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

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samantha Lorenz. Brandon Lewis. Toni Gonzalez. Bianca Gentil. Joseph Orozco.

During the 2014 field season, the California State University, Los Angeles Cave Research Project focused its investigation on a sinkhole at the site of La Milpa that had been given a cursory examination by the TRAP in 2012. An initial inspection suggested that the feature might well have been considered a ch’een by the ancient Maya. Ch’een is generally translated as cave but the indigenous term includes a large number of earth openings that were recognized as sacred landmarks. Excavations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Nicolas.

Caves are prominent earth openings in Maya sites that are widely recognized as being important sacred landmarks. There is a wide range of earth openings at sites, however, that are rarely recognized as possible landmarks and this can impact the interpretation of associated artifacts. Investigation of the La Milpa Sinkhole (RB-25-A5) is a case in point. Investigation in 2012 classified the feature as a trash pit. The recovery of large quantities of what were thought to be chert flakes led to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Cutrone.

Spirit Bird Cave created a new model to evaluate Southwestern caves and earth openings in relation to prehistoric Native American beliefs about religion and sacred landscape. This model suggests that such concepts were major considerations in the choosing of settlement locations and foremost in the ideology of the prehistoric peoples. Site 42SA2120 in Montezuma Canyon, which fits this new paradigm, has not been formally described to this point. A survey of the site found evidence that the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Holley Moyes. Shayna Hernandez. Lauren Phillips.

Ethnographically cave use in Mesoamerica is well-documented and there are many accounts of modern rituals occurring in or near caves. These analogies provide excellent evidence for understanding the meaning of caves and provide supporting evidence to demonstrate that they functioned as ritual spaces in ancient society, yet analogies have little resonance when considering ancient rites occurring deep within caves. For this type of question we are much more dependent on the archaeological record...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Allan Cobb. Jeremy Coltman.

Among the hundreds of caves I have observed in the Maya area a number stand out in possessing relatively large tunnel systems with restrictions near the entrances. When air is driven from the caves due to atmospheric pressure, the restrictions create a fast moving flow of air that is quite noticeable around the entrance to the cave. Ethnographic evidence suggests that modern Maya are quite aware of such air movements. Because rain was closely associated with caves among the ancient Maya and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brent Woodfill.

Caves are among the most sacred geographic features in Mesoamerica and have been used throughout history as the setting for multiple ritual events. In this paper, the author looks at several shrines in central Guatemala that were rediscovered long after they were abandoned by the original ritual practitioners and regained importance. The renewed activity often reflects very different functions of the rituals performed there—in caves along a major trade route cutting through the region, for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Miljour. Karen R. Adams.

The Homol’ovi settlement cluster, a group of Hopi villages occupied A.D. 1260–1400, shared common utilization of a wide range of wild and domesticated plants for both subsistence and non-subsistence needs. Inhabitants had an extremely well-rounded and informed view of the plant world that surrounded them, as well as plant resources obtained from afar. The ubiquity of domesticates in the archaeological record indicates a heavy reliance on agriculture for food, household items, clothing, fuel, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samantha Fladd.

Throughout its occupation, Homol’ovi I, a Pueblo IV site in northeastern Arizona, underwent continuous alteration reflecting the movement of groups both internally and externally. The constant attention to rebuilding, redirecting, and resurfacing rooms and the meticulous patterning of depositional material within structures indicate a continued endeavor to reform the built environment to better reflect the identities, needs, and memories of the current residents. In order to analyze the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Krystal Britt. Richard Lange.

Previous research in the middle Little Colorado River valley of Northern Arizona has characterized the Pueblo III period (1125-1275 C.E.) as dominated by dispersed pithouse villages which were later replaced by the aggregated cluster of masonry pueblos at Homol’ovi. Recent survey and excavation in this region shed new light on the occupation and land use of the middle Little Colorado River valley prior to Pueblo IV. The landscape is dotted with mid-sized pueblos that may have acted as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Byron Estes. Claire S. Barker. Vincent M. La Motta.

RAR-2 is a small Pueblo III period site located on private land outside of Winslow, Arizona. Excavations in 2011-12 by the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Arizona Field School at Rock Art Ranch have revealed the production of local utility ware, Rock Art Ranch utility ware, in addition to a variety of imported, non-local utility wares, including Tusayan Gray ware, Mogollon Brown ware, and Puerco Valley utility ware. This study analyses the technological style of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa Young.

Southwestern archaeologists identify the pithouse-to-pueblo transition as a fundamental change in the social and economic organization of small-scale farming communities. This interpretation implies that pithouse villages were organized differently than pueblos. In northeastern Arizona, pithouses were used after this transition and were the preferred form of housing in certain areas, such as Homol’ovi during the A.D. 1100s. However, systematic research on these "out of phase" pithouse villages...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claire Barker.

During the A.D. 1200s and 1300s, the Colorado Plateau experienced widespread, large-scale migration and the subsequent aggregation of groups into large Pueblo communities. During this period, people migrated to the Homol'ovi area, aggregating into seven large pueblo settlements. The demographic upheaval resulting from this large-scale population movement brought diverse individual and group identities into contact and, potentially, conflict. Chevelon Ruin, one of the aggregated settlements that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only E Adams. Samantha Fladd. Richard Lange. Claire Barker.

In 2011 the Homol’ovi Research Program (HRP) launched a fieldschool at Rock Art Ranch (RAR) 8 km south of Chevelon Pueblo and nearly 25 km from the Homol’ovi core (Homol’ovi I-IV) to investigate (1) the relationship of the many small pueblos in the area to those occupied at the same time in the core Homol’ovi area and ultimately to the large Pueblo IV villages; (2) the location and age of sites associated with the major petroglyph panels at The Steps in Chevelon Canyon generally dating...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Shakour. Ian Kuijt. Tommy Burke.

Crucial to heritage management in the 21st century is developing and maintaining cooperative relationships among archaeologists, local community and decent communities. Different stakeholders have varied views of how to define the past, the cultural and historical relevance of people, places and objects and the extent to which this should be shared when creating multivocal histories. Focusing on the islands of Inishark and Inishbofin, Co. Galway, Ireland, located five miles into the Atlantic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Nassaney.

The Fort St. Joseph Archaeological Project was initiated in 1998 as a collaborative partnership between Western Michigan University, the City of Niles, and various community groups. After 10 seasons of site investigations, scholarly publications, and public archaeology at this eighteenth-century French fur trading post, the Fort St. Joseph Archaeology Advisory Committee invited historic preservation professionals, economic development planners, educators, students, and community members to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Paynter.

The University of Massachusetts Amherst has conducted Critical Heritage Archaeology at the W.E.B. Du Bois Homesite in Great Barrington, MA in collaboration with a community group interested in commemorating Du Bois and fostering an understanding of African American life in Western Massachusetts. W.E.B. Du Bois was one of the most important scholars and political leaders of the late 19th and first half of the 20th century. A 1969 commemoration at the site was met by local and national...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Uzi Baram.

Heritage management encompasses a tremendous range of activities and concerns, including stewardship of the archaeological record. The ethical responsibilities of conservation and protection require recognition of the competing interests involved in the property ownership. This paper reflects on the implications of the dynamics involved in a recent case in Florida. A location containing a significant early 19th century archaeological record became caught up in legal battles. The dynamic is part...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sherene Baugher.

Discovering Enfield Falls is dramatically different from academic managed heritage projects that are top-down projects initiated by archaeologists. In our project, the heritage planning originated with stakeholders who were determine to preserve the history of a community that was demolished in the early twentieth century to create a state park. This 19th century hamlet was both a commercial center for farmers and a regional scenic tourist destination. The stakeholders did not need...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John H Jameson.

In this presentation I discuss evolving concepts in public archaeology and interpretation. I give two examples, one from South Carolina, USA, and the other, as of early 2014, in Crimea, Ukraine, on how these concepts have been proposed and applied at sites and parks. In many parts of the West, the overarching trend is an increasing involvement of non-professionals in planning and carrying out archaeological and cultural heritage studies and public interpretation. We look at three evolving...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Lafrenz Samuels.

Engaging local communities and the many publics has become responsible practice for archaeologists and heritage managers. However, the character of the public sphere is changing. Neoliberal reforms around the world have seen private and commercial actors increasingly fill the vacuum left in the wake of state withdrawal from social services provisioning. This withdrawal has meant the blurring of public and private interests and opening of new governance mechanisms beyond those of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Veit. Sean McHugh. Adam Heinrich.

New Jersey’s Pinelands (aka the Pine Barrens) is the largest preserved natural space in the Boston-Washington megalopolis. Fabled as the home of the Jersey Devil, endless pine forests, lost ghost towns, cranberry bogs, and "Pineys," the region has long drawn the attention of writers, researchers, and folklorists. Many of these authors have emphasized the distinctive way of life present in the region. This paper brings the archaeological lens to bear on the Pinelands. Have the Pinelands long...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Beaupré.

Fort Saint-Jean lies in the Richelieu River Valley approximately half-way between the modern American/Canadian border and the City of Montreal. The valley has been a space of contestation between French, British, Canadian and American ideas, identities, and empires. For over three hundred years this contestation has taken numerous forms, ranging from ethnic stereotyping, to open warfare. When I began directing the Laval University archaeological field program at Fort Saint-Jean, our research...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Douglas Wilson.

Heritage managers of complex archaeological sites are more highly successful when there is a commitment to on-going public involvement and the integration of multiple communities in the site’s archaeological research and site interpretation. The public archaeology program at Fort Vancouver is highlighted as a model for integrating traditional archaeology education activities with site-specific archaeological research, the development of archaeology-influenced interpretation, and the development...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Reginald Auger.

Our paper reflects on the development of a commemoration concept which takes into account the sensibilities of descendants from the slave trade period in French Guiana. Memory of the trade period is indeed a very sensitive issue among residents of most Caribbean Islands and we use sixteen years of research at one site to present the various questions with which we are confronted in order for the local population to appropriate the spirit of place. The Loyola Habitation was located at 10 km from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Chilton.

One of the stated goals of decolonizing archaeological theory and practice it to redistribute power and authority in the creation and communication of cultural heritage, a laudable goal. However, achieving such a goal is only possible if archaeologists and historican relinquish their role as historiographical experts—as the ultimate authority on historical truths and significance. While in recent years there has been a trend towards increasing public outreach and engagement, in some cases such...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Carlucci. Ling-yu Hung.

With a focus on painted pottery assemblages known as Yangshao, Majiayao, Banshan, and Machang from Neolithic Northern China, the present study explores early Eurasian interactions and exchanges indicated by ceramic assemblages and other kinds of archaeological records dated before 4000 years ago. Since the 1920s, scholars have noticed parallels between China’s painted pottery and other collections in Central Asia and further west, prompting the "western origins" theory on painted pottery found...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Enguo Lu.

Ever since the 1970s, painted pottery has been discovered in large quantities at cemeteries and occasionally settlements on the southern and northern foothills of the Tianshan Mountain. Organizing them into four Early Iron Age (ca. 1300-200BC) regional cultures: Yanbulake in the Hami region, Subeixi in the Turfan region, Chawuhu in the Kaidu Valley, and Yili Valley in the eponymous region, this paper characterizes the stylistic distinctions of the painted pottery of them. The Yanbulake culture,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yi-Xian LIN. Ian Freestone. Hui WANG.

This paper examines the evidence for local production of painted pottery of the Majiayao Culture in Gansu province based on their distinguishing characteristics in mineralogical, compositional and technological aspects, and on correlations of these features with the geographical source. An empirical observation of a contemporary family-scale workshop in Lintao County, where the most splendid pieces of Majiayao painted pottery have been found, suggests that the technological difficulties in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ling-yu Hung. Jianfeng Cui.

Painted pottery traditions in Neolithic Northwest China emerged through diverse processes of human migration, technical transmission, style imitation, and material exchange. Starting around 6000 years BP, Yangshao farming communities expanded incrementally farther upstream along the Upper Yellow River drainage and westward along the Hexi Corridor. The painted pottery tradition introduced by Yangshao immigrants developed into different chronological and regional styles in Northwest China over the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shuicheng Li.

The Siba Culture (c. 3950-3550 years BP) is an early Bronze Age culture in Northwest China. Painted pottery of the Siba Culture is characterized by red slip, decorated with black and thick paint, which is easy to peel off. The painted motifs are mainly geometric patterns, apart from a few animal and human figures. These art treasures provide an important dataset to investigate the subsistence and culture of the ancient Qiang groups. Studies of the painted pottery also address: 1) implications of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ting An.

Evidence of millet in Europe before 2000 BC has invited questions about its material culture context, possibly related with external regions such as China. This study compares the matrial assemblages of distinctively painted pottery vessels associated with findings of millet in different regions, such as the Cucuteni-Tripolye Culture of Southeast Europe, the Anau Culture of Central Asia,and the Majiayao Culture of China. These painted pottery vessels have been argued to be similar to each other,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Liangren Zhang.

The dispersion of resource-based goods, such as obsidian and metals, has been a common subject in world archaeological literature and various mechanisms such as migration, gift exchange, and trade have been conjured up to explain it. The dispersion of painted pottery, by contrast, has been glaringly understudied. Although the raw materials for this product are less geographically constrained, its dispersion has not been well appreciated and explained. This paper aims to address the movement of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marc Azéma.

The Aurignacian site of Grotte Chauvet-Pont d’Arc (Ardèche, ca. 37,000 calBP) signals the origin of figurative art, with nearly 500 stylistically uniform parietal decorations. Images of animals are composed in a spectacular fashion, especially in the Secteur des Chevaux and the Salle du Fond. The latter, the end of the cave’s passages, is the clearest example of the management of subterranean space by Paleolithic artists in the interest of achieving their ultimate intention: to narrate by image....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julien Riel-Salvatore. Ingrid Ludeke. Fabio Negrino.

We present an analysis of the spatial distribution of various features (hearths, dripline, etc.) and of four broad artifact classes (lithics, fauna, ochre, shell) in the proto-Aurignacian levels of Riparo Bombrini. The site is a collapsed rockshelter in the Balzi Rossi site complex and is interesting in part for having yielded very late Mousterian and very early proto-Aurignacian levels. The site thus offers an ideal setting in which to study behavioral differences between late Neanderthals and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only François Bon. Romain Mensan. Lars Anderson. Mathieu Lejay. Hélène Salomon.

Régismont-le-Haut (Hérault, France) counts among the rare open-air Aurignacian campsites in southwestern France having both spatially conserved activity areas and explicit traces of a constructed living space. This minimally disturbed single habitation occupies two perpendicular paleochannels, whose geometry separates the site into two main zones. Throughout its excavation numerous combustion structures (27), all being surrounded by differentially diffuse archaeological material, have been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laurent Klaric.

After nine years of excavations (1998-2008) the site of La Picardie has delivered a major lithic collection (more than 13 000 artifacts piece plotted) chronologically related to the "Raysse burin" Gravettian (second phase of Middle Gravettian ca. 24 ky BP uncalibrated). Through the study of lithic material several major results have been brought to light (chronological attribution, description of a new retouched bladelet type, reconstruction of the flint knapping process for blade and bladelet...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Randall White. Romain Mensan. Amy E. Clark.

New excavations at three historically important Vézère Valley sites provide insight into the spatial organization of Early Aurignacian campsites and the nature of the late Pleistocene landscapes surrounding them. These excavations provide new and robust data on fire-use, activity areas and the context of the production and use of symbolic materials (graphic imagery and personal ornaments) among early modern humans in SW Europe. Molecular filtration dates raise new questions about the chronology...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mathieu Lejay. Farid Sellami. Marie Alexis. Romain Mensan. François Bon.

Through the study of several contemporary fireplaces at the Aurignacian open-air site of Régismont-le-Haut we will distinguish differences in the function and operation of a common-place form of archaeological vestige. To achieve this goal we rely on multiscale examination of hearths, which consists of classic planimetric and stratigraphic observation coupled with both micromorphological and geochemical analyses. Results are also compared with experimental hearths analyzed using the same...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jean-Pierre Bracco. Damien Pesesse.

Excavated especially in the late 70s and early 80s, the site of la Vigne Brun provided numerous dwelling structures unique in Western Europe. Each structure is a circular excavation of 6 m in diameter, is coated with ochre, and has a central hearth. This site is generally interpreted as the result of a single occupation and all the dwelling structures of are considered contemporary. New research by a multidisciplinary team shows that site formation processes are much more complicated and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Roland Nespoulet. Dominique Henry-Gambier. Laurent Chiotti.

The status and significance of the assemblage of human remains in the Final Gravettian of the Abri Pataud (level 2, 22 kya) had never really been broached during the excavations of H.L. Movius (1958, 1963). A three-pronged approach (archive analysis, study of old collections, and targeted excavation), started in 2005, allows us to propose a new interpretation of these remains as well the entirety of level 2. This study takes into account the natural configuration of the rock shelter, its...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marie-Isabelle Cattin.

Located in a region where flint is of mediocre quality, the Magdalenian sites of Monruz and Champréveyres (Neuchâtel, Switzerland) show the introduction of a high proportion of good quality flint from sometimes very distant (up to 200 km) regions. For this reason we can argue that flint was not a constraining factor on the selection of camp location. It is certain that favorable hunting grounds, as well as the proximity to water sources and combustible materials, were more important. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elisa Caron-Laviolette.

Since the 1980s, spatially oriented techno-economical lithic studies of a few key open-air sites in the Paris basin have been essential to our comprehension of Upper Palaeolithic behavioral patterns. While these analyses have largely been synchronic in focus, and many others evaluate diachrony on the long-term, we hope to now bridge these two approaches through a study of the mid-term. One of the only Palaeolithic contexts that allow for such an approach is the three-level sequence that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lars Anderson.

The Aurignacian is considered a product of the first modern human groups in Western Europe. Nevertheless, we have approached this important moment in Prehistory with a diachronic vision, ultimately inhibiting us from investigating the synchronic organization of this archaeological culture. By enlarging our field of vision to several sites in southwestern France we hope to characterize the variability of Aurignacian lithic industries on two scales: the inter- and the intra-site. At the intra-site...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dana Kollmann.

Many students eager to begin a career in the forensic sciences have never been on a crime scene and it is even more unlikely that they have ever had the opportunity to process one. This paper details the unusual circumstances that enabled Towson University students to partner with law enforcement and work on both active and cold cases that have necessitated the search for human remains and associated evidence. SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Seidemann. Christine Halling.

Since the inception of the Louisiana Department of Justice’s human remains acquisition program in 2007, two Tibetan kapalas have been recovered from illegal sales. This commodification of human remains constitutes technical violations of the law, but the nature of the remains makes for an awkward fit to the existing laws. The forensic, bioarchaeological, and cultural analysis of these remains are difficult due to their altered nature, leading to problems of disposition. Questions inherent in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sharon Moses.

In Fall 2012, I was contacted by a county sheriff's department in South Carolina and their Coroner as well as by the family members of a missing person, to request my assistance as a forensic archaeologist in a body recovery. A 54 year old male had been missing for nearly two years until a timber worker stumbled upon a human bone in the course of marking trees for harvest. What followed was a body recovery wherein I witnessed growing tensions between family members towards law enforcement...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kimberlee Moran.

In 2004 the first symposium dedicated to forensic archaeology was organized at the Society for American Archaeology’s annual meeting. At that time, forensic archaeology was struggling to be defined within the archaeological community and was mostly non-existent to forensic practitioners in the USA. The events of 9/11, several domestic high profile mass casualty events, missing persons and some homicide investigations began a gradual momentum towards the recognition of archaeology’s use within...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mike Groen. Nicholas Marquez-Grant. Rob Janaway.

Forensic archaeology is mostly defined as the use of archaeological methods and principles within a legal context. However, such a definition only covers one aspect of forensic archaeology and misses the full potential this discipline has to offer. This paper will focus on the perception of forensic archaeology as practiced in different countries, intergovernmental organisations or NGO’s. It will show that the practice of forensic archaeology differs worldwide as a result of diverse historical,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ann Marie Mires. Claire Gold.

Forensic archaeology can be a useful tool when searching for "unfound" missing persons. Forensic Archaeology Recovery (FAR, non-profit) has worked on a number of missing persons cases in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Three case studies are presented that highlight FAR’s involvement and assistance in generating new knowledge. The first case study is the search for Maura Murray, a University of Massachusetts student who went missing in 2004. The second case is Melanie Melanson, a fourteen year...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexis Gray. Craig Goralski.

Fueled by the media and uniformed academic advisors, students are flooding into the field of forensics, often with unrealistic expectations of success and future employment. Although careers in forensic anthropology and archaeology are difficult to attain, today’s practitioners have the responsibility to prepare and train the field’s future members. This paper discusses the 2014 field season of the Unidentified Persons Project, a twenty-three student forensic archaeology field school that took...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Craig Goralski. Alexis Gray.

In 2014, the Unidentified Persons Project transitioned from being a small scale volunteer-based project to a twenty-three student forensic archaeology field school, allowing for the exhumation and DNA sampling of a much larger number of individuals than had been previously possible. This paper will summarize the opportunities and challenges associated with this transition from the perspectives of multiple stakeholders, and will discuss the evolution of the project’s research questions and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Briggs Buchanan. Mark Collard. Michael O'Brien.

Building on several previous studies we investigate the factors that influence technological richness in nonindustrial farming groups. A number of studies have shown that the factors that influence technological richness and complexity in hunter-gatherer groups differ from the factors that influence farming populations. Specifically, environmental risk is the primary driver in hunter-gatherer technological richness and complexity, whereas population size seems to be the main driver for farmers....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charles Perreault.

Assessments of the complexity of lithic technologies coming from different time periods, regions, or hominid species are recurrent features of the literature on Paleolithic archaeology. Yet the notion of lithic complexity is often defined intuitively and qualitatively, which can easily lead to circular arguments and makes difficult the comparison of assemblages across different regions and time periods. Here we propose, in the spirit of Oswalt’s techno-units, that the complexity of lithic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Scholnick. Matthew Looper. Jessica Munson. Yuriy Polyukhovych. Martha Macri.

This study uses Maya hieroglyphic inscriptions to trace the evolution of alternative writing conventions during the Classic period (ca. 250-900 CE). The third person ergative pronoun u- is represented by up to a dozen different graphemes in Classic Maya writing. These glyphs are also the most common set of signs found in the corpus of hieroglyphic inscriptions, regardless of media. The variation and frequency of these signs provide data to model cultural forces that shaped this writing system....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Lake. Eugenio Bortolini. Enrico Crema.

For various reasons many archaeologists are interested in identifying what kinds of social learning operated in past societies. One approach to this problem that has proved increasingly popular since it was pioneered by Neiman in the 1990s is use of the Wright-Fisher population genetics model of reproduction as a null model for human cultural transmission. The basic idea is that a mismatch between the amount of cultural diversity predicted by the neutral allele theory and that actually observed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anne Kandler.

The archaeological record provides information about frequencies of different cultural artefacts in potentially time-averaged samples. The temporal frequency changes of these artefacts reflect the dynamic of the underlying evolutionary processes but the question remains whether inferences about the nature of those processes, especially about the nature of cultural transmission processes, can be made on the base of observed frequency patterns. Here we develop a non-equilibrium framework which...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carl Lipo. Mark Madsen.

At scales where individual copying events are not measurable but the regional archaeological record is rich enough to support models more detailed than phylogenies, seriation can play a unique role as a diachronic measurement tool for linking cultural transmission models to data composed of assemblages of artifact class frequencies. As a first step towards fitting cultural transmission models to regional-scale transmission scenarios, we develop a iterative deterministic seriation algorithm. We...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Popp. Jarman Jarman. Hilary Close. Thomas Larsen. Terry Hunt.

Archaeology and isotopic studies have demonstrated several examples of initial colonists of Pacific Islands subsisting mainly on terrestrial diets, with exotic domesticates preferred over local seafood. Seemingly a poor adaptation to remote island environments, this appears confusing from a behavioural ecology perspective. From a culture evolutionary viewpoint, however, this could demonstrate how intergenerational transmission of human behaviour may preserve dietary traditions in long-distance...

DOCUMENT Citation Only R. Alexander Bentley. William Brock. Michael O'Brien.

Under the conventional view of evolution, species over time come to exhibit those characteristics that best enable them to survive and reproduce in their preexisting environments. Niche construction provides a second evolutionary route to establishing the adaptive fit, or match, between organism and environment, viewing such matches as dynamical products of a two-way process involving organisms both responding to problems posed by environments as well as setting themselves new problems by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Richerson.

Models of cultural evolution aim at a process level understanding of cultural change and gene-culture coevolution. The micro level foundations of these models can be tested in the lab and field on living populations and, in favorable circumstances, with fine-grained archaeological data. Macro scale problems can only be studied by fitting models to historical and archaeological data that can resolve patterns on time scales of a century or more. Progress in two areas in particular are contributing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Luke Premo.

Although anthropologists have long recognized the importance of mobility to hunter-gatherer subsistence strategies, it remains unclear how mobility affects cultural diversity in subdivided populations. A better understanding of how mobility affects both total diversity and regional differentiation in selectively neutral cultural traits may provide us with an additional line of evidence for explaining the appearance of archaeological indicators of modern human behavior. Here, I introduce a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Rieth. Ethan Cochrane.

Agricultural innovation fuelled the development of Oceanic societies. Techniques such as pond-fields and lithic mulching increased yields and made marginal landscapes habitable. Unfortunately, our knowledge of the evolution of techniques, including ancestral states, homologies, and independent inventions has been largely speculative. Here I present a phylogenetic analysis of ethnohistorically and archaeologically documented agricultural techniques across Oceanic societies. The analysis combines...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Shennan.

The EUROEVOL project has recently created reconstructions of changing regional population densities based on summed radiocarbon probability distributions for a large area of western and central Europe for the period 8000-4000 BP, covering the later Mesolithic and Neolithic periods. These have revealed a pattern of population booms and busts in many regions following the arrival of farming. The project has also gathered data on the construction dates of enclosures surrounded by ditches, banks and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Krist Vaesen. Wybo Houkes.

Cultural-evolutionary models of scientific and technological change enjoy growing popularity. This family of mathematical and agent-based models purportedly explains how cultural change results from a ‘demographic’ effect: complex traits accumulate in large groups, and disappear in smaller groups. We use agent-based modelling to reveal hidden contingencies in these findings. We show that the demographic effect is sensitive to assumptions regarding social learning mechanisms and skill...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gilbert Tostevin. Luke Premo.

Ethnoarchaeology has shown that culturally learned behavior is structured in its performance in many ways. For archaeologically-visible artifactual behavior, this performance is structured both geographically, in terms of where the artifacts are made and used on the landscape (what Ingold calls "the taskscape"), as well as temporally, in terms of the sequential nature of operational chains which can be distributed among taskscape locations. Yet cultural transmission theory has not yet explored...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adrian Timpson. Katie Manning. Stephen Shennan. Enrico Crema.

Occam’s razor judges the success of any model by its ability to explain the evidence with the greatest simplicity. We present two powerful yet simple models; the first evaluates the transition from hunting and gathering to farming within an evolutionary framework, by considering farming as a phenotypic mutation under positive selection. This allows us to estimate the selection coefficient and map local times of first appearance and fixation. The second evaluates the appearance and eventual...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rahul Oka.

The premise of this session is that "communities are not merely the byproducts of individual households pursuing their own productive strategies nor are households passive reflections of the larger communities of which they are a part." This paper focuses on Waungwana (elite) communitas at the Swahili port of Mtwapa, Kenya between 1600-1750 CE. Data from 10 elite wards is used to examine the effects of competition on both household and community. Analysis shows that the external predatory...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cameron Wesson.

Increased use of remote sensing techniques in archaeology has afforded researchers unparalleled opportunities to examine the spatial dimensions of ancient settlements. At the same time, we have witnessed a dramatic increase in archaeological research directed toward the examination of households. Although both scales of inquiry are capable of producing meaningful archaeological insights, distinct theoretical perspectives have developed out of attempts to reconstruct past social relationships...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Konwest.

Greater La Amontonada, a cluster of Postclassic period sites in the Nejapa region of Oaxaca, Mexico, is an ideal location for investigating the ways in which people would have negotiated their roles as members of households, neighborhoods, and larger communities. Group members enact their relationships through everyday choices, habits, and routines that are materialized through daily action. The practices enacted in one community, the learning and doing, may be materialized differently than...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam King.

Etowah was the locus of a prehistoric community for 550 years. After it’s founding the site was abandoned and re-occupied twice, meaning Etowah’s communities were created three separate times. Periods of abandonment create points in the life of a community where it is possible to question and modify local tradition. Re-establishment after abandonment can lead to novel ways of casting identity, social relations, and history. Data collected at Etowah and the wider region reveal this process and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gregson Schachner.

Investigations of households and communities have long been strengths of archaeological research in the American Southwest. As the spatial breadth and temporal resolution of these studies has improved, the archaeological record has raised key challenges to our preconceptions of the scale, stability, and structure of Ancestral Pueblo communities and households. Newer models must reconcile evidence for the frequent movement of individuals and households with contrasting data attesting to long-term...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anne Underhill.

Previous studies about the production, distribution, and consumption of craft goods in complex societies emphasize social relations at the household, site, and regional scales. An often neglected component is the nature of economic organization within different neighborhoods of large settlements. This paper argues that we should attempt to understand neighborhoods as meaningful communities for inhabitants of urban centers. These smaller communities can have a major impact on the nature of social...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matt Peeples.

Archaeologists typically use the term "identity" to refer to the ways in which individuals define membership in larger social groups through direct interaction or the perception of similarities and differences with others. Such social groups can be defined at a variety of scales (e.g., family unit/household, community, ethnic group/culture, etc.) and most archaeological studies tend to focus at only one particular scale. Recent archaeological research across a broad range of social and political...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lydia Wilson Marshall.

In 19th-century coastal Kenya, runaway slaves were known as watoro. This paper uses an expanding analytical framework to investigate watoro identity and interaction at three scales. First, I use artifact concentrations and domestic spatial dynamics to illustrate the daily lifeways and material preferences of individual households in two watoro villages, Koromio and Makoroboi. I then compare multiple households within each watoro community in order to investigate how these households interacted...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Kurnick.

From the Late Preclassic to the Late Classic period (400 BCE to 900 CE), the Mopan Valley of Belize was a complex political landscape and an arena of intense political competition. During this time, the Valley witnessed the sequential rise of three, closely-spaced, major centers – centers likely in direct competition with one another – as well as the establishment and abandonment of minor centers and settlement clusters. The Mopan Valley Archaeology Project recently completed excavations and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patrick Ryan Williams.

Households and community structures in ancient Peru were key to developing irrigation systems and reproducing a social order. Tensions between communities and within them are often written on the landscape in the form of water distribution structures and community placement. Household level strategies may also be evident in the material structure of the house and its belongings. I undertake a cross-temporal and cross-cultural study of household and community level interfaces around...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa Catto. Virginia Butler.

Websites have become a relatively common way to share findings from archaeological research with the public. They are easily adaptable, can reach a wide audience (e.g. location, age, education levels), and can supplement other outreach programs. What makes a "good" one? Answering this requires that one has established goals; and that one has developed ways to assess whether the goals have been met. In our background research, explicit goal-setting and assessment of archaeological-based...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristine Bovy. Michael Etnier.

Birds are often relatively scarce in Northwest Coast shell middens in comparison to fish, mammal and shellfish. However, large numbers of bird bones have been recovered from Tse-whit-zen. In fact, bird bones are both more numerous and more identifiable than mammal bones at the site. In the largest house structure, 47% of the bird bones greater than ¼" in size were identified to taxon (79% of those were identified to element). In contrast, the mammal identifiability rate ranged from 7% to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Phillips. Frances Charles.

More than 900 incised and painted pebbles were recovered from the Tse-whit-zen Site in Port Angeles WA, yet, few have been reported elsewhere in the Pacific Northwest region. Similar stones from two sites on the Canadian side of the Strait of Juan de Fuca were reported by an art historian, but no spatial or temporal data was provided. Anecdotal accounts by archaeologists indicate that some incised stones have been found elsewhere in the Salish Sea, but have not yet been reported in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Reno Nims. Virginia Butler.

Though the study of human-prey animal relationships in the Pacific Northwest has focused largely on salmonid species (family Salmonidae) and their hypothetical connections to ancient increases in social complexity, a growing body of research demonstrates that many more fishes than have been previously recognized played key roles in the diets and social systems of peoples past and present. The Tse-whit-zen fauna, with over 80,000 fish bone specimens identified by ongoing zooarchaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Virginia Butler. Kristine Bovy. Sarah Campbell. Michael Etnier. Sarah Sterling.

On the northern Pacific Coast of North America, animals play an extremely important role in conceptual models related to hunter-gatherer evolution and social dynamics of household production and resource control. Our ability to rigorously apply faunal remains to these models is limited by substantial data requirements including well-documented contexts, high-resolution chronology, control over complex site formation processes and taphonomy, as well as large sample sizes. Unique circumstances...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Sterling. Ian Hutchinson. Jennie Shaw.

The use of high precision dates provides a chronological framework for reconstructing environmental conditions at the Tse-whit-zen site (45CA523) in Washington state. The geochronology of the site in is derived from high-precision radiocarbon dates taken from finely excavated deposits, with ages spanning the time period from ca. 2000 BP to contact. We have added 36 high precision AMS dates from short lived organic material, recovered from intact contexts, to the 52 original dates reported in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patrick Rennaker. Virginia Butler.

In 2010, the Salish Sea stock of Pacific cod (Gadus macrocephalus) was listed as a species of concern, which resulted from declining commercial and recreational catches that have not increased despite harvest reductions. Fishery managers typically use historical data from the past 40 to 50 years to create baselines to manage reduced fisheries; archaeological data can extend these baselines much further back in time. The Tse-whit-zen village site, located on the southern shore of the Strait of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Campbell. William Damitio. Ryan Desrosiers.

In faunal analysis, rare taxa can potentially provide valuable biogeographic or socioeconomic information, but are inherently difficult to interpret and to integrate with quantitative measures. Working with extremely large assemblages highlights these issues. Among the half million specimens of shell identified from the Tse-Whitzen village site are more than 20 taxa represented by less than 30 specimens. There is no single explanation for the presence of taxa in very low numbers, and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Larsen.

Archaeologists have given little direct attention to the taphonomic effects of cooking methods for marine invertebrates, particularly the effect on shell mineralogy. Various methods of heating and steaming shellfish directly in the shell are recorded as traditional for Northwest Coast peoples and the shell samples at the Tse-Whit-Zen Village site in Port Angeles, Washington State, contain many specimens that visually appear to be thermally altered. This type of heat exposure has been shown...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristina Dick. Virgina Butler. Sarah Sterling.

Digital databases promote consistency and data quality, facilitate analysis of patterning at multiple temporal and spatial scales and promote accessibility to a wide range of potential users. The value of digital databases is especially clear with large complex projects that involve collaborators working in separate research settings with different collections, but where data integration is essential to meeting project goals, such as with the Tse-whit-zen project. This presentation reviews...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Abigail Holeman.

In societies across the ancient world, incipient leadership and centralization were founded on connections to the cosmological through ancestors, origins, and other ritual practices. At Paquimé in northern Chihuahua, Mexico these ritual practices were expressed through the language of color symbolism. Color/directional symbolism is a cosmological principle that acts as a deep structure for societies in the Puebloan U.S. Southwest and Mesoamerica. Red, black, yellow, white, and blue/green...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alyce De Carteret.

As anthropological and archaeological scholarship attests, household ritual has a potent role in forging and maintaining sociopolitical relationships both within the household as well as with the communities, cities, and states of which it forms a part. Archaeological research in the Classic Maya area has revealed evidence of feasts, ancestor veneration, dedication and termination caches, and other ritual practices taking part within the limits of the house. The most substantial remnant of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Callaghan. Brigitte Kovacevich.

In this paper we will discuss how ritual activities in both emergent elite and commoner Maya households contributed to the development of social complexity and hierarchy during the Preclassic period at the site of Holtun, Guatemala. Our working hypothesis at the site is that while certain households successfully manipulated traditional ritual practices and symbols related to political and religious authority, all households would have contributed to the cultural milieu in which the dominant...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katelyn Bishop. Samantha Fladd.

Chaco Canyon is thought to have been a regional center during the Pueblo II period. Its identity as such makes it a particularly interesting locale at which to compare the relationship between public community-based and more exclusive household-based rituals. In this paper, the nature of articulated animal remains and their deposition are examined in order to elucidate social relationships at both the community and household scale, particularly at the largest and most well-studied site, Pueblo...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica MacLellan.

Founded around 1000 B.C., the Maya site of Ceibal has yielded important insights into the development of public rituals and spaces in Preclassic Mesoamerica. Recent excavations at the Karinel Group, located just outside the ceremonial core of Ceibal, have complemented this knowledge with data from domestic contexts. By making detailed comparisons of public and household ritual practices, we seek to understand the social processes through which the community of Ceibal changed over time. Some...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Ryan.

Architectural construction is the process by which material and non-material elements and overall spatial setting are made fixed. Consideration of the ways in which physical space-defining elements function can provide insights to the ways in which space was used and understood by the occupants or builders. This study illuminates how ancestral Pueblo kiva construction rituals were integrated within Pueblo worldview concepts in the northern Southwest during the Pueblo II (A.D 1050-1150) and...