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

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angela Arpaia.

The Santa Clara Valley has an archaeobotanical record that spans from the central California Early, Middle, and Late periods. Sites CA-SCL-12, -478, -674, and -919 have robust plant remains assemblages from distinct periods that can be used to evaluate change in plant use and land-management practices. Temporal context and habitat will be compared for each site to understand variation in plant diversity and intensification. SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Seetha Reddy.

Despite considerable diversity in plant communities across coastal and inland California, the region’s hunter-gatherers often have been viewed as having broadly similar plant resource orientation. This paper reassess this perspective by explicitly examining spatial and temporal variation in plant use west of the Sierra Nevada. In doing so, the study capitalized on a growing body of paleoethnobotanical data to explore similarities and differences in plant food resource emphasis across six main...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wendy Pierce. Gary Scholze.

Owens Valley is unique in that the Native Paiute were recorded as using irrigation to promote growth of certain crops such as taboose, Cyperus esculentus. This paper looks at the archaeological occurrence of the taboose tuber and other archaeobotanical remains in Owens Valley to explore the issue of whether Native irrigation would have made sense for this hunter-gatherer group. For roughly the last 2000 years of prehistory the Owens Valley archaeological record shows a cycle of alternating...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristin Hoppa. Kristina Gill.

This paper considers both macrobotanical and starch grain evidence for terrestrial plant use at Diablo Valdez (SCRI-619/620) on Santa Cruz Island, California. This inland site consists of a rock shelter as well as an open-air living space, and was occupied from ca. 5900 years ago and into the Historic period. Macrobotanical remains were recovered from 140 liters of soil, while starch grain analysis was conducted on six bowl fragments. This paper contextualizes these results within a broader...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rob Cuthrell.

The Central Coast and San Francisco Bay regions of California are areas of high climatic, ecological, and indigenous cultural heterogeneity. During the last two decades, archaeobotanical research in these regions has begun to document the contributions of botanical resources in indigenous foodways systems through time. In the San Francisco Bay Area, a large number of anthropogenic shell mounds were population aggregation sites used for thousands of years, and, for the period after ca. 1050 CE,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Wohlgemuth.

The Sacramento Valley bottom is a rich environment for faunal resources, notably fish, but lacks staple nut crops found elsewhere in interior central California. The absence of key nut resources appears to be the key factor in intensified production of geophytes and the early intensification of small seeds, especially Chenopodium spp. These features are absent in other regions in the rich archaeobotanical record of central California. SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Georg Meyer. Natalie Uomini.

A big question in cognitive archaeology is whether complex tool-making and language co-evolved in the human lineage. There is considerable overlap in the brain structures that support complex body actions, including pantomiming and tool use, but also making music and using language. The activation of shared brain areas for separate skills is the basis of this popular theory. The aim of this talk is to review some of the difficulties - and possible solutions - to measuring the degree of overlap...

DOCUMENT Citation Only P. Schoenemann. Lindsey Kitchell.

The right-handed bias in humans is significantly stronger at the population level than what has been found for other primates. The functional connection this might have with the elaboration of tool use in general, and stone tool making in particular, has long been of interest. Tracing the development of handedness in the fossil record would allow for an assessment of the degree to which handedness is associated with technological advances evident in the archaeological record. The extent to which...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ceri Shipton. Antoine Muller. Chris Clarkson. Richard Jennings. Mike Petraglia.

In 2013 I suggested that changes in behaviour at a transitional Acheulean to Middle Palaeolithic site in India were characterized by increases in generativity, hierarchical organization and recursion, and that the transition was perhaps underpinned by improved working memory. Here I present the results of a knapping experiment that compares the recursive and hierarchical complexity of Acheulean and Middle Palaeolithic knapping sequences in order to test this claim. I then look at how...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Morgan. Natalie Uomini. Luke Rendell. Ignacio de la Torre. Kevin Laland.

Flint flakes appear in the archaeological record from 2.5mya and the skill to produce them is believed to have been socially transmitted. However, how this occurred remains a mystery. In an experiment involving 184 participants, we investigated how effectively five different forms of transmission facilitate the acquisition of the ability to produce Oldowan flakes. We compared i) reverse engineering of discarded flakes, ii) observational learning, iii) basic "ape-like" teaching, iv) gestural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karenleigh Overmann.

Numerical elaboration and the extension of numbers to non-tangible domains such as time have been linked to cultural complexity in several studies. However, the reasons for this phenomenon remain insufficiently explored. In the present analysis, Material Engagement Theory, an emerging perspective in cognitive archaeology, provides a new perspective from which to reinterpret the cultural nexus in which quantification and timekeeping develop. These insights are then applied to representative...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nada Khreisheh.

The analysis of stone tools has long been a technique used when addressing prehistoric cognition. While experimental studies have been used extensively as a tool that can give information on these technologies, these studies have often been short term and involved a small number of participants. This paper uses the examples of two longer term multi-disciplinary studies of experimental flintknapping, involving the teaching of early knapping technologies, to demonstrate the value of experimental...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Frederick Coolidge.

Bruner and his colleagues (Bruner et al. 2013) have demonstrated that the parietal lobes in Homo sapiens are expanded in comparison to Neandertals and Homo heidelbergensis. The traditional parietal lobe function of the brain, somatosensory integration, is thought to be among the phylogenetically oldest functions of the brain. However, recent research has shown that the parietal lobes may be critical to many of the higher cognitive functions of modern Homo sapiens. There are two regions appear to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erella Hovers. Anna Belfer-Cohen.

A point that we want to emphasize is that "cognitive archaeology" is a catch-all phrase that covers pretty much every aspect of human existence. To truly discuss cognitive archaeology, we need to define the specific areas of interest in each case. Given our position that cognitive capacities as such existed from at least the late Middle Pleistocene, we are interested in questions about evolution of social cognitive constructs. These constructs portray the plasticity of cognitive mechanisms and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dietrich Stout.

Neuroscience research has linked both language and tool-use to neural circuits in the left hemisphere, leading to hypotheses of co-evolutionary interaction between these behaviors. However, it is known that the right hemisphere also contributes to language, particularly with respect to large scale (e.g. prosody, context) processing. Studies of actual tool-making, as opposed to simple use, are sparse, but similarly suggest right hemisphere involvement in the more complex and temporally extended...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Mahaney.

Pioneering neuroimaging studies have allowed the analysis of the cognitive basis of stoneknapping and lithic technology to develop rapidly over the past 40 years. While these studies have helped identify the neuroanatomy of stoneknapping, interpretation of the cognitive significance of these results is still in its early days. To provide a comparative baseline between brain activity in stoneknapping and the rest of cognitive neuroscience, I performed an Activation Likelihood Estimate (ALE)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emiliano Bruner.

Cognitive archaeology is based on the assumption that behaviors can reveal cognitive capacities, and that archaeology can provide inferences on behaviors. Additional information comes from the fossil record (paleoneurology) and from methods in neuroscience (neuroarchaeology). Visuospatial functions can be investigated from all these perspectives. In archaeology, visuospatial capacity can be investigated in terms of space and geometry according to information on tools, tool use, and space...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lana Ruck.

Lithic analysis is of great value for understanding hominid biological, cognitive, and cultural evolution, but analyses of handedness in lithics are rare, despite their potential to elucidate the evolution of human lateralities in the body and the brain. This paper will present results of an experiment to determine handedness in lithic materials. In a blind study on debitage (n=631) from Acheulean handaxes created by right- and left-handed flintknappers, several flake characteristics...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathleen Gibson.

Charting the emergence of human cognition from archaeological remains requires reconstructing the probable behavioral capacities of the last common chimpanzee/human ancestor and delineating the cognitive, motor, and social abilities that underpin the production of hominin material cultures. Hence, the birth and growth of cognitive archaeology has long depended upon research findings in other disciplines. This paper provides a brief overview of historical perceptions of adult and immature human...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Wynn.

Perhaps the most intractable puzzle of the Palaeolithic is the Acheulean handaxe. Despite a century and a half of scrutiny by several generations of archaeologists, a comprehensive understanding of these enigmatic but ubiquitous artifacts remains out of reach. The typological approach that dominated Palaeolithic studies for a century arguably generated more puzzles than it resolved (‘stasis’, the ‘Movius line’) and the functional/materialist approach simply confirmed that they were tools....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Glenn Farris.

Following the successful conclusion of the Mexican Revolution, many soldiers from the old Spanish Presidio of San Diego moved down the hill to found a civil pueblo. The soldiers themselves represented a diverse background of people from Mexico to which were added local Native Americans as wives and, more often, as servants. With the opening of the province of California to foreigners under the new Mexican regime, a variety of men of European and American descent including merchants and sailors...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Johnson.

The Mission Period in Spanish-Mexican California resulted in the breakdown of original independent native polities. Depopulation from introduced European diseases coupled with intermarriage between people from different tribal groups at the missions led to the disappearance of linguistic differences and the formation of new community identities named after the different missions. Alongside these processes of coalescence and ethnogenesis, political and traditional ceremonial activities...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Douglass. Kathleen Hull.

Community formation and integration in colonial settings has traditionally been viewed from the binary perspective of colonists and native people. This session views the concept of community in colonial Alta California (1769-1834) from more holistic and alternative viewpoints. To set the stage for this discussion, this introductory paper offers an overview of the sociopolitical landscape in colonial Alta California and presents a broad discussion of the concept of "community" as it may pertain...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kent Lightfoot.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the multiple communities that materialized at Colony Ross, the mercantile outpost administered by the Russian-American Company in northern California from 1812-1841. Archaeological and archival research suggests that several distinctive pluralistic communities, comprised mostly of colonial men and indigenous people, were established at Colony Ross. The paper will examine the dynamic relations of these communities, including how they formed, how they...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Dietler. Heather Gibson. Benjamin Vargas.

Recent research at Mission San Gabriel (CA-LAN-184H), conducted in collaboration with descendant communities, has identified two major types of Mission-period features related to communal mourning. In addition to the known practice of interring and memorializing the deceased in the Mission’s cemetery, archaeological data recovery excavation has identified a series of artifact-filled pits that have much in common with prehistoric and historic Native American mourning features that have been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tsim Schneider.

From the first baptism in 1783 to the last recorded baptism in 1832, at least 2,800 Coast Miwoks from the Marin Peninsula entered Spanish missions in the San Francisco Bay area. Understandably, and like most accounts of Indian entanglements with Spanish missions, the story of Coast Miwok missionization and assumed cultural loss is told through the documents and trowel work at Spanish missions. Comparably less is known of the world beyond the mission walls and in the hinterlands that took shape...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Peelo. Christina Spellman. Lee Panich.

In this symposium, we have been tasked with investigating how communities were forged during the Mission Period in California (1769-1834). Some researchers currently suggest that diverse indigenous populations in mission communities formed collective Indian communities and identities (e.g. Lightfoot 1998; Panich 2009; Peelo 2009). However, others maintain that indigenous peoples were not only part of a mission community, but they were simultaneously part of diverse traditional village...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lee Panich. Sarah Peelo. Linda Hylkema.

In this paper, we examine the challenges associated with understanding indigenous community formation and change through the archaeology of the native ranchería at Mission Santa Clara de Asís. The mission’s indigenous population had well-documented and distinct temporal shifts, initially drawing local Ohlone converts but eventually extending recruitment to Yokuts groups in the more distant San Joaquin Valley and Sierra Nevada foothills. These population changes pose an intriguing archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathleen Hull. John Douglass. Seetha Reddy.

This paper examines archaeological and ethnohistoric data that speak to the role of communal events and practices in the creation and maintenance of real and imagined communities during the colonial era for native people in the Los Angeles Basin. Communal ritual and associated feasting had a long tradition in this region, and persisted into the colonial era despite the incorporation of many native people into Mission San Gabriel and the Pueblo of Los Angeles. Archaeological data suggest such...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ian Kuijt.

How many people lived in individual buildings within early food producing communities? Be it as an explicit driver or as an implicit background landscape, all modeling of small-scale household life, developing Neolithic villages, and the evolutionary trajectory towards the full-blown domestication is linked on some level to demography and the increasing scale of human communities through time. The reconstruction of the scale of Neolithic house, including our engagement with what may represent...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Byrd.

The talk addresses the built environment of complex hunter-gatherer villages of the contact period in California. Although not agriculturalists, they constitute one of the most diverse and well-documented amalgam of complex hunter-gatherers in the world. The study explores the interrelationship between vernacular architecture, households, community organization, and their socio-economic underpinnings. In doing so, highlighted case studies will include the Chumash of coastal southern California,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dean Snow.

While details remain debated, the general outline of the emergence of semi-permanent sedentary domestic architecture in Northern Iroquoia is well understood. Communities comprised of bark longhouses came to be associated with subsistence maize horticulture over the course of the last millennium prior to European contact. Various factors triggered periodic community relocations throughout Northern Iroquoia, migratory events that were usually short-distance but occasionally involved long-distance...

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

Large-scale durable architecture appears quite suddenly with the emergence of the semi-sedentary Natufian (ca. 15,000 calBC) in the Near East. Subsequently, during the course of the Natufian, structure sizes diminish; they were commonly semi-subterranean, constructed with wooden posts, stones and puddled mud. These traditions continued during the PPNA (ca. 10,000-8,500 calBC), albeit with the innovation of mud-brick superstructures. An important distinction between the Natufian and the PPNA is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Junko Habu.

Archaeological data from the prehistoric Jomon period of the Japanese archipelago indicate that, by the middle of the Early Jomon period (ca. 6000 cal. BP), the presence of large settlements with dozens of pit-dwellings became common. Some of these pit-dwellings are quite deep, measuring more than two feet in depth. The residents of these settlements are considered to have been relying primarily on hunting, gathering and fishing. Environmental management may have been an important part of their...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julian Salazar. Jordi A. López Lillo.

Agriculture was adopted by NW Argentina inhabitants around BP 3500 within a complex process of macroregional population reorganization, economic intensification and increase of territoriality. This transition was followed by a rapid introduction of large and solid buildings that became the major and most visible features in the village outlays after BP 2500. Thousands of multi round-room compounds were built and inhabited by several generations all over several high valleys, like Tafí, Anfama,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kellam Throgmorton. Richard Wilshusen.

The transition from lightly built, short-term or ephemeral structures to substantially built, sophisticated dwellings occurred between A.D. 400 and 1400 in the Ancient Pueblo Southwest. At the early end of this period, most dwellings were occupied by a single household and may have only lasted for about a decade. By the end of this period, nearly the entire population of the northern Southwest lived in multi-household, apartment-style dwellings that housed entire villages for generations. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christian Peterson. Robert Drennan. Adam Berrey.

Household garbage constitutes the most ubiquitous, and least ambiguous class of information on Neolithic household activities, social standing, and economic well-being available to archeologists. Unlike the short-lived symbolism of funerary ritual expressed in burials, or the celebration of individuals and institutions in monumental architecture, accumulated household garbage time-averages longitudinal patterns of domestic life. Remains from midden deposits are thus ideally suited to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jean-Paul DEMOULE.

It is accepted with good reason that the appearance of the Neolithic in Europe results from a phenomenon of diffusion, notably demic, from the Near East and more particularly Anatolia. At first sight, there are considerable differences between the Near Eastern houses, which are often small and stone-built with white plaster floors, and the large wood and and earth houses of Central Europe. In fact a more detailed analysis of the situation in intermediate regions, especially the north-west...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Rocek.

The archaeology of the United States Southwest permits examination of the process of Neolithisation with chronological precision in a wide range of contexts. In broadest outline, Southwestern data parallel social, economic and technological patterns documented worldwide. The recency, large sample, and fine resolution of Southwestern data allow recognition of multiple divergent and convergent patterns shaped by local environments and cultural traditions that are difficult to observe in other...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Shepard. Kisha Supernant. Kenneth M. Ames. Andrew Martindale.

Traditionally, Northwest Coast houses were rectangular, post and beam dwellings. Architectural details varied regionally, ethnically and even locally. It is presently impossible to trace this variation archaeologically beyond a few coarse-grained statements. The earliest structures date to at least ca. 5000 calBP; they are rectilinear and some at least are semisubterranean. The longest continuous sequence of houses is presently documented in the Prince Rupert Harbor region of northern British...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Clark.

In Middle America the transition from the Archaic to Early Formative period (ca. 2000-1400 BC) was marked by the first use of pottery and the construction of durable dwelling clustered in small hamlets or villages. These markers of year-round dwelling in one place represent a major transition in Early Formative times to neolithic lifeways and presumably lifeworlds. I review the evidence of the earliest houses known from highland and lowland regions of Middle America, with an emphasis on the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anick Coudart.

The archaeological and ethnographical study of domestic dwellings gives us the opportunity to grasp the logical structure which underlies the transformation of any architectural tradition, then the process of reproduction-transformation of a cultural group, and ultimately the evaluation of its sustainability. A comparative architectural approach between Bandkeramik Neolithic and New-Guinean Anga groups) allows us to extract the structure inherent in architectural traditions; i.e. the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ivan Pavlu. Petr Kvetina.

The earliest longhouses of the first agricultural population in Central Europe appear discontinuously, without continuity with the previous settlement; only indirect information about the residence patterns of the latter is available. This is due to both different settlement strategy of the Mesolithic hunter-gatherer groups, and the state of research. Therefore, only the evolution of Central European Neolithic longhouses can be assessed. Their introduction in Central Europe is supposed to be of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eberth Serrudo. Lawrence Coben. Erika Cabello.

Field research by the Canete Archaeological Project (CAP) has begun to unveil rich data regarding the Inca incorporation of the Middle and Lower Canete Valley. Utilizing both systematic survey and excavations, our work suggests a complex but intensive interaction between the Inca and those who occupied the valley before them. In this paper, we begin to tease out the imperial strategies of incorporation and local responses to them. SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carol Rodriguez.

This study focuses on the analysis of the ceramic material from the archaeological site Cerro de Oro, located in the Cañete Valley. While the Cerro de Oro pottery style has been defined previously in a generic way (Menzel 1964), this study seeks to reopen the investigation and conduct a deeper analysis with recently excavated material, which allows us to characterize it in itself. The aim is to define an iconographic program that allows us to compare and contrast it with popular styles from a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Grace Alexandrino Ocaña.

Evidence of looted tombs from Conchopata and Huari -the capital of Wari- have allowed archaeologists to identify up to three formal types of funerary structures. Researchers also point out that variants of these types of funerary enclosures identified at both sites might have held local chiefs and provincial governors. Evidence of such elite Wari funerary contexts has also been found in Espítiru Pampa, in the high jungle of Vilcabamba, and Batan Urqo, in Cusco, among others. Although the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lawrence Coben. Eberth Serrudo T..

Field research by the Canete Archaeological Project has begun to unveil rich data regarding the Inca incorporation of the Middle and Lower Canete Valley. Utilizing both systematic survey and excavations, our work suggests a complex and intensive interaction between the Inca and those who occupied the valley before them. In this paper, we begin to tease out the imperial strategies of incorporation and local responses to them. SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rosa Maria Varillas.

This paper focuses on the analysis the textile material obtained in three areas (one funeral and two domestic) investigated within the archaeological site located in Cerro de Oro Cañete Valley. This research is embedded within the framework of the Cerro de Oro Archaeological Project, which is working on this archaeological site since 2012 which has among its objectives to determine the cultural affiliation of the site, especially its relationship with the Wari phenomenon. The material has been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Francesca Fernandini.

Cerro de Oro, a 150ha settlement located on the lower Cañete valley presents a long term occupation that spans from the Early Intermediate Period through Colonial times (0-1600 A.D.). Research performed by the Cerro de Oro Archaeological Project at the site during 2012-2013 has focused on the Early Intermediate-Middle Horizon occupation (500-1000 A.D.) yielding important information regarding the nature of the settlement, the sequence of its construction and use, as well as its possible...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Giancarlo Marcone. Nina Castillo. Rodrigo Areche. Geraldine Huertas.

The accounts about Inca domination of the Cañete valley had been proposed as the example of Inca military strategies. The El Guarco site was proposed by these accounts as the head of a kingdom that establish a fierce resistance to the Incas that was later overwhelmed by an unmerciful repression. Although this presences in the ethno historic accounts, is little what we know about the political and social organization of this kingdom and the functions that the El Guarco had inside this society. In...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Favio William Ramirez Muñoz.

La presente investigación tiene por propósito aproximarnos al conocimiento tecnológico alcanzado por las sociedades prehispánicas durante el Horizonte Tardío en los distintos espacios geográficos que abarca la cuenca hidrográfica del río Cañete, enfatizando en el aprovechamiento de los recursos naturales renovables, acontecido por una constante interacción entre el hombre y su medio ambiente, siendo un factor importante en los cambios ecológicos la necesidad de adaptación al entorno en el que...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alejandro Chu.

This paper presents the results of recent research at the archaeological Inca site of Incahuasi located at the Cañete valley, Peru. Although Incahuasi is frequently mentioned in the archaeological literature and by spanish chronicles (it is considered a New Cusco) little research have been done at the site. New data from archaeological excavations allows to compare historical accounts about the nature of Inca's occupation of the site, showing significant differences between both; challenging the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Celine Gillot.

The stone buildings of the Río Bec archaeological zone are a testament to the emergence of a new architectural tradition in the central Maya lowlands during the second half of the first millennium of our era. To understand this new architecture and the ways it has been conceived, a recent investigation has been carried out on the technological process involved in its production. Since construction practices can hardly be appreciated without considering the materials used by the builders, this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alejandra Alonso-Olvera. Nora Ariadna Perez. Jose Luis Ruvalcaba. Jaime Torres.

This study comprises preliminary results of analyses made on different type of limestones employed in models and stucco supports, and other stone products used by the ancient Maya of Ek´ Balam. The ancient Maya technology results in high efficiency and durable materials appropriate for the architectural and decorative program at the site, which has positively influenced the preservation of this heritage. The study of mineral elements from various limestone, and lime products (sascab and kut)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marie Jackson. Gabriele Vola.

Romans prepared lime for the volcanic ash mortars of conglomeratic concretes using methods (Vitruvius, de Architectura 5.1.2-3) that are reflected in modern Italian lime industry terminology. In mortars of architectural concretes in Rome (1st C BCE–3rd C CE) builders mixed quicklime with freshwater to form stiff putty (grasello di calce) and then incorporated moistened scoriaceous ash, shown by an experimental reproduction. Pure calcite in unburnt particles (incotti) suggests pre-orogenic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bernadette Cap. Rachel Horowitz. Jason Yaeger. Mark Eli.

Limestone is one of the most abundant stone resources over much of the Maya lowlands and scholarly research has been focused on its use as a construction material. Limestone was also used to create a variety of portable items, such as manos, metates, bark beaters, and bifaces. In this paper we examine the evidence for production, exchange, and consumption of limestone general utlity bifaces in the Bueanvista del Cayo zone, Belize during the Classic period. Although chert bifaces are more...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kenneth Seligson. Tomás Gallareta Negrón. Rossana May Ciau.

Powdered lime was one of the most important materials produced and utilized by the ancient Maya. It was a key ingredient in the mortar used to construct monumental edifices and residential structures, as well as in the lime plaster that coated the facades, floors and interior walls of these structures. Lime was even crucial for maintaining a viable maize-based diet through the nixtamalization process. By soaking maize in lime-infused water the ancient peoples of Mesoamerica not only softened the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Ortiz Ruiz.

The characterization of the ring structures made ​​during the past two years allowed strongly suggest the presence of kilns for lime production used by the Maya of the Classic and evidence of use in the Colonial Period. Archaeometric techniques used in this research were critical in the mineralogical characterization, dating and obtaining organic waste associated with the production of lime. In this paper I present the results of two years of work that allowed characterizing the limestone used...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Luisa Straulino. Ana María Soler. Sergey Sedov. Sandra Balanzario. Teresa Pi.

The archeological site of Dzibanché, Quintana Roo, has polychromed stucco remains that seems to date to the Middle Classic when the Kaan dinasty ruled at Dzibanché. The aim of this investigation was to determine the composition of the stucco and the painting (petrography, SEM-EDS, XRD) and date them.The antiferromagnetic hematite in paintings contains remanent magnetization (PiRM). Magnetic record could date them if changes in direction and intensity of the geomagnetic field have been well...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alessandra Pecci. Luis Alberto Barba. Agustin Ortiz.

When activities are carried on, the substances used and/or produced during the activities are poured onto the on floors and absorbed by them. Specific analyses can be performed to identify the chemical residues absorbed in porous materials, like plastered and earthen floors. As these residues are strictly related to the activities carried on, and reflect their spatial distribution, they can be considered "anthropic activity markers". A methodological approach concerning the understanding of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tiziana Matarazzo.

The term concotto refers to fragments or patches of hard heated clay that derive from living surfaces, walls and ovens. Concotto fragments are found throughout the Italian peninsula and date from the Neolithic to the Iron Age. Current studies express contradictory opinions about whether or not the concottos found on living surfaces represent intentionally constructed surfaces or the secondary products of the contact between hot embers and sediments. This study uses micromorphological analysis...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Duncan Cook. Timothy Beach. Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach. Thomas Guderjan.

Multi-element inorganic geochemical studies across the Maya lowlands have revealed elevated levels of mercury (Hg) in soils and sediments that date mainly from the Classic period (c. 250-900 AD). Mercury pollution has now been recorded at a range of archaeological sites despite the absence of metallurgy until the Postclassic Period (after 1000 AD), or any other industry capable of significant heavy metal pollution of the environment. This paper presents the first detailed analysis of the extent...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Debora Zurro. Myrian Alvarez. Ivan Briz. Joan Negre. Jorge Caro.

Hunter-gatherer sites constitute often challenging research contexts within the discipline of archaeology; identifying and even defining whom Tierra del Fuego constitute an optimum arena for studying anthropic markers in hunter-gatherers sites for two reasons: a) good preservation of archaeological remains; b) a rich ethnographic record about hunter-fisher-gatherer societies who inhabited this region. The aim of this work is to present the first results of an intrasite spatial analysis, based on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Ballantyne.

This paper is inspired by consideration of how charred plant macrofossil assemblages relate to past human lives, as one component of the small artefactual debris on settlements. Cultural decisions regarding activity location, rhythm and ‘waste’ deposition mean there can be wide variation in the archaeological remains of an otherwise identical plant processing activity; this issue is common in archaeology as many classes of material, including plant assemblages, are understood with models from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marco Madella. Carla Lancelotti. Alessandra Pecci. Javier Ruiz-Perez. Fernanda Inserra.

The main aim of archaeological research is the reconstruction of past human activities. So far this has been achieved mostly through the study of material culture. However, activities related to food production and consumption represent an important part of human life and leave microscopic and chemical traces. The use of ethnography and geostatistical approaches can help in unlock the patters and identify activity areas in a controlled environment. We present here results from a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Szymanski.

Interpretive challenges involving issues of equifinality and causation can chronically hamper environmental reconstruction efforts, as numerous physical, environmental, or anthropogenic processes may potentially be responsible for creating observed raw data patterns. Nested multi-proxy and multi-scalar analyses offer potential means of approaching these difficult conceptual issues which can plague interpretations reliant on single lines of proxy evidence. A dataset comprised of multiple...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Kovacik.

Macrofloral analysis conducted on sites concentrated in the northwestern Permian Basin (southeastern New Mexico) recovered evidence of charred yucca (Yucca sp.) leaf bases in numerous features. Ethnographically various yucca plant parts are mainly associated with fiber and food processing. The presence of these remains in solitary hearth features distributed on the arid landscape of southeastern New Mexico suggests use of these plants simply as tinder. Yucca plants represent a natural and easily...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sandra Lopez Varela.

In eradicating poverty through infrastructure building and welfare policies in the State of Morelos, the commodification of the landscape is causing people to forget the social practices of distant pasts. Memory is intimately linked with the landscape, as it creates a sense of place that legitimizes the many identities and social worlds that have existed through time. By exploring current human practices in the landscape, this study illustrates how habit memory translates and maps fragmented...

DOCUMENT Citation Only E. Christian Wells. Christopher K. Waters. Georgia L. Fox.

Multi-elemental geochemical prospection of soils and sediments has become a highly useful technique for understanding past activity areas and the behaviors that produced them. However, this technique has limited interpretive potential, because it can only identify possible locations of different classes of activities. More importantly, there has been little research to evaluate the processes and elemental loadings that characterize different types of spaces. By studying known contexts and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dante Garcia. Ricardo Higelin. Nelly Robles.

Desde las primeras exploraciones de Alfonso Caso en Monte Albán y hasta fechas recientes, la capital zapoteca ha sido ampliamente estudiada por distintas disciplinas que buscan comprender a las sociedades que construyeron, habitaron y proveían a la ciudad de todo lo necesario, sin embargo, los estudios se han enfocado primordialmente en el área central y en los conjuntos monumentales que la componían. Este trabajo presenta la información bioarqueológica obtenida a partir de un rescate...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeffrey Blomster.

In exploring the bioarchaeology of ancient Oaxaca, an important component is the social context of human burials. This paper explores the placement of four burials, containing seven individuals, associated with the same Yucuita phase (500-300 BCE) household at Etlatongo, Oaxaca. This household appears to have been located in the same space for several generations, shifting slightly both horizontally and vertically through time. These burials are associated with the first occupation of this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arion Mayes. Sarah Barber. Arthur Joyce. Christopher Morgan.

Dental modifications are symbolic representations permanently etched into human dentition that can have different cultural interpretations. Often done for aesthetic purposes, these modifications may reflect status, represent social inclusion or exclusion, or display regional variation. Bioarchaeological analysis of skeletons from three sites (Yugüe, Loma Don Genaro, and Río Viejo) from the Lower Río Verde Region of Oaxaca, Mexico (100 CE-800 CE) shows an increase in the frequency of dental...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angel Rivera.

Los huesos humanos grabados, encontrados como ofrenda en depósitos funerarios, representan un marcador especial del gremio sacerdotal de la sociedad del Oaxaca antiguo. Por un lado, al ser huesos humanos, establecen un lazo con los ancestros del grupo; por otro, la imaginería que muestran permiten establecer el tipo de rituales y oblaciones a los que estaban dedicados. Más aún, estos objetos eran considerados como reliquias y en algunos casos se les ilustra en la imaginería de los códices...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ernesto Gonzalez-Licon.

In this paper we present a brief outline of what has been considered the elite into the Mesoamerican world. The pros and cons of mayor archaeological indicators used to identify and/or define the elite. Our research goal is to approach the elite as a biological group, not only the ruler itself. The evaluation of the ruling elite from different aspects such as demography, gender relations, funerary practices, health conditions, diet and disease, hierarchy and inequality among its members and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lourdes Marquez-Morfin. Ernesto Gonzalez-Licon.

This paper starts from a micro and qualitative approach to describe and analyze the social position of individuals: children, women and men within various domestic units in Monte Alban, Oaxaca, through archaeological indicators of prestige, power and wealth. The methodology uses funerary practices and its meaning in social terms within the domestic group, to identify the social role especially of children, a sector of the population rarely studied. The location of burials into de domestic unit...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arthur Joyce. Arion Mayes. Bethany Weisberg. Chris Morgan.

This paper discusses preliminary bioarchaeological findings from the Late Formative cemetery at Cerro de la Cruz in the lower Río Verde Valley on the Pacific coast of Oaxaca. The Cerro de la Cruz cemetery has figured prominently in a long-running debate over the hypothesized conquest of the region by Monte Albán. We discuss the results of detailed bioarchaeological analyses of four individuals from the cemetery in the context of an ongoing regional study. Although taphonomic processes...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Guy Hepp. José Aguilar. Paul Sandberg.

The initial Early Formative period site of La Consentida was occupied between 1950 and 1550 calBC. This early village community on the western Oaxaca coast has produced evidence of some of Mesoamerica’s oldest known ceramics, mounded earthen architecture, and musical instruments but the site’s human remains have received little attention thus far. The people of La Consentida lived and died during a period of social and economic transformations, including the establishment of sedentary villages,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jose Cervantes Perez. Tito Mijangos. Agustin Andrade Cuautle.

El estudio de los entierros colectivos es una de las vertientes que presentan las prácticas funerarias, y mediante el registro minucioso en campo y el análisis de los materiales arqueológicos en el laboratorio, es posible estudiar de manera integral y multidisciplinaria, un trabajo en conjunto entre la antropología física y la arqueología de dichas expresiones culturales. La investigación que será presentada se enfoca en la distribución y depósito de una serie de esqueletos humanos excavados en...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ricardo Higelin Ponce De Leon.

Archaeological, iconographic and ethnohistorical sources have been used to examine diverse cultural practices of Zapotec society before European contact. Cultural practices related to violence and warfare, such as captive taking for ritual sacrifice and slave labor, played an important role in Zapotec imperial expansion during the Late Formative through the Classic period. In the Valley of Oaxaca research has been done to understand these cultural practices. Whatever, bioarchaeological data to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrea Cucina.

The dynamic interaction among human groups in Prehispanic Mesoamerica led to population exchange and migrations that have began to be untangled from a bioarchaeological perspective. Still, little is known about the demic biological exchange between Southern Sierra Madre populations and their coeval Eastern neighbors along the isthmic and Maya corridors. The present paper focuses on dental morphology and affinities among Prehispanic settlers that inhabited the present state of Oaxaca (Mexico)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Barber. Arion Mayes. Arthur Joyce.

The Early Classic (AD 250 – 500) in the lower Río Verde valley was marked by political fragmentation and significant transformations in social, political and economic relations following the collapse of a regional polity centered at Río Viejo. How the region’s inhabitants navigated these transformations remains poorly understood, although regional-scale evidence from settlement patterns and excavation indicates the abandonment of many communities and major changes in the way people engaged with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Martha Alfaro. Dr. Andrea L. Waters-Rist;. Danny Zborover.

Skeleton Sk-CV-01 is a female around 18 years of age, carefully buried in a stone cist in the Chontal Highlands of southern Oaxaca during the Late Postclassic or Early Colonial period. She is the first and only human skeleton known from controlled excavations in the area, and the archaeological context and historical documentation associate her with the Chontal people who still inhabit the region. In this presentation the results of the archaeological, osteological, and stable isotope analyses...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stacie King. Ricardo Higelin Ponce de Leon.

To date, we have documented or recovered the remains of over 15 individuals in the Nejapa region of Oaxaca. This paper summarizes these finds and takes a first step in comparing the mortuary practices of Nejapa to those in other regions of Oaxaca. Eight individuals were found buried nearby one another at the site of Majaltepec, an early Colonial period town in the mountains surrounding Nejapa. Morphoscopic dental analyses indicate the presence of at least 4 younger individuals between 15 and 21...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lee Newsom. Lourdes Pérez Iglesias.

The Caribbean’s pre-peopling flora and fauna were the culminations of both vicariant and long-distance dispersal processes, coupled with evolution in relative isolation spanning more than 20 Mya. Human colonization beginning around 7,000 years ago coincided with extinctions of megalonychid sloths and giant flightless owls-- the archipelago’s only large terrestrial vertebrates-- probably precipitating the first human-induced trophic cascades and initiating the first of a series of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jean-Denis Vigne.

This presentation aims to show how the progresses of biological knowledge allows archaeology to take advantage of the paleontological and archaeozoological documentation accumulated during the last 40 years on the islands, to increase its set of evidence –admittedly indirect -- on the early seagoing in the Mediterranean. It presents a brief review of the geographical and paleogeographical frameworks as well as the basics of island biogeography and focuses on the different ways in which mammals...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Catherine West. Courtney Hofman. Steven Ebbert.

The Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge maintains more than 2000 islands, where invasive species management and eradication are the focus of conservation and landscape reconstruction efforts. While written records from the Russian and American eras document the introduction of many species, including red fox (Vulpes vulpes), arctic fox (Alopex lagopus), and cattle (Bos taurus), little is known about the introduction and dispersal of the arctic ground squirrel (Spermophilus paryii) in this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristina Douglass.

This paper discusses early occupations of the southwest coast of Madagascar and the impact that human subsistence practices may have had on the highly endemic spiny forest biome. A major transformation of Madagascar’s environment post-human arrival is the extinction of a suite of mega fauna species. Ongoing work on the spread of domesticates throughout the western Indian Ocean will certainly improve our understanding of Madagascar’s settlement history, but little is known to-date about the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Courtney Hofman. Torben Rick. Jesus Maldonado.

One of the greatest human impacts on the environment has been the intentional and unintentional introduction of plants and animals around the world. Islands are particularly susceptible to ecological change following introductions, but distinguishing between natural and cultural introductions of wild taxa is often challenging. Here we present our interdisciplinary approach to investigating the origins of California Channel Island terrestrial mammals that can serve as a framework for helping...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa Matisoo-Smith.

The Pacific region has some of the earliest evidence of animal translocation in the world. The use of transported landscapes – including the introduction of a range of plants and animals - was a major strategy for Pacific Island colonists, particularly in the settlement of Remote Oceania. We have been studying genetic variation in Pacific commensals for nearly 20 years and through these studies have had to constantly rethink our concepts of human and animal interactions generally and, more...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jillian Swift. Patrick Kirch.

Early Polynesian voyagers transported a suite of plant and animal species to each new island they colonized, forming the foundation of the Polynesian subsistence economy and leading to long-lasting transformations of island landscapes. The Pacific rat (Rattus exulans) was nearly ubiquitous on these journeys, perhaps as a potential food source or simply an inadvertent stowaway. With few natural predators, rat populations multiplied quickly after arrival and spread across island landscapes. Their...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Naomi Sykes. Holly Miller.

Animal introductions are frequently equated with the introduction of new dietary ingredients; however, this paper will argue that access to 'meat' is seldom the motivation for the importation of exotic species. By examining a number of case-studies pertaining to Britain it will be proposed that many faunal introductions were both inspired by, and resulted in, social, economic and ideological change. Many species were associated with specific deities and because they were imported from beyond the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mario Giron-Ábrego.

Natural and man-made caves are clearly attested to in myth, iconography and the glyphic corpus as powerful features for the ancient and contemporary Maya. Caves are paramount for they function as entrances into the sacred earth, the most powerful entity of the sacred Maya universe. A third and less explicit category of these subterranean features, although extensively documented (Brady 2011; Rivera Dorado 1993; Tate 1992) in the Maya area, are architectural caves. This latter category, due to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Sload.

Multiple lines of evidence indicate that the cave determined the definition of the Sun Pyramid. As the earliest monumental construction at Teotihuacan, it is hypothesized that the Pyramid/cave was built within a pan-Mesoamerican worldview that valued the mountain cave, including acknowledging artificial caves as caves, pyramids as mountains, and sacred space as created via engineered spatial relationships. Ceramics and radiocarbon dates indicate contemporaneous construction of and modification...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Donald Slater.

Cave explorers and scholars classify the different light zones of underground spaces into three categories – light, twilight, and dark. Despite the practical challenges ancient people faced while traveling into and through dark zones (those entirely devoid of light), it is common across the Maya region to find rich evidence that demonstrates that these spaces were heavily utilized during Precolumbian times. Research conducted during the 2009 - 2011 field seasons of the Central Yucatan...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jon Spenard.

Archaeological investigations of the Nohoch Tunich Bedrock Outcrop Complex (NTC) located near the pre-Hispanic Maya site of Pacbitun, Belize, revealed a karst landscape that was heavily, yet subtly modified during the Terminal Classic period (A.D. 700-900). Analysis of construction techniques reveal that the modifications were made to conform to a purposefully crude aesthetic aimed at maintaining and enhancing the wilderness essence of the outcrop, while transforming it into a cultural space....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Prout.

Children throughout Mesoamerica were preferred sacrificial victims, especially to water deities. Because caves were associated with rain, ethnohistoric sources mention the sacrifice of children in caves. The importance of children in sacrifice was documented early on my Edward Thompson’s dredging of the Cenote of Sacrifice at Chichen Itza. More recently archaeological investigations of caves have recovered have recorded the skeletal remains of children that have been interpreted as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Brady. Lili Taleghani-Nia.

Michael Smith and Katharina Schreiber note that, "For the Classic Maya, studies of sacred landscapes are dominated by research on caves." Unfortunately, northern Belize lacks large caves that have attracted archaeological interest and no large cave survey has been conducted in the region. Lacking such studies, archaeologists appear to be at a loss on how to engage sacred landscapes. An underappreciated aspect of the Petexbatun Regional Cave Project was its articulation of an explicit model of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marilyn Bueno. Ann Scott. Melanie Saldaña. Jocelyn Acosta.

Cave archaeology in northern Belize is poorly developed because the soft dolomitic limestone does not permit the formation of large and impressive caves. Several studies of small caves associated with public architecture have been conducted within the Rio Bravo Conservation Management Area, Orange Walk District, Belize. These studies suggest that caves played much the same role in the sacred geography that has been documented elsewhere in the Maya area. Nevertheless, there are no systematic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aliya Hoff. Dominique Meyer. Michael Hess. Fabio Esteban Amador. Dominique Rissolo.

The integration of multimodal and multiscalar 3D imaging and visualization techniques can be used to explore ritual and non-ritual uses of rock shelters by analyzing potentially meaningful relationships between natural and constructed features. Situating rock shelters within the greater context of Maya subsurface ritual practice may in turn help further define the Maya concept of caves. LiDAR and SFM can be integrated with traditional mapping techniques and ArcGIS to rapidly and precisely...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cristina Verdugo.

Evidence for dental modification practices have been found throughout Mesoamerica since the Early Preclassic Period (Williams and White 2006) and were noted by Diego de Landa in the 16th century. Examples for these practices have been found not only among human remains, but also in iconography and in architecture. Investigations into the aesthetic or ritual purpose for dental modification have yielded a number of possibilities. These possibilities include its use as an indication of social...