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

DOCUMENT Citation Only Grace Erny. Gerardo Gutierrez. Alyssa Friedman. Melanie Godsey. Machal Gradoz.

This paper addresses how Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are used as a platform to produce accurate topographic maps with a considerable reduction in time and costs associated with fieldwork when compared with a total station. For this study, data was collected in the controlled environment of a mapping course to compare the procedures and time required to train archaeology students in the operation of a total station versus the operation of a small UAV equipped with digital cameras. An...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marco Pacheco Gonzalez. Gerardo Gutierrez. Felipe Ramirez-Sánchez.

El desarrollo de nuevas tecnologías (UAVs) han permitido explorar, generar y diversificar nuevos puntos de vista aéreos de sitios arqueológicos y como resultado generar una conciencia social hacia la conservación, investigación y preservación del patrimonio cultural de México. En esta ponencia se presentarán los casos de Cuicuilco y El Salto, México, como ejemplos de modelación fotogramétrica de sitios arqueológicos y monumentos coloniales con UAVs. SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Mark. Evelyn Billo.

A radio-controlled DJI Phantom quadcopter with GoPro or built-in camera can help document archaeological features best seen from the air, such as geoglyphs, rock alignments, and some rock art panels. The camera can be set for interval photography, or monitored and triggered in real-time. The fisheye image distortion can be reasonably corrected with software such as Photoshop or DxO. This portable and relatively inexpensive method of flying a pattern and hovering directly above a site (now...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Searcy.

There has been a significant increase in the use of UAVs throughout the world to aid in archaeological investigations. Unfortunately the current U.S. Federal Aviation Administration has enforced strict policies that prohibit most institutions and private firms to use these aerial vehicles. As a result archaeologists in the United States are falling behind in implementing an important tool in archaeological reconnaissance. This paper outlines the progress made thus far by the FAA to reform these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Willis. Eleanor Harrison-Buck. Chester Walker.

Saturday Creek is a sizeable Maya site center with an elite residence, three large pyramids, and two ballcourts. While much of the site core is in bush, most of the surrounding area has been cleared for agriculture. While the clearing makes for good visibility, the hinterland settlement has been subject to extensive bulldozing, repeated plowing, and removal of stone over the years, obscuring the smaller mounds and making it difficult to discern them on the ground. In less than two days, we flew...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Austin Hill. Andrew Petersen.

As part of the "Visualizing Qatars Past" project, drones are being used at the Islamic Period site of Ruwayda, on the north coast of Qatar, to document extant structures and investigate buried features. A Microdrone equipped with visible light, near infrared, and thermal sensors was used to document the fort and surrounding areas. By combining thermal imaging of the site with photogrammetric mapping, it was possible to identify architecture in and around the site that is difficult or impossible...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carla Hernandez Garavito.

The Peruvian central coast is widely known in the archaeological literature as the locus of small polities that co-existed in environments of limited resources through cooperation and competition. However, most archaeological research has been greatly influenced by ethnohistoric accounts which populated the Late Intermediate Period in the Andes with a number of warring societies, and not on direct archaeological evidence. Recent research points towards a more complex scenario, in which the Inka...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Margaret Brown Vega. Nathan Craig.

The formation of economically specialized communities in the coastal valleys of Peru by the late Archaic (3000 BC) has long been accepted. Specialized groups exchanged products with each other, negotiating both local and more far-flung exchange networks by the Initial Period (ca. 1800-900 BC). By the end of the Early Horizon (ca. 300 BC) communities in coastal and inland valley areas built numerous fortifications, suggesting conflict or preparations for defense that must have changed interaction...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Milosz Giersz. Patrycja Przadka Giersz. Wieslaw Wieckowski.

Wari (600-1050 AD) was the first pre-Hispanic political organization that succeeded in the consolidation of vast lands in the central Andes into one multi-ethnic, cultural, and linguistic realm, creating the conditions of a mini world system. The products and networks of exchange connected heterogeneous populations from distinct parts of the empire, which political complexity was reflected in a variety of styles, due to the co-existence of local traditions, with production that imitated foreign...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Palacios Linares.

Investigaciones en el sitio arqueológico La Explanada de Unión-Ñaña, ubicado a 772 msnm, en las laderas del cerro La Parra en Ñaña, margen norte del valle del Rímac. Permitieron vislumbrar inadvertidas modalidades de culto, en el extenso macizo que configura el cerro La Parra, santuario de montaña del Período Inicial (1,600 a.C.) en el valle medio del Rímac. Las excavaciones, revelaron rituales propiciatorios, que evocan los rituales en uso, en la vecina población altoandina de San Antonio de...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Allen Rutherford.

This paper will examine the ceramic forms from excavated contexts at Cerro Colorado de Huacho, Huaura Valley, Peru in order to address conflict, cooperation, and exchange on the central coast of Peru in the Late Intermediate Period (LIP) (AD 1000-1450). Though dominated by Chancay black-on-white and Lauri impressed ceramic styles, the range of diversity in forms from Cerro Colorado is sizable. The diversity of these forms from will be compared and contrasted to ceramics from contemporaneous...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Eeckhout.

During the 2014 field campaign, the Ychsma Project (Université Libre de Bruxelles) has uncovered a small building decorated with murals in the Second Precinct of the site of Pachacamac, Central Coast of Peru. The floors of the building were covered with hundreds of various offerings, including many stones. These stones have shapes, colors and overall look very different from those present in the local geology. The study of the archaeological context and origin of these stones offers a new and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rafael Vega-Centeno.

The Late Intermediate Period (LIP) is usually considered as the time of ethnic diversity in the Central Andes and representations of ethnic boundaries in maps illustrate this scenario. However, these representations offer a synchronic perspective of ethnic configuration as a consequence of their reliance on XVI Century sources. Nevertheless, Andean chronologies demonstrate that the LIP covers more than 500 years (from AD. 900 to 1450) in which several dynamic phenomena including expansion,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kasia Szremski.

This paper builds off of recent calls to re-evaluate Murra’s model of verticality and explores the utility of entanglement theory as an alternative way to understanding the different relationships that developed between groups living on the western slopes of the Peruvian Andes during the Late Intermediate Period (1100-1470 CE). Entanglement theory is increasingly being used in Old World archaeology to examine the complex types of interdependencies that develop between groups when exotic goods...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aldo Noriega.

La presente investigación brinda los primeros resultados de los trabajos exploratorios de excavación llevados a cabo en el sitio arqueológico de Tupish, localizado en el valle de Checras, en la sierra norte de la región Lima en Perú. Encontrándose evidencia cronológica relativa de su ocupación cultural que abarcaría de manera discontinua desde el periodo formativo medio hasta la época Inca. Esta convergencia cronológica y foránea mostraría indicios de los intercambios culturales o influencias...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Shanks.

This talk reflects upon the work and career of Ruth Tringham in relation to the human experience of practicing archaeology. SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Ashley.

Twenty-five years ago, an undergraduate in philosophy at UC Berkeley took a course on the archaeology of architecture from Ruth Tringham and then dropped out of school, only to return a few years later to pursue a career in archaeology and digital remediation. In this performance, we will co-experience moments of inspiration, perspiration, risk and reflection on a journey with the best travel companion one could ever have. Prepare to be challenged, made slightly uncomfortable, to laugh, cry and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Henrietta L. Moore.

This paper discusses the relationship between conceptual development and material experimentation in feminist research. It uses the work of Ruth Tringham as a fulcrum for wider discussions on how we can and should drive new forms of experimentation as we enter the fourth wave of feminism SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steve Mills.

Walking with Ruth Tringham has always been a social and intellectual adventure. I have been fortunate to have the opportunity to muse on past ways of life while walking with Ruth at a range of different heritage sites in the U.S., Bulgaria and Turkey. Important themes we engaged with during these walks included: exploring different ways to approach contemporary senses of place, thinking about how senses of place may have been significant to prehistoric people, and how to (re)mediate these ideas...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Doug Bailey.

In the summer of 1995, a team of British, Bulgarian and American archaeologists, students, helpers and local villagers made preliminary CENSORED at the late Neolithic settlement tell at CENSORED. After a CENSORED field season, during which CENSORED, CENSORED, and CENSORED were regularly engaged in CENSORED by CENSORED, several of the team were CENSORED. In the months that followed, CENSORED CENSORED CENSORED CENSORED and CENSORED CENSORED. National press coverage in CENSORED as well as a formal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angela Piccini.

Ruth Tringham belongs to a small group of archaeologists who engage seriously with the media practices through which archaeology disciplines itself. She has tirelessly worked to place audio-visual media – from film to networked media – at the heart of how we think about and do archaeology. In a 2009 paper about the UC Berkeley Archaeological Film Database, Tringham sought to move debate beyond reductive critiques of archaeological accuracy to explore how it is that we watch films about the past,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Biehl.

People create themselves through the houses they build. Ruth Tringham’s archaeological as well as anthropological inquiry has identified houses as active material culture entangled with both material and immaterial social values and rules. Architecture is the material expression of culture, both enabling and constraining the relationship between people and their actions. In archaeology, we receive the final phase of the use-life of a house, yet abundant evidence exists for its making and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Colleen Morgan.

In an interview with Michael Shanks and Christopher Witmore, Ruth Tringham describes her experiments with digital remediations of the past as "expressing and sharing the complex web of relationships and ambiguities that is an essential dimension of the feminist practice of archaeology" (Rathje et. al 2013). As such, Tringham’s practice of digital making was an explicitly political expression of archaeological investigation, not as explanation, but as an interpretive process. She shared the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara Voytek.

FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE: RUTH TRINGHAM AND THE EARLY DAYS OF MICROWEAR ANALYSIS It was the early 1970’s and a time when the Cold War directed the geopolitical scene worldwide. It was also a time when a young British archaeologist brought to the USA a new approach to the study of material culture. Professor Ruth Tringham landed at Harvard in 1971 together with the technique of microscopic analysis of traces of use on chipped stone tools, a technique which she had studied in the USSR. There...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Margaret Conkey.

Although we had previously been colleagues at different institutions, it was when we were both on the faculty at Berkeley (starting in 1987) that we elaborated our mutual "you go first" relationship in our research and teaching. I had once corralled Ruth into participating in a Women in Anthropology kind of seminar while still at Binghamton (1977), but it was with her now famous "kicking and screaming" foray to the Wedge for the conference that became the volume, Engendering Archaeology, that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lori Hager.

Archaeologists encounter the people of the past as skeletons with some frequency, yet attempts to reconstruct the life histories of the dead have often been ordinary and predictable. As a scientist and a storyteller, Ruth Tringham's consideration of the dead, inspired by empiricism and imagination in equal measure, imparts multiple truths through multiple voices in novel ways, with a particular focus on visualization. The people of one house at the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük, for example, are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mirjana Stevanovic.

My contribution to this session will be a personal account of a long-term professional relationship with Ruth as a student and colleague. Ruth and I began the collaboration in the Former Yugoslavia, a country that ceased to exist, and continued with projects in Israel, Bulgaria, and Turkey. Together we were learning the local archaeological practices and were developing our own. Each of us brought something to this process of learning: she - her anthropological interpretation of the material...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Salinas Acero.

The Sabana de Bogotá is one of the most extensively studied regions of preceramic archaeology in Colombia. Many of these projects were carried out by or in conjunction with Dr. Gonzalo Correal (UNAL) and contributed a wealth of information on the period including paleoenvironmental data, tool use, and faunal data. However, few botanical remains have been recovered which resulted from the sieving of a few small samples or were found in-situ. Recent excavations conducted at rockshelters and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Corcione.

The doctoral research I drive seeks to understand whether there is relationship between nutrition and the appearance of porosity in the skull within the Late Muisca society Tibanica located in Soacha Colombia. From the macroscopic, histological and radiological analysis is to perform a differential diagnosis to understand the true involvement anemic trait. According to the etiology presented for porous phenomena, its causes is the high consumption of maize, which inhibits the absorption of iron,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marcela Bernal.

While the subject of the contact can be approached from different perspectives (political, economic, social, cultural, religious), in this study the reflection will have to do with power and social control over the daily customs and practices of each group involved in a contact society (which includes categories such as physical space management, nutritional practices and identification of material goods to each of the groups), settle in el Cabo de la Vela to continue with the enterprise for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jorge Garcia. Agusto Oyuela-Caycedo. Alexis Rojas.

Neocyclotus snails produce opercula, a calcified plate attached to the foot of the gastropod serving as a protection mechanism from predators, and dehydration. Opercula are rarely found in the archaeological record, and have only been recovered from few archaeological contexts. Excavations at the Archaic site of San Jacinto, Colombia have facilitated the unprecedented recovery of 3,542 opercula a presence that has not been recorded previously in the neotropics. These calcified plates form...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hernando Giraldo Tenorio.

The capacity of the leaders in the Intermediate Area of the Americas to amass power before 1000 AD has been usually explained as a result of the manipulation of a religious ideology or through the creation of social debts in the context of feasting. My dissertation research in the Malagana site, in southwestern Colombia, has provided evidence indicating that these were not the only factors involved in the development of social inequalities in the region. I discuss the importance of prestige...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melanie Miller. Sabrina Agarwal. Carl Langebaek.

Highly stratified societies are characterized by differentiation between groups along various socially defined axes. The Tibanica community (950-1350 AD), part of the Muisca culture from the Sabana de Bogotá, Colombia, is an ideal population to study how social roles and identities are intertwined with human diet and skeletal health. Here we present stable isotope data to investigate the complexity of human diets across the life course by comparing childhood diets to adulthood diets for the same...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lucero Aristizabal Losada.

El presente estudio fue llevado a cabo combinando información arqueológica, bioantropológica y análisis químico de hueso, específicamente de isótopos estables en una muestra muisca del sur de la sabana de Bogotá. Como objetivo principal se buscó la reconstrucción de la dieta antigua de la sociedad muisca tardía asentada en Tibanica y su relación con aspectos sociales. Específicamente, la investigación estuvo orientada a comparar la relación isotópica de una muestra de 200 individuos con el fin...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeanne Lopiparo.

Craft production in the Classic Maya world was often carried out within multi-household groups, whose shared practices were passed on from generation to generation and whose social identities were strongly tied to the products they created. Investigations of a residential zone at Chinikihá, a Classic Maya center in the Palenque region, recovered a quantity of obsidian artifacts and evidence for production that is unusual not just at the site, but across the region. Fine-grained excavations have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steven Brandt.

This paper builds upon previous research among craftspeople of Southwestern Ethiopia who still procure obsidian on a regular basis to manufacture scrapers for the production of leather products. Previous ethnoarchaeological studies of these male and female hide workers of multiple ethnicities have provided a wealth of information on the role of lithics in past and present societies, and have been especially important in helping to debunk the idea that men were largely, if not exclusively...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kyle Freund. Robert Tykot. Andrea Vianello.

This study focuses on the long-term exploitation of obsidian in prehistoric Sicily and the factors that influenced the procurement and consumption of these raw materials from the sixth to second millennia B.C. A detailed study of 6,287 prehistoric artifacts from 43 sites shows that the vast majority of obsidian found in Sicily comes from a single Lipari subsource, with smaller quantities of Pantelleria obsidian found in the west. Despite differences in the color and physical properties of these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Holmberg.

Prominent, recent explorations of the role of sensory data in archaeology detail the linkages of bodily senses, material objects, and remembering or forgetting to invoke the ‘vast and secret museum of historical and sensory absence’ in analyses. In this paper, I examine the residues and associations of chthonic power and senses that can cling in social memory to volcanic materials. This serves as a query for why an entirely useful material was not in use in the Chiriqui culture area that spans...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robin Torrence.

Brilliant, shiny, translucent, black. On the surface, everything made from obsidian is inherently attractive. So why are some obsidian artifacts more highly valued than others? Using the example of obsidian use in West New Britain, Papua New Guinea, properties that go beyond physical attributes are explored as potential factors in the creation of valuables: e.g., exoticism; ownership of resources; social links; symbolism; performance; staged production; specialist makers. SAA 2015 abstracts...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carolyn Dillian.

Northern California contains multiple, geochemically distinct, high-quality obsidian sources that were quarried in prehistory. However, not all were exploited equally. Instead, selection patterns suggest that some obsidian sources were reserved for manufacture of specific types of objects, while others could be used for more routine tools. The geologic and cultural context of the obsidian source may offer explanations for why differential quarrying and use occurred. Glass Mountain in Siskiyou...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ellery Frahm.

A central issue in palaeoanthropological research is understanding the cognitive and behavioral variability of Lower and Middle Palaeolithic hominins, including differences with respect to the modern humans who replaced them. Some scholars argue that these hominins had fundamentally different cognition and behavior than Homo sapiens, whereas others hold that their capabilities are essentially indistinguishable from those of modern humans. In obsidian-rich landscapes, artifact sourcing and lithic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Theodora Moutsiou.

Recent research has demonstrated the extensive use of obsidian throughout the Palaeolithic in all the areas where obsidian sources were available at the time. Further analysis revealed that obsidian covered a wide range of distances on the Palaeolithic landscape but in the majority of cases its movement was linked to long distances, i.e. ≥100 km. This surprising conclusion cannot be satisfactorily explained on purely functional terms. Obsidian’s physical properties could have been the primary...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Healey. Stuart Campbell.

Obsidian is a visually attractive material. Artefacts made of obsidian are regularly documented in early state contexts in the Near East (for example Atij, Gudeda, Mari, Ras Shamra, Atchana, Mozan) and its use for vase manufacture is well known at sites such as Acem, Kultepe, Atchana, Warka, Ur and so on. It is also used to make beads and other personal items (Ur, Assur and elsewhere). Less well known though, are the origins of the obsidian from which these objects are made. In our paper,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marisa Lazzari. Marina Sprovieri.

The south-central Andes have a very rich record of long-distance circulation of things, animals, and people, the origins of which can be traced to the earliest hunting-gathering societies that occupied the territory ca 9600BP. We summarize the available information on obsidian circulation resulting from nearly three decades of research in the area, with a particular focus on the Calchaquí valleys area of north western Argentina (NWA) from early sedentary settlements until the Inca...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rennie Horneman. Carl Lipo. Terry Hunt. Vincent Bonhomme.

Of the few resources available to prehistoric people of Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile), obsidian was plentiful. Yet out of the countless surviving shaped obsidian artifacts that are found on the island, virtually all of them are of the same general class, the mata’a. Mata’a are flaked obsidian stemmed tools formed from a hard-hammer primary flake. As relatively simple stemmed obsidian tools with wide blades, their form is similar to artifacts known as mata’a found on other Polynesian islands...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lucas Martindale Johnson.

To the uninitiated, Maya "eccentrics" are vague archaeological labels applied to flaked obsidian objects placed in ritual caches during the Classic Period (AD 250-800). Although an unclear label of humanoid, deity, animal-like, or other shaped objects, lithics analysts have tried to define eccentrics based on technological attributes enabling comparisons between contexts, sites, and regions. Those studies that reconstruct a complex chaîne opératoire demonstrate many eccentrics had a dynamic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pip Rath.

Dazzling, large, highly retouched obsidian objects comprised part of the material world of prehistoric people from West New Britain, Papua New Guinea from sometime between ca 6300- to 3300 years ago BP. Beyond their role as valuables, the seemingly mundane practices of choosing and acquiring raw material together with the application of a sequence of actions on the material and knowledge used in making them were fundamental for creating and structuring social relations. A case study,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mara Mulrooney. Andrew McAlister. Christopher M. Stevenson. Alexander E. Morrison.

On Rapa Nui (Easter Island), four geological sources of rhyolitic obsidian were utilized to manufacture obsidian artifacts, including tanged implements known as mata‘a. In this study, a total of 332 mata‘a from the collections of Bishop Museum were analyzed using portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF). Two analytical methods, Discriminant Function Analysis and Support Vector Machines Classification, were used to assign geographical provenance to these artifacts, which appear to be manufactured using...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John OShea. Ashley Lemke. Elizabeth Sonnenburg.

Some of the most pivotal questions in human prehistory hinge on archaeological sites that are now under water. While the discovery of such sites presents technological challenges, they offer unique potentials for investigating time periods, cultures, and adaptations that are only poorly known on land. Unfortunately, underwater research rarely produces the systematic coverage of space and material culture that is needed to conduct anthropologically relevant research. The investigation of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicolena (Niki) Virga. Norman Easton. Charles Moore. Andrew Mason. Rob Field.

Twenty-one years ago we completed our last of four field seasons excavating inter-tidal and sub-tidal sediments in Montague Harbour, Galiano Island, British Columbia. While a permit report describing basic results and several analytical publications ensued, a final summary concluding publication remained to be completed. Here we present the essential elements of this forthcoming publication, which will discuss methodology, provide a comprehensive database on recovered artifacts and ecofacts,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only C. Hemmings. J. M. Adovasio.

Underwater exploration and excavation of target loci along the inundated Paleo-Suwannee River Channel has recently focused on the Brownstone site. The western edge of the paleo-channel in the study area contains several grades of cryptocrystalline chert and dolomite. Materials recovered and attempts to access underlying stratified deposits are detailed. Further, correlation of the inundated Pleistocene landscape and known riverine features with timing of human occupation and utilization of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessi Halligan. Michael Waters. Morgan Smith.

Hundreds of Paleoindian artifacts have been found in northern Florida, mostly by avocational archaeologists and collectors. Many archaeologists have noted the correlation between Paleoindian artifact locations and known chert outcrops. Further, many of these finds were recovered from Florida streams by SCUBA divers, often in displaced contexts or in areas with no sediment. Extensive research in portions of the Aucilla River have allowed archaeologists to arrive at some understanding of site...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Cook. Ervan Garrison.

Sedentary occupations and monumental architecture first appear during the Middle Archaic (8,000 BP to 5,000 BP) in Florida at sites where marine, estuarine, and riverine resources were exploited, spreading to the coast of Georgia by the Late Archaic, around 4,500 BP. However, the coastline did not reach its modern position until around 5,000 BP, leaving many sites submerged. Fieldwork was initiated in June of 2014 in order to relocate, excavate, and interpret Middle Archaic sites submerged in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leah Colombo.

Many attempts have been made to consistently locate submerged and inundated prehistoric archaeological sites offshore the state of Florida. In many instances these attempts have not been successful in some respects but beneficial in others. This paper will identify the issues of studying such sites and the results of past and recent studies. However, the main topic of the paper will focus on a recent study exercised within the Florida Bay region of Everglades National Park. Working in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kerry Lynch.

A portion of Salem Harbor in Massachusetts was investigated during a cultural resource management project in 2009/2010. The underwater reconnaissance included a remote sensing survey using a Klein 3.5 kHz sub-bottom profiler. An acoustic basement was recognized at approximately two meters below the sea bed, and was hypothesized to be an organic layer potentially representative of a buried land surface below marine sediment. Vibratory cores were used to ground truth the potential buried land...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stefan Claesson.

In 2013, two Pleistocene mega-faunal remains, a single mammoth tooth and a partial juvenile mastodon mandible with teeth, from two separate locations, were recovered by a scallop-fisherman in the Merrimack River embayment off the coast of New Hampshire and Massachusetts. These well-preserved finds follow on previous finds by fishermen in the same locale over the last two decades, as well as numerous other offshore finds that have occurred in the Gulf of Maine for more than 50 years. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ben Ford. Mark Durante. Katherine Farnsworth.

This paper presents the results of a preliminary model of submerged prehistoric site potential within the Pennsylvania portion of Lake Erie. The model takes into account both cultural and natural factors that may have influenced the placement and preservation of archaeological sites. Archaeological data from the current Lake Erie littorals of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York were used to model likely site locations based on known bottom features within Lake Erie, such as drowned shorelines and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Evans.

Archaeologists have been conducting prehistoric archaeological research on the world’s continental shelves for the last 40 years, with a general consensus that remote sensing combined with physical sampling is the best method for identifying sites. Following the conclusion of a US federally-funded (BOEM) study in the Northwestern Gulf of Mexico, two promising Paleoindian landscapes have been verified 20 and 30 miles offshore, at depths of between 16 and 32 m BSL. Remote sensing and physical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daryl Fedje. Quentin Mackie. Duncan McLaren.

The sea level history of the Discovery Island archipelago on the Canadian West Coast shows that early post-glacial paleoshorelines are stranded up to 165 m above modern. Under the auspices of the Tula Foundation we are using this history and landscape modeling to guide investigation into the early human history of the area. Survey has focussed on landforms such as raised marine terraces, tombolos and wave cut notches (potential rockshelters). In 2014 we located and tested archaeological sites...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Quentin Mackie. Alison Proctor. Fedje Daryl. Bradley Colin.

The search for early human occupation on drowned continental shelves is hampered by the low archaeological visibility of typical hunter-gatherer sites. Predictive modelling for site locations can produce polygons of potential, but these need to be tested both to evaluate the model and to recover material remains. Sampling of underwater predictive model potential polygons is difficult, expensive and usually low-return. However, some sites, such as stone-wall fish weirs, may be directly visible to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Weinstein. Charles Pearson. Amanda Evans.

From 2010 to 2014, archaeologists from Coastal Environments, Inc., conducted several remote-sensing surveys within Lakes Borgne and Pontchartrain in an effort to locate the remains of drowned prehistoric terrestrial sites that once existed prior to subsidence and shoreline transgression. In this effort, it has been critical to interpret the remote-sensing data within the established geologic and geomorphic contexts of the region. Several submerged and buried high-probability landforms and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only E. James Dixon. Kelly Monteleone.

Four seasons (2010-14) of underwater archaeological survey (NSF OPP -#0703980 and 1108367) on the continental shelf of SE Alaska demonstrates that survey for evidence of human habitation when sea level was lower is feasible. Real time ROV monitoring and video, hydrologic excavation, airlift sampling, and graduated screening can be reliably employed for sea floor sampling following multibeam, side-scan sonar, and sub-bottom profile surveys. Limiting dates for submerged landscape features and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Natalie Munro. Mary Stiner.

Franchthi Cave is a pivotal case in research on the mechanisms of the forager-producer transition in the southern Balkans region. Publications on this site have documented the geological, artifactual and macrobotanical records, but detailed information on the faunas is lacking. This zooarchaeological study focuses on the Final Mesolithic and Initial Neolithic periods and the question of whether livestock were adopted as isolated components by late Mesolithic foragers or the site was colonized by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer French.

A key question for archaeologists studying the late Pleistocene is how human populations responded and adapted to the dramatic, and often rapid, global climatic changes which characterised this glacial period. Using a range of archaeological data attributed to the Upper/Final Magdalenian and Azilian techno-complexes (15 000-10 000 uncal BP), this paper assesses the evidence for changes in settlement patterns and human demography during the Late Pleistocene in South-Western France. Data on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Clive Bonsall. Catriona Pickard. Peter Groom.

Intensive and specialized exploitation of marine resources has traditionally been attributed to the Early Holocene in Europe, from c. 11,500 cal BP (e.g. Clark 1965, 1975; von Brandt 1984) as a response to changing climate, reduction in large mammal biomass, and consequent broadening of the resource base. However, the technical sophistication of fishing gear recovered from Early Holocene archaeological contexts is suggestive of a long history of development. This paper presents a synthesis of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Jochim.

The environmental changes in Europe at the end of the last ice age had profound effects on human populations. One of these changes, the development of numerous lakes in the region north of the Alps, created new habitats and niches that were rapidly exploited, with significant effects on many aspects of behavior. The record of environmental and archaeological changes in Switzerland and southern Germany are examined with an emphasis on subsistence, technology, and land use. SAA 2015 abstracts...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Phillips. Ofer Bar-Yosef.

This paper is concerned with interpreting the terminal Pleistocene foragers of the Nile River basin, dating between ca. 22,000 to 11,000 years BP. From Wadi Halfa at the Second Cataract, downriver to Qena, at least twelve archaeological traditions occupied and/or utilized the Nile River ecosystem, with subsistence strategies organized around the Nile floods, and the migration of migrating birds. Some settlement patterns within the confines of the Valley shifted seasonally, while others...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Philippe Crombé. Erick Robinson.

In a recent paper Robinson et al. (2013) could synchronize major changes in Mesolithic armatures and the development of the Rhine-Meuse-Scheldt Culture with the abrupt cooling event of 9.3 cal BP. It is suggested that this climatic event led to environmental stress which triggered the development of inter-regional social networks, e.g. by expanding long-distance raw material exchange and creating particular socially symbolic artifact types. Yet, the impact of the 9.3 cooling event on the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leore Grosman.

The Natufian culture coincided with the Terminal Pleistocene, a period of climatic unpredictability. In the Southern Levant the Late Natufian phase corresponds to the global Younger Dryas event and directly precedes the abrupt transition to early Neolithic entities at the beginning of the Holocene climatic regime. The unique cultural dynamics of the Natufian, shifts in subsistence strategies and the environmental setting of various sites are the key for understanding the process of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Simon Connor. Shawn Ross. Adela Sobotkova. Ilia Iliev.

The spread of agriculture into Europe from its Near Eastern heartland was an important cultural event, the causes of which have been debated for many decades. DNA analyses are increasingly providing insights into the genetic inheritance of Europe's first farmers, yet the triggers for their initial migration remain elusive. The earliest agricultural sites in Europe appear to be those situated in coastal Greece, while more fertile inland areas, such as the Thracian Plain, were settled centuries to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Lacy.

Oral pathology prevalence can be used to make inferences about the behavioral and environmental factors that contribute to individual and population health. Late Upper Paleolithic Western Eurasian human groups were expanding geographically as well as increasing in density, and the major climatic oscillations that define this period stressed these pioneering humans. Evidence of this strain includes temporal differences in oral pathology prevalence, namely caries, periodontal disease, tooth loss,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ofer Bar-Yosef. James Phillips.

The Levant is geographically limited by the sea in the Mediterranean in the west, deserts in south and east with the only widened extension of wetter condition in the Euphrates and Tigris basins. Abrupt climatic changes allowed for the demographically growth of Terminal Pleistocene foragers in the Levant and led to increasing territoriality. Pressures were increased with the expansion of hunting-gathering groups from the Nile Valley into Sinai and the Negev. The social and economic impacts...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Felix Riede.

The Hamburgian is associated with the initial pioneer human re-colonization of northern Europe during the Late Glacial. Whilst much recent research has focused on the dynamics of initial entry, this paper addresses the end of the Hamburgian, especially in its northernmost range of present-day southern Scandinavia. The difference in cultural signature between the Hamburgian culture’s late Havelte variant and its successor in the region, the Federmessergruppen, is striking and difficult to explain...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Banks.

A common theme among Upper Paleolithic studies is how hunter-gatherer adaptations may be related to environmental variability, with some focusing on how culture-environment relationships during the Paleolithic are intertwined with ecological niche dynamics. The reason being that when faced with the rapid-scale climatic fluctuations and environmental reorganizations characteristic of MIS 3 and 2, Paleolithic populations could have responded in a variety of ways. Ecological niche modeling methods...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stuart Fiedel.

In pond sediments in Ohio, Indiana, and New York, Sporormiella (dung-fungus) spore declines at ca. 14,000 cal BP are followed first by charcoal particle peaks, and then dramatic shifts in tree pollen percentages. This sequence has been interpreted as the outcome of initial human predation on megafauna. New dates push "classic" Clovis back to ca. 13,500 cal BP, but this still leaves a 500-yr gap between the ecological signals and the earliest Paleoindian artifacts. How can this gap be...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Wygal.

Once heavily glaciated during the Late Pleistocene, southern Alaska became ice-free just as the First Americans were entering the Bering Land Bridge. This makes the Susitna River in Southcentral Alaska a perfect laboratory for understanding how and why small-scale foraging societies spread throughout Beringia and ultimately the New World. While first explorers undoubtedly made decisions based on previous experience, initial occupants probably had different cultural expectations of their...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Piotr Wojtal. Jaroslaw Wilczynski.

The Gravettian technocomplex arose about 30,000 years ago and expanded into nearly all of Europe during the next millennia. The most distinctive features of the individual stages of Gravettian cultures are backed bladelets, shouldered points, and zoomorphic and anthropomorphic art objects. Complex early Gravettian sites are found in South Moravia (Czech Republic), dated about 27-25,000 BP. Pavlov I and Dolní Vĕstonice I and II are long-term open-air campsites. Gravettian sites of a later phase...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Krasinski.

The identification of cutmarks has been integral to expanding the understanding of hominin behavior ranging from the origins of meat eating to megafaunal extinctions and the peopling of Australia and the Americas. However, paleoanthropological and archaeological research has demonstrated that while cutmark placement may be indicative of activity, cutmark morphology is more complex and influenced by multiple variables such as raw material, tool shape, and bone density. Further, significant...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelly Graf.

The Siberian Upper Paleolithic is divided into three phases: early, middle and late. Middle Upper Paleolithic (MUP) archaeological assemblages are both lithic and osseous in nature. Most processing tools were made on blade and flake tool blanks, whereas projectile and sewing tools were manufactured from osseous materials and an astonishing array of portable art and personal adornment pieces were also made on ivory and bone. Procurement and use of faunal resources centered on a wide array of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chrissina Burke.

Zooarchaeologists have commonly employed analyses concerning only site formation processes when studying carnivore modification and utilization to North American faunal assemblages. Yet, such processes are rarely discussed beyond descriptions of the presence of tooth marks or overall percentages of elements with modifications. Additionally, limited discussion has occurred with regards to the implications of these data on how humans and carnivores interacted in the past. In this paper, I address...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Teresa Wriston. Gary Haynes.

Hunting-and-gathering in northwestern Zimbabwe was largely replaced by pastoralism and farming between ca. 2,000 and 1,200 years ago. In order to understand whether climate change influenced this transition, we collected environmental and archaeological data during a multi-year research program that included: rockshelter excavation, salvage excavation along eroding stream cuts, and geomorphological and soils analyses of various locales in Hwange National Park. The strontium, carbon, and oxygen...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jarod Hutson.

The transition from the Early Stone Age (ESA) to the Middle Stone Age (MSA) represents an important technological shift in hominin behavioral evolution in southern Africa. Subsistence behaviors during this transition, however, are relatively unknown due to a lack of faunal preservation or insecure associations between lithic and faunal accumulations. Often, these sites originate from riverine, lakeshore, and spring deposits, locations that likely attracted hominin hunters and other carnivores in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Camp.

This presentation is a first attempt to trace the taphonomic trajectory of specimens of Catlow Twine, an important kind of basketry technology. Catlow Twine basketry spans over ~9,000 cal B.P. years in the archaeological record of the Great Basin. The longevity of this artifact class and its appearance throughout the Northern and Western Great Basin allows for a thorough investigation of how it has been used. Catlow Twine is simple close twine technology; one of the oldest techniques in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicole Waguespack.

Archaeologists have a unique relationship with the faunal record of proboscideans. The interpretative histories associated with mammoths and mastodons, particularly in North America, are wholly unlike those of other zooarchaeological species both extinct and extant. Distinctively divisive, consequential, and enduring, the interpretive attention and rhetoric focused on proboscideans has proceeded largely independent of the known inventory of sites and assemblages in Pleistocene North America....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nohemi Sala. Juan Luis Arsuaga.

The study of carnivore activity on bones is crucial to understand the role of the carnivores in the site formation since some carnivores are able to accumulate bones in cave dens. The studies of the Professor Haynes reveal that actualism is a very useful tool for taphonomic studies, as it allows understanding the behavior of the fauna in the past. In Spain there are several Pleistocene sites with evidences of carnivore activity. The Sima de los Huesos (SH) is site is the largest accumulation of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only George Scott. Roman Schomberg.

Starting with a single root trait, C.G. Turner II developed a model for the peopling of the Americas that involved three migratory waves: (1) Amerind; (2) Na-Dene/Northwest Coast; and (3) Eskimo-Aleut. After expanding to 29 variables, he found the same general pattern and contended that all New World populations were derived from Sinodont groups in Northeast Asia. Recently, researchers have challenged the three-wave model on genetic, archaeological, and dental grounds, including the notion...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Geoff Smith.

The recurrent presence of mammoth, elephant and rhinoceros at Middle Palaeolithic sites, together with Neanderthal isotopes signalling meat as a prominent protein source, have been used to argue for a central role of these species in Neanderthal subsistence. Key to this model are the bone heap horizons from La Cotte de St Brelade (CSB, Jersey), previously interpreted as game drive debris resulting from systematic Neanderthal hunting. However, this hypothesis has never been rigorously tested....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Luis Borrero. Fabiana María Martin. Francisco J. Prevosti.

A regional study of Late Pleistocene bone assemblages is used for the study of Patagonian extinct carnivore niches. The excavation of dens, distributional patterns, habitat and prey selection and the study of living analogs are some of the main research lines. This study offers information about the conditions of the environment immediately before the arrival of humans, and indicates the conditions under which Patagonian archaeological bone assemblages are destroyed or contaminated with bones...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ted Goebel.

The early archaeological record of Beringia continues to be left out of most discussions of the peopling of the Americas, partly because of repeated discoveries of older-than-Clovis sites in temperate North America and Beringian archaeologists’ own admission that the early northern record looks very different from Clovis technologically. In this paper, I attempt to recast Beringia in a leading role by (1) reviewing new genetic studies of humans and their prey species positing that late-glacial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Hill. Kevin Nolan.

Copper artifacts are widely represented in prehistoric sites of eastern North America and their presence in any particular region is often used in reconstructing exchange and social networks. Early interpretations were predicated on assumptions that native copper from which materials derived from the extensive copper deposits in the Lake Superior region. However, as early as 1903, assessment of copper trace element composition has been used to test such hypotheses. A number of methods have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sean Dunham.

The Late Woodland (LW) period in the upper Great Lakes region has been linked to the development of the Inland Shores Fishery and especially to the advent of deep water fall fishing. A recent study of LW settlement and subsistence patterns in the eastern Upper Peninsula of Michigan has revealed a shift in the mobility strategies used by LW peoples of that region. Using site locational data and an assemblage diversity index trends were identified that directly inform on LW settlement and mobility...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fernanda Neubauer.

This paper presents the results of a study of subsistence, chipped stone and hot rock technologies, settlement variability, residential mobility, and landscape interactions of the Late Archaic (c. 5,000-2,000 BP) people on Grand Island, in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Recent excavations by the Grand Island Archaeological Program (GIAP) have yielded a sizable body of evidence for Late Archaic occupations on Grand Island, which is the largest island of Lake Superior's southern shore. Direct...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Kooiman.

The relationship between subsistence and food-processing technology is a burgeoning topic in archaeology and has the potential to yield new perspectives on resource choice and cuisine in the Upper Great Lakes. This paper presents the results of exploratory functional pottery analysis from the well-dated Winter site, a Middle Woodland habitation in the western Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The analytic data discussed includes those physical properties affecting ceramic vessel performance, as well...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Demel. Marla Buckmaster. Terrance Martin. James Paquette. Kathryn Parker.

The discovery of several early iconographic/Jesuit rings in 1996 in Marquette County, Michigan led to the subsequent discovery of a proto-historic locus within a larger multi-component site. Professional archaeologists and volunteers spent two summers excavating 34 square meters near this discovery, and eventually identified the area as Location A at the Goose Lake Outlet #3 site. The excavated area is a single component occupation located in an ecologically diverse region that has been used...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Sonnenburg. John O'Shea. Ashley Lemke.

Understanding of early Holocene hunter-gatherer archaeological sites relies heavily on paleoenvironmental data, as many of these sites are ephemeral and have little archaeological visibility on the landscape. In rare cases, such as on the Alpena-Amberley Ridge in Lake Huron, highly visible hunting structures are preserved which offer a unique insight into early hunter-gatherer lifeways, while targeted sediment sample collection provides high-resolution paleoenvironmental information. Since 2011,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Hambacher. James Robertson. Randall Schaetzl.

Research into Late Prehistoric subsistence strategies used by residentially mobile hunter-foragers in the Upper Great Lakes region indicate that there is a complex interplay in the choices made between the exploitation of natural resources and the incorporation of maize and other domesticated plants into those economies. Recent excavations of food processing and storage features coupled with soils analysis elucidating their depositional histories at two Late Prehistoric sites have provided new...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Egan-Bruhy. Mark Bruhy.

The Butternut-Franklin Lakes Archaeological District is located immediately south of the confluence of the Upper Wisconsin, Menominee, Brule River watersheds, in an area dominated by several thousand lakes. The preponderance of streams, swamps, and marshes make this a vast and extraordinary aquatic ecosystem. Archaeological research in this region, extending back into the 1960s, provides a solid baseline for reconstruction of the dynamic settlement/subsistence adaptation of prehistoric...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Bush.

A shifted baseline is the intergenerational acceptance of the progressive degradation of a system as reflecting its natural state. Paleoecological analyses have revealed the long-term usage by humans of sites previously thought to be ‘pristine’. Analysis of lake sediments in remote areas of Panama and Ecuador revealed unexpected histories of land usage. In Ecuador, Lake Ayauch provided a record of maize agriculture from 6000 years BP. At Lake Wodehouse, in Panama, a 3300-year long record from an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Crystal McMichael. Dolores Piperno. Eduardo Neves. Eduardo Tamanaha.

The extent and intensity of pre-Columbian human impacts on Amazonian forests has remained a topic of debate for decades. Traditional views of pre-Columbian Amazonia as a ‘pristine forest’ have recently been replaced by predictions of vibrant cultures frequently scattered across the Basin. A primary form of evidence for the latter includes the presence of terra preta soils, which are nutrient-enriched anthrosols that were formed in prehistory. Archaeological and paleoecological investigations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Linda Scott Cummings.

Dolores Piperno has addressed the origins of maize agriculture in the New World through examination of samples from MesoAmerica. Ultimately, maize diffused throughout the world. Prior to globilization, maize spread throughout the Americas. Zea mays is represented by over 100 races in North America alone. My work has focused on the spread of maize agriculture, rather than its origins. Identifying races of maize is a daunting task for any region of the Americas. The most informative remains for...