I explore the value of knowledge that emanates from evidence-based practice grounded in descendant community’s engagement with heritage, and it subsequent application in two realms. The first is research at the interface of Traditional Knowledge (TK) and Western science; the second a series of community-initiated and -directed studies funded by the Intellectual Property Issues in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Philip Kohl.

Silence and Noise in the Archaeological Record: are archaeological understandings always underdetermined? In his seminal critique on the practice of history: Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Michel-Rolph Trouillot persuasively argues that historians often cannot understand or even recognize major historical events, such as the slave organized and directed rebellion in Haiti (1791-1804) that led to the end of slavery and the establishment of the Republic of Haiti. It was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carole Crumley.

Four decades ago this summer, newly arrived in a country where we barely spoke the language, our field crew began excavation of an Iron Age hill fort. First encounters quickly taught us that local identity was grounded in the tradition of the Iron Age Celts, not the later arriving Romans, Franks, or the region’s powerful medieval dukes. My intention was to see how indigenous peoples had fared before and after the Roman conquest; I planned a colonization framework. But the site was a surprise,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jagath Weerasinghe.

Surveying, excavating, and conserving Buddhist stupas have been major activities undertaken by Sri Lankan archaeologists since colonial times. Conservation of Buddhist stupas holds an important place in the archaeological agenda of the national institutions in Sri Lanka. I present the elusive concept of ‘authenticity’, treated as the most important criterion in conserving architectural heritage and examine the crisis that emerged when this centerpiece of the Authorized Heritage Discourse was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Schmidt.

Theory as Western performance in archaeology has hogged center stage so long that other actors standing in the wings ready to play their roles are not included in the drama. Indigenous theories of knowledge have been relegated to permanent off-stage status. Yet those who have had the privilege to work with and collaborate with historically-minded counterparts in other cultures have incrementally accumulated local beliefs and have, both consciously and unconsciously, woven local epistemologies...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chris McDaid.

One way to limit the amount of damage done to cultural property during armed conflict is to work within the international framework developed by the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict. This international treaty requires its signatories to develop processes to protect cultural properties including significant archaeological sites and monuments. One way to lessen the likelihood of damage to cultural properties is to have the discussions...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Newson. Ruth Young.

When faced with the destruction of archaeological sites through conflict, and the accompanying loss of knowledge, what can archaeologists do? Archaeologists, politicians, and many others recognise that damage to heritage is irreversible and has very serious, lasting consequences. The impact of war on archaeological sites is rightly an area of great significance and concern to archaeologists and other heritage professionals, and is increasingly an area of research and debate, both within and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tao Li.

It is proposed that a greater degree of differentiation between households in Hongshan villages (4500-3000 BC) in northeast China with regard to productive activities implies a greater degree of economic interdependence between households and a more complex economy, which possibly provides leaders with enhanced opportunities to mobilize labor toward such ends. Analysis of household artifact assemblages in the Hongshan periphery has indicated some very modest levels of productive differentiation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zhen Qin.

Over the last 10,000 years, agriculture has gradually replaced hunting and gathering, and become the dominant food resource. Because of their extreme importance agricultural issues have attracted much academic attention; a wide variety of new perspectives and understandings, especially concerning agricultural origins, have been gained in the past few decades. However, there is a huge intellectual gap between the extensive agriculture soon after the earliest domestication and intensive...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kuei-chen Lin.

The Chengdu Plain has been home to several large walled settlements and many small villages since the late Neolithic era. Evidence from several sites suggests that multiple types of economic and subsistence production were usually coupled within a given community. Such activities might have mutually influenced one another while sharing or competing for resources, including labor and customers. Although some artisans possibly produced luxury goods or gifts used on special occasions, most of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Xiangming Dai.

Traditionally Erlitou was considered the capital city of the first kingdom——the Xia dynasty, in Chinese history. However, an increasing amount of archaeological data in the past decades have suggested that Taosi was the first state-level society earlier than Erlitou emerging in central China. With the amazing discoveries of the Shimao walled site in north Shaanxi province in the past several years, I offered that Shimao was another early state appearing in northern China, which was approximately...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jade D'Alpoim Guedes.

The highlands of western Sichuan (or Eastern Tibet) experienced a profound change in both settlement patterns and in subsistence regimes when a shift from a millet-based agriculture to wheat and barley based agro-pastoralism took place c. 2000 cal. BC. Using a model that predicts the changing possible distribution of crops across the area, we examine the role that changes in ancient climate could have played in the reversal of subsistence practices in this area. SAA 2015 abstracts made...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Camilla Kelsoe. Dong Li.

The late Neolithic marked the emergence of a new kind of settlement pattern in the middle Yangzi river valley. During this period, large, tightly nucleated communities, many of which were surrounded by moats or walls, rapidly replaced the dispersed hamlets and small villages of the middle Neolithic. This dramatic transition in settlement organization may have been associated with significant changes in social and economic relations between individuals both within and between settlements. To...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Williams.

Food production and other forms of economic activity manifest at both local and regional scales. In some instances population density within one community may lead to stress at the local scale. The region can, however, mitigate local stresses through regional exchange between small polities. In the same way that household exchange mitigates the risk of a single community, inter-community exchange mitigates risk for many communities regionally. This paper will explore both regional and local...