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

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ian Buvit.

Remnants of perennially frozen ground can serve as indicators of past climate changes. Evidence of ground ice like pseudomorphs, or solifluction lobes, for example, has helped us identify cooling events such as the last glacial maximum or the Younger Dryas. Cryogenic activity can also have wide ranging affects on the behavioral context of archaeological sites displacing material from its original location a few millimeters to many meters. Here I illustrate some common types of cryogenic features...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gerald Kelso.

The pollen spectra of archaeological sites in the temperate zone are subject to post-deposition modifications in the form of earthworms mixing the pollen in the humus zone.They are subsequently percolated downward in rainwater, at rates that vary with the location and nature of the matrix, and are physically degraded by aerobic fungi, by groundwater oxygen, and by repeated hydration and dehydration.These processes produce a profile with the highest pollen concentrations at the top and quantities...

DOCUMENT Citation Only F. Scott Worman. Anastasia Steffen. Jeffrey W. Hall.

The Valles Caldera National Preserve in northern New Mexico encompasses a diverse landscape of grassy valleys, forested mountainsides, and rocky peaks, almost entirely more than 2600 m (8500 ft) above sea level. People have visited the area regularly for millennia to access large obsidian quarries and other resources. The long history of human activities has left us a rich archaeological record, but interpreting that record is complicated by the dynamism of the landscape; physical and biological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carly Whelan.

Though optimal foraging theory is useful for examining hunter-gatherer subsistence decisions, food storage falls outside the scope of traditional models, because it separates foraging effort from consumption. The time that foragers spend accumulating a surplus for storage has the potential to conflict with the time they need for other activities during seasons of abundance, creating opportunity costs to storage. Changes in settlement strategies can alter these opportunity costs and affect...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Overly.

The overall symposium provides a series of case examples that demonstrate the important role the BLM plays in promoting proactive non-compliance related archaeological research. This introductory paper sets the frame by offering direct experience from multiple perspectives working on BLM land as a field school student, graduate student researcher, volunteer, contractor, and agency archaeologist. This is done to provide additional context for how the BLM has typically supported archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrea Catacora. Jo McDonald.

A BLM-funded rock art recordation project recently undertaken in Lincoln County, Southern Nevada has focused on three Areas of Environmental Concern: Mount Irish, Shooting Gallery and Pahroc. The overall Project was designed to be a comprehensive heritage inventory of all archaeological evidence in these Areas, and based on a systematic sample there are close to 700 recorded sites in these areas of which around 200 contain rock art. Building on earlier work by the Nevada Rock Art Foundation and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Josephine McDonald. Gregory Haverstock. David Lee.

The Volcanic Tableland north of Bishop, California has been the focus of significant previous research (e.g. Bettinger, Basgall, Giambastiani), which has been mobilized by proactive BLM Archaeologists (E. Levy, K. Halford, and G. Haverstock) to generate a predictive model for managing cultural sensitivity against recreational impacts. Further innovation has been the use of specialized rock art recorders (represented by Western Rock Art Research) to document the petroglyphs and petroglyphs of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Whitley.

Rock art is landscape art, but what may be inferred from its setting and associations? It is commonly believed that function directly follows from setting and locational association, but the assumptions underlying this inference are not examined. The Lincoln County Class III rock art inventory is partly directed at the landscape implications of the Pahranagat Valley, NV, petroglyphs, providing an opportunity to consider this question. Associational inference, appropriately applied, combined with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Allen.

This paper reports on more than a decade of archaeological fieldwork conducted at two archaeological landscapes in the western Mojave Desert by Cal Poly Pomona undergraduate students on lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Ridgecrest Field Office. The majority of funding for the project was provided by a multi-year BLM Assistance Agreement. It represents an outstanding example of a "win-win" partnership between a university and government agencies. Students received training in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marcel Kornfeld. George Frison.

Since at least the 1980s the University of Wyoming has conducted Paleoindian and rockshelter studies on BLM administered properties from northern Colorado to southern Montana. The cooperative and assistance agreements have benefited both the agency and the University. An enormous amount of research effort contributed by the faculty and enhanced by volunteers and avaocationals, have produced results far beyond what could have been accomplished without the cooperation. The results include students...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aaron Woods. Barbara Roth. Katelyn DiBenedetto.

The primary objective of this research project is to assess the function of sites located on the rim and plateau above Afton Canyon in the Mojave Desert to determine how they fit into regional patterns of subsistence and settlement defined during previous work in the area. Archaeological sites identified during a recent survey include multi-component artifact scatters, lithic reduction areas, and hunting blinds. These sites provide new information on prehistoric use of Afton Canyon. We present...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dennis Blanton. Elliot Blair.

Glass beads are one of the most important artifact types on colonial archaeological sites, providing insights into colonial trade networks and helping address critical chronological issues. In this paper, using a sample of 16th to 17th century beads from Mission Santa Catalina de Guale (GA), the Glass Site (GA), and Jamestown (VA), as well as a comparative sample from Venice, we use LA-ICP-MS and XRF analyses to examine elemental variability within and across these assemblages. Primarily...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Abidemi Babalola. Laure Dussubieux. Susan McIntosh.

The site of Igbo Olokun in the city of Ife, in southwestern Nigeria has been identified as a primary glass and glass beads production center dating to the "Classic" period (12th-15th c.), but glass from well-recorded contexts has been rare. Excavations in 2011-2012 produced over twelve thousand drawn glass beads. LA-ICP-MS analysis of 49 glass bead samples revealed two main compositional groups: High Lime, High Alumina (HLHA); and Low Lime, High Alumina (LLHA). While the occurrence of HLHA...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marilee Wood. Laure Dussubieux.

A number of potash lead silicate glass beads have been recovered from excavations at the 14th to 16th century Tanzanian site of Songo Mnara, a small but wealthy stone town on an island just south of Kilwa Kisiwani. LA-ICP-MS analysis has shown that two groups of Chinese beads are present, one that dates to the early 15th century, when Zheng He’s fleets visited the East Coast, and the other from around the turn of the 17th century when European glass beads began to be traded in that region. These...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alicia Hawkins. Joseph Petrus. R.G.V. Hancock.

We present the results of a preliminary study of glass bead chemistry from several contact period Wendat sites in Ontario. Much important work on the chemistry of glass beads found in Ontario was carried out by Hancock and colleagues using Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis in the last several decades. We compare our results with theirs. In some cases we were able to analyze the same beads that had been previously examined using INAA. We consider our results in terms of insights they may...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Vanessa Muros. Nikos Zacharias. William Shelley. Ioanna Kakoulli.

The archaeometric study of glass provides not only an understanding about the technology and manufacture of this material, but can also shed light on aspects of ancient societies such as trade, craft specialization, and cultural connections. The research presented looks to answer questions about glass production and trade in southeastern Europe during the LBA and EIA through the analysis of glass and faience beads from the sites of Lofkënd (southwest Albania) and Methone (northern Greece). This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Dalton-Carriger. Elliot Blair.

Native American inhabitants in the interior Southeast did not experience direct and prolonged European contact until the late 1600s, however European trade goods still managed to filter their way into the area. While trade goods are present, site chronology has not been clearly defined in many areas. Both pXRF and LA-ICP-MS testing on glass trade beads from East Tennessee and surrounding states has revealed trends in their chemical composition which can be correlated to date ranges. This method...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Aldenderfer. Laure Dussubieux.

Samdzong is found in the Kali Gandaki drainage in Upper Mustang, Nepal, just to the south of Tibet. Known from historical sources that date to the 17th C., Samdzong was an important waypoint on the salt trade route between South India and the Tibetan Plateau. Aside from salt from the plateau, these documents say little about other materials that were exchanged, and virtually nothing about their places of origin. The antiquity of the salt route was simply assumed. Excavations at the site...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laure Dussubieux. Thomas Oliver Pryce.

Glass appears in Southeast Asia at the début of the Iron Age, around the middle of the 1st millennium BC. Variations in Southeast Asian glass type distributions were found to be excellent markers of changes in cultural and economic interactions but are based heavily on material from Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. Other regions, in particular Myanmar’s pivotal position with India, have remained largely unexplored, making it difficult to draw a global picture for Southeast Asia during this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephanie LapeyreMontrose.

From Native Americans to Spanish and European settlers, Southern California has a rich history. One town in particular, Simi Valley, incorporated in 1969, was home to several Chumash villages, part of the Santiago Pico 1795 Land Grant, and attracted European settlers. CA-VEN-346, the El Rancho Simi Adobe, was occupied during all three eras. It was a Chumash village, home to Santiago Pico, and home to European settler Robert Strathearn and family. When Robert Strathearn purchased the El Rancho...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carol Plannette.

Nestled in the hills of Simi Valley at what is known as the "old" Rocketdyne site and where NASA conducted testing for the Airspace program, is the sacred site of Burro Flats. Considered to be a ceremonial site with evidence of astronomical alignments, Burro Flats carries important meaning for some of the tribes of Southern California, primarily the Chumash and other local communities such as the Fernandeno and the Gabrielino/Tongva. Mainly known for its’ painted cave drawings associated with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Austin Ringelstein.

In the late 19th century museum collectors recovered an abundance of cultural materials from the Channel Islands and dispersed them to national museums. Although they recorded important ethnological observations, their practices were often not in the best interests of native peoples or even academics. Many of the artifacts were stored without provenience information and in many ways disregarded. However, the unique preservation of legacy collections provides an excellent opportunity to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hugh Radde.

The Catalina Island Museum (CIM) cares for the largest collection of Island Tongva (Gabrielino) artifacts in the world, the results of early expeditions, modern excavations as well as objects donated by Catalina Islanders. Opened in 1953, the Catalina Island Museum boasts a wealth of historic, archaeological, and archival materials that document life from the first islanders 8000 years ago to the present day, and strives to provide awareness and appreciation of the island’s rich heritage...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elanor Sonderman.

Despite their critical importance, the care and management of archaeological collections has not always been at the forefront of the discipline’s overall methodology or federal and state regulations that are intended to mitigate harm to those resources. A seminal paper by Marquardt et al. (1982) argued for the existence of a crisis in the curation of archaeological collections. Marquardt, et al. (1982) as well as Childs (1995, 2003) and Sonderman (1996) highlight the ethical responsibility to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Foster.

The 1971 San Fernando Earthquake severely damaged several buildings at San Fernando Mission, which had been established in 1797. In May 1973, the church was slated for demolition and during the course of that activity several burials were encountered. Students and volunteers from California State University, Northridge (CSUN) were asked to assist in the removal of the burials, artifacts, and documentation of features that had been found. I had been one of those volunteers and was the "dig...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mario Borrero.

The existing collections of our nation’s institutions hold great potential for future research and should be subject to modern scientific inquiry. If these collections are not catalogued or sorted properly, they can lie forgotten and virtually inaccessible to scholarly research. The example presented here is of a legacy collection, comprised of artifacts from the Tulare Lake area in Kings County, California. This selection is primarily of lithic tools, which represent ancient California...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather McDaniel.

The backlog of curated archaeological collections can be overwhelming; and the notion of taking on another’s "work" can seem very daunting and at times, considering who the "other" might be, down right intimidating. So many variables add to the challenge of assuming the responsibility of a curated collection, but they also offer great potential for personal, academic and professional growth. It is the prospect, after all, of finding the missing piece to the puzzle and making sense of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ann Stansell.

The Northridge Archaeological Research Center (NARC), which began as a student club on the campus of San Fernando Valley State College in 1969, was involved in more than 800 cultural resource management projects throughout Southern California before falling inactive in 1996. Accessibility of the collections has been variable over the years. In recent years however, these legacy collections which are now housed at and administered by the Anthropological Research Institute at California State...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara Tejada.

When a major village site was encountered during construction monitoring in the early 1980s, newspapers declared that the "Lost Village of Encino" had at last been found. In reality, archaeologists suspected its presence since the 1950s based on descriptions of the Portolá expeditions of 1769 and 1770. The resulting archaeological data recovery produced a large collection of artifacts, as well as human and animal burials. Subsequent disputes between the developer, archaeologists, the Native...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elisabeth Rareshide.

Not all legacy collections are forgotten in dusty boxes. Some find new life in public education, offering non-archaeologists tangible connections to the past. Integrating legacy artifact and document collections with effective education techniques provides the opportunity to engage children and adults in archaeology. Through the case study of developing an interactive educational tour about pre-Contact Chumash at the Leonis Adobe Museum in Calabasas, this paper explores practical concerns...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Margarita Villarreal. Lindsay Jacoby. Karimah Richardson.

The Standards for Data Collection from Human Skeletal Remains has been the standard for inventorying skeletal collections around the country, as well as most recently adopted by the Autry National Center of the American West. In 2011, a new digital method of inventory was developed by the Smithsonian Institution, called Osteoware. Osteoware is intended to be a common set of core observations between different researchers and incorporates The Standards. This project looks over the merits and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Monica Corpuz.

The Frank Palmer collections were the founding collections of the first museum in Los Angeles, the Southwest Museum, opened in 1914, and also for the Southwest Society’s exhibit in the Pacific Electric Building in downtown Los Angeles of 1907. Their profound importance to the individual founders of the museum, the Southwest Society and to the general populace of Los Angeles is well documented in meeting minutes, newspaper clippings and articles in magazines. The artifacts assembled by Frank...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Margarita Caballero. Socorro Lozano-Garía. Beatríz Ortega.

Lakes in central Mexico are ideal sites for the study of late Holocene climatic trends. These lakes have high sedimentation rates and their sediments are rich in pollen, diatoms and other biological remains that allow reconstructions of past environmental, ecological and climatic changes. In these lakes, precipitation, concentrated during the summer months, is frequently more important than temperature as a long-term environmental control; however, both variables are connected by climatic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carmen Pérez. Elizabeth Zepeda. Wesley Stoner.

El Coyotlatelco con frecuencia se ha caracterizado por su decoración distintiva de pintura roja sobre el color natural del barro; sin embargo en la región del valle de Toluca se han localizado en diversos contextos arqueológicos piezas que comparten las mismas características morfológicas, de pastas, acabado de superficie y color, que son contemporáneas, y de hecho coexisten, con la cerámica tradicionalmente identificada como Coyotlatelco. A partir de estas múltiples coincidencias consideramos...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yoko Sugiura. Gustavo Jaimes. Diana Martínez.

Hablar de la vida cotidiana puede resultar un tema bastante complejo, ya que ésta se compone de múltiples prácticas, las cuales se entretejen, de manera intricada, por acciones y actividades. Éstas se desarrollan en diversos espacios desde los domésticos y más privados hasta aquellos con carácter público que se denotan su carácter ritual, cívico o administrativo. En el presente trabajo, se aborda la problemática a través de las prácticas colectivas desarrolladas por acciones recurrentes de...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria De Muñoz. Minerva Mejia-Rangel. Miguel Moreno-Galeana. Gerardo Peréz-Ramírez. Yoko Sugiura-Yamamoto.

El valle de Toluca es una región que ha jugado un papel histórico importante dentro del altiplano central de México. Hasta el momento se desconoce el origen de estas poblaciones, aunque la primera aproximación basada en el estudio genético ha sugerido que podrían haber sido conformados por los grupos de raigambre otomiano. El presente estudio a través de la secuenciación del DNA mitocondrial y su análisis filogenético tiene el objetivo de conocer el origen materno de las poblaciones antiguas...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angeles Alberto-Villavicencio.

En este trabajo se analizan las formas de apropiación de los recursos naturales y el uso de los servicios ecosistémicos del río Lerma para las actividades cotidianas y económicas durante la época reciente, asimismo, se explican los procesos de configuración territorial y transformación paisajística en torno al río en la zona Metropolitana La Piedad-Pénjamo. Se analizan los procesos de degradación de la calidad ambiental del río que han alterado la provisión de servicios ecosistémicos, y se ponen...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Agapi Filini. Ramiro Aguayo Haro.

The Cuitzeo Basin in Northern Michoacán was a key area at the local and supralocal levels for its rich lacustrine resources, and its geographic position that facilitated interaction between the Central Highlands and West Mexico. Mortuary rites were fundamental for the social reproduction of regional elites. The continuous occupation of some sites for more than a thousand years underscores the ritual and religious significance for the lacustrine societies. The comparative study of both biological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ruben Hernandez.

El río Lerma representó el escenario ideal para el asentamiento de poblaciones desde el periodo Preclásico. Estos habitantes primigenios de las subcuencas de Ixtlahuaca-Atlacomulco y Temascalcingo establecieron vínculos con diferentes regiones culturales, por lo menos desde el periodo Preclásico hasta el Posclásico y aprovecharon todos los recursos disponibles en un medio privilegiado por el paso del rio Lerma, con el que establecieron un equilibrio respuetuoso y un nivel de desarrollo similar a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Magdalena Garcia Sanchez.

En el siglo pasado, en su paso por Michoacán, el río Lerma influyó en la vida de los pobladores de la región de Angamacutiro, que abarca las localidades de Santiago Conguripo, Aramútaro y Ancihuácuaro, entre otras. En éstas, la pesca, la caza y la recolección se llevaron a cabo sólo por algunos de los pobladores, pero existieron otras actividades hasta mediados del siglo XX que se desarrollaron en mayor medida y constituyeron en conjunto la economía preponderante en la región. Es el caso por...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alberto Aguirre.

Se presenta una síntesis del uso del agua en la Cuenca del Lerma en su paso por el Bajío, en particular en donde se unen Michoacán y Guanajuato, así como su transformación en energía eléctrica. A partir de un repaso histórico, se toman en cuenta las obras realizadas para generar electricidad y sus transformaciones más significativas en relación con el paisaje que las alberga. Asimismo, se discute el cambio tecnológico implicado y el del paisaje que conllevó el uso social de la electricidad en la...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Jacobs. Arleyn Simon. Owen Lindauer. Glen Rice.

"Salado" refers to a series of local expressions developed when populations were faced with the challenges of increased population sizes, migrants, and complexity. Local populations incorporated ceramic styles, iconography, architecture, and community organization from new arrivals and surrounding populations in ways that were adaptive and fostered integration. This brought migrants into the fold, albeit keeping them at a safe distance with limited participation and membership. To have excluded...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stacy Ryan.

Several seasons of field school excavations at the late Pueblo period 3-Up and Fornholt sites in Mule Creek, New Mexico, have produced a substantial number of flaked stone artifacts. Because these sites are located adjacent to the extensive Mule Creek obsidian source, and occupied at a time when Mule Creek obsidian was widely distributed, the collections provide information about lithic technology at sites with immediate access to the material. Obsidian composes a large proportion of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andy Laurenzi. Matthew Peeples. William Doelle.

Regional planning is an essential element of comprehensive archaeological management programs. The Salado Preservation Initiative at Archaeology Southwest is linked to our research agenda focused on Salado and related developments across the Southwest in the late precontact period. Working exclusively within a temporally defined period of record (1250-1450) and conscribed geographically by the distribution of Roosevelt redware, Archaeology Southwest conducted a series of expert workshops and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hannah Zanotto. Will Russell. Jeffery Ferguson.

During the late thirteenth century, the Salado Phenomenon swept across much of the U.S. Southwest, leaving its most indelible mark in the form of Salado Polychrome pottery. Chemical sourcing indicates that this pottery was produced in many of the areas in which it is found and many researchers now associate production areas with the settlement of Kayenta migrants. Archaeologists frequently use stylistic analyses to infer shared socio-cultural backgrounds. For example, some colleagues have noted...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aaron Trumbo. Allen Denoyer.

Experimental archaeology is a useful tool for improving our understanding of prehistoric technologies and testing archaeological interpretations. The "Hands On Archaeology" project at the 2014 Archaeology Southwest / University of Arizona Upper Gila Preservation Archaeology Field School focused on the experimental construction of a single-story adobe pueblo room in the style of the Cliff phase (AD 1300-1450+). This project was done in conjunction with limited excavation in three Cliff phase...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeffery Clark. William Doelle.

Archaeology Southwest (formerly the Center for Desert Archaeology) has been heavily engaged in studying the Salado Phenomenon through the lens of migration for nearly twenty years. Our research has been both intensive and extensive in scope: gathering new data from sites on public and private lands, reanalyzing existing collections, and scrutinizing published and unpublished reports from nearly every valley and basin in southern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico. Here we summarize this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maxwell Forton.

The Salado phenomenon in southern New Mexico and Arizona includes a set of cultural traits that are believed to have been stimulated by the arrival of Kayenta migrants in the late 1200s from northern Arizona and southeastern Utah. Identifying the influence of these northern migrants at Salado sites has been one of the ongoing goals of Archaeology Southwest’s field excavations. In addition to perforated plates and certain architectural features, the presence of particular ground stone tools at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Neuzil.

Current perspectives on the origin and nature of the Salado phenomenon vary amongst Southwest archaeologists. Evidence from the Safford Basin in southeastern Arizona suggests that in this area, Salado came about as a response to multiple waves of migration of various sized groups from the Kayenta and Tusayan regions of northeastern Arizona. Following the arrival of these migrants, the archaeological record shows that both migrants and groups indigenous to the Safford Basin renegotiated their...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandra Covert. Leslie Aragon.

Archaeology Southwest and the University of Arizona’s 2014 Upper Gila Preservation Archaeology (UGPA) field school excavations at the Dinwiddie Site (LA106003) produced interesting and somewhat unexpected results. Dinwiddie is a Cliff Phase (A.D. 1300 – 1450) Salado site located along Duck Creek, a tributary of the Gila River, in southwestern New Mexico. It was partially excavated by avocational archaeologists in the 1960s and the remaining deposits have faced multiple sources of disturbance....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patrick Lyons. Deborah Huntley.

Recent research in the southern US Southwest has revealed patterns useful in refining ceramic chronology and investigating communities of practice among 14th and 15th century potters producing Roosevelt Red Ware (Salado polychromes). Analyses of whole and partially reconstructible vessels recovered from stratified contexts in the San Pedro Valley of southeastern Arizona confirm the Roosevelt Red Ware stylistic seriation presented by Patricia Crown in 1994. Combining these results with recent...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nathaniel Erb-Satullo.

For a variety of historical reasons, the interdisciplinary field of innovation diffusion research has been underutilized by archaeologists examining technological change. Yet there is much to be gained by engaging with the predictive models produced by hundreds of investigations of technology adoption. Using the case of iron adoption in Western Asia, I demonstrate how an approach utilizing these concepts, with some modifications, provide a more complete perspective on technological change. ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pamela. Vandiver.

Technological change is driven by social context and perceived needs, but technological changes are also driven by seven other factors: materials constraints, especially composition and microstructure and availability and ease of processing raw materials, as well as the properties of the materials and the finished products, the nature and complexity of the materials transformations, the methods and sequences of processing, and the suitability to use and performance. Examples will be drawn from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Anthony. Dorcas Brown.

Every technological innovation carries a social agenda, usually one that was not intended or even foreseen by its inventors. The domestication of the horse in the Eurasian steppes probably was initially an attempt to secure winter-adapted meat animals, but horseback riding transformed the initial innovation into a revolution in transport. Riding made steppe herding more efficient, transformed tribal raiding, and eventually was combined with wagon transport to create a new way of life based on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Miller.

A bewildering assortment of materials utilizing siliceous pastes were used to make small objects such as figures, beads and containers, in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, the Mediterranean, and regions beyond and between. From very early beginnings in the sixth millennium BCE or earlier in some regions, the assortment of these materials reached great diversity of production technique and material in the third and second millennia BCE, with much less diversity of appearance. In...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carrie Brezine.

The textiles of Magdalena de Cao Viejo provide an opportunity to study technological changes in one coastal Andean settlement between the late 16th and the early 18th century. As a colonial reducción, Magdalena was home to people of both Andean and Spanish descent. Among the more than 3,000 textile artifacts are examples of cloth woven with pre-Columbian methods and indigenous fibers, fabrics created on European-style floor looms, and examples which combine Andean and European techniques and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Bray.

The vast chemical datasets for copper-alloy objects are a tremendous, but underused, opportunity. These data were often considered objective fixed points that represented chronological sequences and geographical provenance. Recent work has demonstrated that, though the object composition is fixed, it is only a final characterisation. Bringing together material science, archaeological, and conceptual approaches, we discuss the life histories of units of metal. Before being cast into the final...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Howland. Brady Liss. Craig Smitheram. Mohammad Najjar. Thomas E. Levy.

This paper presents preliminary results from the 2014 Edom Lowlands Regional Archaeology Project (ELRAP) excavation at Khirbat al-Jariya (KAJ), an Iron Age copper production site in southern Jordan’s copper ore-rich Faynan region. To complement earlier work on copper production activities at KAJ, industrial and administrative areas were sampled. Stratigraphic excavations in both these areas applied a cutting-edge cyber-archaeology workflow in order to ensure the best-possible spatial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bastien Varoutsikos.

Recently, several discoveries in Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan have shed new light on the processes involved in the development of food production economy in the South Caucasus. If a series of excavations using modern techniques have provided an improved chronological and cultural framework for this complex phenomenon, several interrogations remain. What is the role of the hunter-gatherer population in the domestication process? Is the presence of Neolithic cultures in this area the result of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Neely.

Two large-scale water management systems, one in the Tehuacán Valley of Puebla, Mexico and the other in the Safford Basin of southeastern Arizona, are briefly described and compared. In the Tehuacán Valley, the Purrón Dam exhibits a massive construction effort totaling about 370,000 m3 of earth and stone. In contrast, the 28 "hanging" canals of the Safford Basin are small but extensive in nature, with the longest about 9.5 kilometers in length and the total length of all canals exceeding 80...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Schiffer.

Archaeologists are much concerned with, and often have evidence for studying, the effects of technological change on social processes. In this paper, I reverse the causal arrow and examine social processes that can initiation technological change. Among these varied social processes, I discuss here peer competitions; social role expectations; new social groups, social roles, and activities; and maintaining a system of status differentiation. Each of these processes can serve as fillips to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Kenoyer.

The production of stone beads involves multiple stages of manufacture determined by the available raw materials as well as technological choices made by bead makers and their communities. This paper focuses on technologies associated with the production of carnelian beads during the Harappa Phase (2600-1900 BC) of the Indus Valley region of Pakistan and Western India, and parts of West Asia. Technological change in production and trade can be shown through materials analysis and provenance...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melissa Murphy.

Native Andeans’ first contacts with foreigners were not necessarily with the Spanish foreigners themselves, but with the foreign pathogens that were introduced prior to the arrival of the Spaniards through trade networks and early incursions in the northern extent of the Inca Empire. Violent encounters with indigenous peoples followed the Spaniards as they made their way down the northwestern half of the Central Andes, such as the fateful battle in Cajamarca.Yet not all native Andeans perished...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Oster. Michael Elliott.

The chronicler Tello describes the Caxcans as rústicos mexicanos who accompanied the Mexica on their march south from Aztlan in the 1100s, but to the Spanish, they became known as the gente belicosa, fierce fighters who did not accept the terms of their conquest, and who ultimately led the Mixtón War of 1541-42. The discussion focuses on the results of the Spanish encounters with the Caxcans and the ways in which these interactions informed the military and political strategies pursued by the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Schmader.

In 1540, Francisco Vázquez de Coronado led one of the largest expeditions ever assembled by the Spanish crown into the present-day American southwest. The expedition had 375 European men and was supported by a large contingent of at least 1,300 native Méxican soldiers from various ethnic groups. The native Méxican soldiers likely did much of the advance work, hand-to-hand fighting, guarding, and other military detail. The whole expedition was not well-equipped with European military technology...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zachary Chase.

Much scholarly understanding of the ancient Andes has been greatly influenced by the unique ca. 1608 Quechua manuscript of Huarochirí, Peru. For many archaeologists and historians the manuscript reveals an indigenous Andean cosmos otherwise hidden or lost. And indeed the text’s manifest leitmotif is the superation of worlds past by worlds present–an historical etiology of its narrators’ place in space and time. Here I present results from the first systematic archaeology in the central area of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Rodning. Robin Beck. David Moore.

From 1566 to 1568, the northern frontier of the Spanish colonial province of La Florida was situated in western North Carolina. Members of the Hernando de Soto expedition traversed the province of "Xuala," in the upper Catawba Valley, in 1540, en route to towns on the other side of the Appalachians, in eastern Tennessee. Expeditions led by Juan Pardo between 1566 and 1568 visited many of the same places and provinces in the Carolinas and eastern Tennessee as the Soto expedition, including...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steven Wernke. Teddy Abel Traslaviña.

In the 1570s, the Viceroy of Peru Francisco de Toledo instituted one of the largest forced resettlement programs in world history: the Reducción General de Indios (General Resettlement of Indians). Some 1.4 million native Andeans were forcibly resettled into over 1,000 planned colonial reducción ("reduction") towns built on gridded street plans throughout the viceroyalty. Through the media of the built environment, the Reducción was to be a means of generating a new social order from the ground...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Pohl.

Traditionally, the colonization of Spain's northern frontier is studied as a uniquely 16th through 18th century enterprise. This paper will describe how this process of expansionism was informed by existing indigenous trade networks that linked bands, tribes, chiefdoms and states into mutual systems of exchange extending from the mouth of the Colorado river to coastal Oaxaca. In so doing, the role of indigenous peoples of southern Mexico as both settlers and mediators between the Spanish Crown...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angélica María Medrano.

When the Spanish entered northwest Mexico in1529 they confronted a bellicose people, the Caxcans, occupying numerous settlements in the southeastern drainages of the Sierra Madre Occidental, los Altos of Jalisco and Zacatecas. The Caxcans—ethnically and culturally related to Nahuatl-speaking groups of Central Mexico, including the Mexica—were one of the northernmost Mesoamerican cultures in sixteenth-century New Spain. Data from recent investigations are presented, clarifying the position of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Bletzer.

This paper presents an outline of the colonial encounter between the A’tzi-em/Piros and Spaniards during the years 1581-1681. Archaeological evidence of Spanish-induced settlement changes comes from two long-term archaeological projects at the sites of the Piro pueblos of Teypana and Pilabó, Socorro County, New Mexico. Analysis of primary documents provides additional information on such issues as native accommodation and resistance, factionalism, and the ultimate disintegration of the last Piro...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matt Liebmann.

Historians and archaeologists often consider the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 to be the final chapter in the saga of early Spanish colonialism in New Mexico. Borderlands scholars endlessly debate the origins of the uprising, and in recent years their attention has turned toward proximate causes. In this paper I take a longer view, investigating how the events of early Spanish contact and colonialism created conditions ripe for Native insurrection. I pay particular attention to the differential...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alan Avila-Ortiz. PATRICIA FOURNIER. PARESKEVI KOUVATSOU.

The Spanish intrusion in Mexico brought indigenous peoples into contact with a Hispanic cultural system, creating a fusion of multiethnic societies each with its own religious, social, and economic values. Our research considers how material culture is formed and transformed through a variety of processes involving structure and practice in specific contexts, which we glean through archaeological collections and documentary records. We focus on the materiality of ceramic figurines made by the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meghan Howey. Karen Alexander. Courtney Mills. Adreinne Kovach. Beverly Johnson.

This paper looks at the story of the colonization of New England from the perspective of the Ocean. It was the Ocean, and its marine resources, that first brought Europeans to the Northwest Atlantic and into contact with the region’s indigenous communities in the 16th and 17th centuries. As Europeans expanded their colonial presence on land, they likewise expanded their presence on the sea, increasing commercial fishing in the Northwest Atlantic. During this early colonial period, New England...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nancy Ely. Alyssa Scott.

Archaeology provides an amazing vehicle for teaching the Common Core and engaging students in lessons across the curricula, while emphasizing teaching for deep understanding of big ideas or broad concepts. Social sciences, history, and science easily find avenues for collaboration, while students use language arts and math skills to analyze and apply data, as well as to write reports. Archaeological inquiry may be used to understand the human past, employing such tools as observation, inference,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Pollack. Jules McKnight.

What happens when teachers and students engage with project archeology curriculum materials in the classroom ? What happens when students investigate archaeological and historical sites using the process archaeological inquiry? Critical thinking, inquiry, and interdisciplinary investigation are the hall marks of Project Archeology curriculum material. students at Aptos Middle School in San francisco, learned archaeological inquiry in their classroom and applied it to a real archeological site. ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Crystal Alegria. Shane Doyle.

Project Archaeology is a heritage education organization devoted to curriculum development that gives students the tools to better understand the cultural landscape of the world they live in. One of our main goals is to collaborate and partner with descendant communities in all that we do to research, develop, and implement our programs. In this paper we will outline our collaborative theory and practice, and our goals to encourage multiple ways of knowing, validate tribal history, and support...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Margaret Heath. Maureen Malloy.

Archaeology education has been a part of archaeological practice in the U.S. for the past 30 years and is firmly rooted in the discipline's widely shared belief that public education about archaeology is key to protecting and preserving sites. But archaeology education has broadened to encompass educational goals and cultural heritage values that are much broader than only site protection. The goals of Project Archaeology--which began collaboratively in Utah to combat site looting and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only A. Gwynn Henderson. Linda S. Levstik.

Twenty-five years from now, as America’s educators put into place yet another "new" set of standards, and classroom teachers endure yet another pedagogical adjustment, will archaeology be at the table, included as an appendix, or invisible? Predicting the future is risky business, but the intrigue of the past never fails to engage learners. It’s our responsibility as educators to nurture that engagement and channel it toward understanding. Drawing from the preliminary results of a piloting...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Courtney Agenten.

We estimate that 275,000 students each year learn about archaeology and protecting the human past through Project Archaeology’s high-quality educational materials. In 2009, I was lucky to attend a Project Archaeology workshop at the Little Bighorn Battlefield, living in a tipi for a week and studying how to engage my students in discovering the culture and history of the Crow tribe. The workshop was taught by a passionate, knowledgeable archaeology educator and I was hooked! The next year, I...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eleanor King. Stephen Epstein.

Over its 25 years, Project Archaeology has helped revolutionize not only how we teach archaeology in pre-collegiate and other settings, but also how professional archaeologists look at public engagement. The program’s original objective was to prevent looting by inculcating a sense of stewardship in children. Its initial success made it the profession’s premier outreach instrument. As various states adapted Project Archaeology to different regional audiences, it became clear that the deep...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeanne Moe.

Over the last 25 years, Project Archaeology has had a profound impact on educators, students, and archaeologists. Project Archaeology curricular materials and professional development have shown teachers how to transform their teaching into inquiry learning in all subjects. Students have developed deep cultural understanding of the Native peoples who have inhabited our nation before Europeans came to these shores and are still here today. These students demonstrate a profound respect for all...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Justeson.

Research on contact linguistics has shown that, and to a great extent how, the nature of the linguistic influence of speakers of different languages on one another relates systematically to the nature of the interactions among speakers of these languages. This paper will survey some of the evidence and inferences that historical linguistics can contribute to some of the culture-historical situations addressed by other papers in this symposium, from varying time frames, and will address some of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bryan Schaeffer.

Interaction between the central Mexican city of Teotihuacan and the Maya region, and the subsequent influence of Teotihuacan on Maya material culture, has been much discussed. Although many scholars have noted the tripod cylindrical vessel as a diagnostic trait of Teotihuacan and as evidence of interaction and/or influence in other areas of Mesoamerica, further examinations of the tripod ceramic vessels and their imagery found in the Maya area have not been fully developed. The tripod vessel...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Knab. John Pohl.

Rotating power structures of the mayordomías circulares in Cholula show extreme stability through time. We will analyze how these systems work and why they are so effective using notions of social capital to show how these and other organizations in Cholula build up social capital needed to keep Cholula’s baroquely complicated system of ritual festivals running. In so doing, we will show that the system can be sourced to the early post conquest when it was maintained by the city's merchants and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joshua Englehardt. Michael Carrasco.

Interregional interaction often serves as a catalyst for cultural innovation. This paper explores the effects of interaction on the development of Mesoamerican scripts during the Formative period. Current models suggest that the transition from iconography to phonetic writing involved the recontextualization of visual symbols: motifs were excised from the pictorial frameworks in which they were usually contextualized and enclosed within the emergent textual–linguistic conventions and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only J. Gregory Smith. Charles L. F. Knight.

The nature and degree of interaction between the Classic period centers of Teotihuacan and Cantona is investigated through two types of obsidian artifacts that characterize Early to Late Classic period obsidian use in the central-east highlands of Mexico: prismatic blades and bifacial dart points. At the Zaragoza-Oyameles source area in eastern Puebla, Mexico the recovery of dart point preforms next to obsidian quarries, combined with chemical analysis indicates that these points were crafted at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ramiro Aguayo Haro. Agapi Filini.

The Mesoamerican world system was characterized by diverse kinds of interdependencies since the Preclassic to the Postclassic periods. Interdependencies generate sources of power such as economic and ideological which affect social structures well beyond cultural boundaries. This paper contends that in a highly complex exchange network that dominated the Mesoamerican landscape power was negotiated at the local and supralocal networks, and resulted in interdependencies of various levels and among...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Blanca Maldonado. Niklas Schulze.

The way people were placed in relation to each other was fundamental to the distinctive character of Mesoamerica, as a historically linked series of socially stratified, economically differentiated, complex societies. Long-distance exchange, one of the practices through which intensive interaction between different peoples was fostered, was centrally concerned with obtaining materials used for marking distinctions between commoners and nobles. Costume was a major means of marking distinctions...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Dempsey.

In 2013, the Midwest Archeological Center initiated a five-year project to study the impacts of erosion on archeological sites in Great Plains parks, specifically those parks with badlands geography. The project is designed to provide information on erosion rates in a variety of environmental contexts, as well as erosion’s effect on different features and artifact types. In the future, these data will be used to predict which sites or potential site locations may be most vulnerable to climate...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Kendrick.

The Northeast Region of the NPS extends from Saint Croix Island on the Maine-New Brunswick border to Booker T. Washington National Monument in Virginia, and from Cape Cod National Seashore to New River Gorge in West Virginia. The national parks of this region contain the archaeological signatures of presidents, poets, war, human rights struggles, maritime history, industrial history, and thousands of years of American Indian heritage. This paper discusses recent archaeological studies in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Pederson Weinberger.

Human occupation of the 54 million acres of land managed by the National Park Service (NPS) has spanned millennia from early use of the ice-free corridors, later migrations and adaptation of tool kits to meet changing needs, and contact with explorers, fur traders, and others from distant lands. Research conducted each year along coasts, in and around mountainous terrain, small towns, and places in between aids efforts to inventory park land for archaeological resources, understand past human...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anne Vawser. Tim Schilling. Ashley Barnett. Allison Young. Michael Schumacher.

In 2011 Wind Cave National Park acquired new lands that include an important prehistoric site where American Indians once made their homes and practiced communal hunting. Two seasons of work at the site have resulted in the discovery of drive lines, rock cairns, processing areas, stone circles, ceremonial features and much more. What has been found at the site is equally as important as the way the work has been conducted, including the involvement of tribal monitors and volunteers, tribal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Schilling.

Jefferson National Expansion Memorial is an anomaly in the National Park Service. The park was designated in 1935 as the first national historic site, memorializing America’s westward expansion, yet it is best known for the Gateway Arch, a modernist monument that towers over the city. Archaeological information from the St. Louis riverfront is sparse, but the park is located in an area that was densely settled from prehistory to the beginning of the twentieth century. In the late 1930s, NPS...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Staffan Peterson. Daniel Eakin.

The Nez Perce (Nee-Me-Poo) National Historic Trail was designated by Congress under the National Trails System Act in 1986 to commemorate the 1877 flight of the non-treaty Nez Perce from their homelands in present day Oregon, Idaho, and Washington, across Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, including 85 miles within Yellowstone National Park. In 2008, Yellowstone began archaeological investigations of the trail corridor. This six-year project includes consultation with the Confederated Tribes of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Rupp.

The use of geophysical survey techniques to identify potential archeological deposits has a long history at Valley Forge NHP (VFNHP). As early as 1974, while it was still a state park, Dr. Bruce Bevan conducted magnetometer and GPR surveys of some of the brigade areas. Since 2011, archeologists at VFNHP have undertaken a series of geophysical surveys aimed at identifying possible encampment related features. The surveys produced a series of promising anomalies, many of which have been tested...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wanda Raschkow.

The Grapevine Archeological District in Death Valley National Park contains evidence of prehistoric and ethnohistoric occupation. The district also overlaps with the Death Valley Scotty Historic District. A road realignment project in 2014 led to the discovery of a historic period site that appeared to be a mining camp with features and artifacts typically associated with tasks performed by men. Surface features and artifacts included a forge and hand-forged axes; a mining claim cairn marked the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Potter. John Bedell.

In 1688, a band of Shawnee left Fort St. Louis on the Illinois River and headed east. Eventually, some of them settled at King Opessa's Town on the upper Potomac River, circa 1722, in the vicinity of Oldtown, Maryland. In 1975, a National Retister Nomination was prepared identifying a 122 x 213 m surface scatter of prehistoric artifacts as the site of King Opessa's Town, which also corresponds to the location of "Shawno Indian Fields Deserted" on Benjamin Winslow's 1736 map. Subsequent test...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Morgan. Dave Conlin. Charles Lawson.

Protecting archeological sites from looting is one of the constant challenges facing the 66 park units in the Southeast Region of the U.S. National Park Service. One park in particular--Biscayne National Park--eclipses the others in terms of the quantity and destructiveness of looting it suffers. Research since 2010 at the HMS Fowey, English China, Black, Pillar Dollar, Brick, Long Reef Cannon, and other shipwrecks illustrates the severity of the problem. The submerged nature of the resources is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jay Sturdevant. Brenda Todd. Wendy Ross. Craig Hansen.

Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site was set aside to preserve, research, and interpret the archeological and cultural landscapes of the Hidatsa-Mandan villages at the confluence of the Knife and Missouri Rivers. Both park enabling legislation and NPS policy direct park staff to preserve archeological resources unimpaired for future generations. However, defining what preservation means and how it is put into practice presents a challenge for park managers as they attempt to...