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

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anthony Ranere. Richard Cooke.

There has been a sea change in our understanding of the early human occupation in the tropical lowlands of the Americas over the last 4 decades. Research carried out in Panama has contributed to this change in a number of ways. First, evidence of Terminal Pleistocene hunter-gatherer populations using both Clovis technology and presumably later fluted fishtail projectile point technology were recovered in tropical forest as well as open woodland habitats. Importantly, the pioneering analyses of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Messner.

Over the last several decades, Dolores Piperno has made significant methodological and theoretical contributions to our archaeological understanding of the past. This paper draws on these insights to explore Early Holocene foraging strategies in the Lower Illinois River Valley and how these practices fit within their paleoenvironmental and social contexts. These data offer insights into the long trajectory toward plant domestication in eastern North America and the construction of space and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ruth Dickau. Javier Aceituno. Anthony Ranere.

Archaeological research in the Middle Cauca region of Colombia has identified significant human presence during the early to middle Holocene (10,600-3600 uncal BP), associated with lithic technology focused on plant processing (e.g. handstones, milling stone bases, and "hoes"). Starch residue analysis on these tools has documented the early availability and use of several domesticates; both exogenous, such as maize (Zea mays) and manioc (Manihot esculenta), and possibly indigenous, such as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa Kealhofer. Judith Field. Adelle Coster.

Investigations of rainforest archaeological sites from the Koombaloomba Dam environs in the NE Queensland Wet Tropics, have established a human presence here since the early Holocene (Cosgrove et al., 2007). These open sites have yielded abundant archaeological finds including excellent preservation of plant macro-remains in the form of wood charcoal and the carbonised shells of some toxic starchy economic plant species including Beilschmiedia bancroftii, the Yellow Walnut. Examination of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Sayre. Daniel Contreras.

The work of Dolores Piperno has significantly advanced our understanding of the rise of agriculture in the tropical Americas. Her work has been fundamental in the development of microbotanical techniques used to understand the use of plants in the past. This paper builds off of Dolores' analysis of plants depicted on the Tello Obelisk, at the site of Chavin de Huantar in Peru, in order to consider the role that plants from distinct ecological zones across the Andes played at the temple site....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Irene Holst.

Over the past decade an increasing number of archaeological starch grain studies have made important contributions to our understanding of prehistoric diets and subsistence strategies. The research has also generated a number of questions concerning the identification and interpretation of starch grain records from the Neotropics and elsewhere. Some of them involve possible modification of archaeological grains from cooking and grinding. Starch may also be susceptible to damage or degradation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alison Weisskopf. Ling Qin. Dorian Fuller.

Using data from modern and archaeological phytolith assemblages we follow the trajectory of wild rice cultivated on wetland margins at 5000 BC through early domestication and the first artificial arable systems in dug out fields at c. 4000 BC to fully developed irrigated paddy fields in the Lower Yangtze Valley. Using multivariate analysis with phytolith assemblages from ecological communities of rice weed flora across a range of arable systems we create modern analogues of ancient systems which...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sonia Zarrillo.

Genetic studies suggest a single domestication event for cacao (Theobroma cacao L.) in the Upper Amazon of southeastern Ecuador and northeastern Peru and then transported by humans northwards to Central America and Mexico. As such, we should expect to find the earliest archaeological evidence of cacao use in the tropical forests of South America. This paper presents starch granule evidence for the use of cacao dating to 3500-3300 Cal BC from the Santa Ana - La Florida site in the Upper Amazon of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caroline Stromberg.

Grass-dominated ecosystems occupy >40% of Earth’s land surface today. Documenting when this prominent biome emerged was traditionally hampered by the rarity of identifiable grass fossils. Recently, phytoliths have emerged as a vital tool for tracking the evolutionary history of grasslands. Key to understanding ancient grassland composition is studying the 3-D morphology of silica grass short cell (GSSC) phytoliths. GSSCs have long been known as broadly diagnostic within grasses, but a landmark...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Stothert.

Personal and professional reminiscences from 1979 to the present of the life and works of Dolores Piperno, great person, smart graduate student and distinguished scientist whose contribution to the early history of Ecuador (culture Las Vegas) has been transforatioal. 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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tom Dillehay.

By 7,000-6,000 BP on the coast and in the western highlands of northern Peru, several long-distance food crops, whether domesticated or not, were adopted by local communities. Most of the crops are derived from Neo-Tropical environments far to the north, perhaps in the Ecuadorian and Colombian lowlands, or from the eastern side of the Andes. The technological, demographic and economic mechanisms and processes by which this adoption process took place is considered for several archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Deborah Pearsall.

Paleoethnobotany is a diverse discipline, with practitioners around the globe. A systematic discussion of methods and approaches is beyond the scope of this presentation. I focus instead on an issue concerning paleoethnobotanical practice and inference that cross-cuts the kinds of materials being studied, or the geographic or topical focus of research: deposition and preservation of plant remains. Determining what kind(s) of human behaviors and natural processes led to deposition and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Logan Kistler.

Following the inception of ancient DNA-based research in the mid 1980’s, researchers began applying the new toolkit of archaeogenetics to a diverse range of questions surrounding human-plant interactions. These early studies laid the groundwork for the field of molecular archaeobotany, exploring aspects of selection and domestication, movement of crop plants alongside humans, and human impacts on ancient ecosystems. Some two decades later, ancient DNA researchers began experimenting with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Neil Duncan.

How does one honor the greatest generation of paleoethnobotany? It should not be difficult. What they have accomplished is no less than establishing paleoethnobotany as fundamental archaeology. Their cutting edge approaches succeeded in keeping scientific methodology in archaeology throughout the discipline’s theoretical paroxysms, all the while keeping the "ethno" in paleoethnobotany. The next generation of paleoethnobotanists is already building on their mentors’ successes by further advancing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jose Iriarte. Francis Mayle. Ruth Dickau. Bronwen Whitney. John Carson.

This paper summarises the results of a multiproxy study on the past human impact of Late Holocene peoples across different regions of the Llanos de Moxos. In the Monumental Mound Region, palaeoecological data show that the savanna soils were sufficiently fertile to support crops; maize being a predominant one. Macrobotanical remains from mound habitation sites in this region documented the presence of maize (Zea mays), squash (Cucurbita sp.), peanut (Arachis hypogaea), cotton (Gossypium sp.),...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Minnis.

It is a daunting task to make decades of research appear to be consistent and coherent when it is often ad hoc and opportunistic. During the past four and one-half decades I have tried to meld ethnobotany and archaeology with three themes focusing my work: food, anthropogenic ecology, and the value of research beyond archaeology. On the other hand, I have tended to avoided deep cultural contexts also and methodological issues. I will discuss each of these, not only for the past, but for the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dolores Piperno.

Paleoethnobotanical research the past two decades from around the world makes it clear that multi-proxy data including from genetic and paleoecological approaches are necessary for understanding plant exploitation, domestication, and spread of agriculture. Recently, bio-archaeologists using such kinds of multidisciplinary endeavors have come to understand that addressing prehistory is also relevant to understanding species adaptation and survival in future environments. This paper discusses...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bruce Smith.

Recent advances in archaeobotany are discussed, and emerging research domains and future challenges are outlined. Particular emphasis is paid to the challenges of replication of results, and the curation of archaeobotanical collections for future researchers. 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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Marston.

Paleoethnobotany has long been associated with the identification of crop plants and has led to important insights into domestication and the adoption of farming systems. New methods for the quantitative analysis of botanical remains, together with multiple allied datasets on human diet and environmental change, now allow paleoethnobotanists to generate empirical data on agricultural decision making in the archaeological record. The breadth of data now available to paleoethnobotanists includes...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amber VanDerwarker.

PEB practitioners are increasingly drawing from social perspectives which allow them to shift between concepts of diet and foodways. This increasingly social paleoethnobotany is bolstered by rigorous quantitative analyses of large datasets that facilitate the exploration of temporal and spatial nuances in ancient plant assemblages. This marriage between social theory, analytical rigor, and large datasets is further strengthened by the trend towards integrating multiple proxies of food data...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Grace Barretto-tesoro.

Cosmology prior to European contact has been the focus of recent research in the Philippines. The objective of this paper is to investigate cosmology practiced in the Philippines prior to the introduction of Christianity during the Spanish colonial occupation from the 16th century AD onwards. This research is significant because it will show that elements of the tripartite cosmology of past populations in the Philippines which can be traced from the Neolithic period persist until the present...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Madeleine Yakal. Jacy Moore.

Grave goods have been especially useful in the archaeological examination and determination of political economy and levels of inter-group interaction. Among the Ifugao of the northern highland Philippines, ethnohistoric and ethnographic datasets indicate that the group can be considered a ranked society. Dominant Philippine historical narratives also suggest that the Ifugao were in isolation during Spanish colonization. Our excavations at the Old Kiyyangan Village provide material support for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Jane Louise Bolunia. Rey Santiago. Alfredo Orogo.

The significance and importance of Butuan as a trading center as early as the 10th century C.E. Can be based on the thousands of artifacts excavated from 1976 to 2014 ranging from Chinese ceramics belonging mostly to the Song Period (ca. 10th-13th centuries), Southeast Asian and locally produced earthenware pots and stoves. Another very important artifact encountered were plank-built edge-pegged boats that measures approximately 15 meters long and 3 meters wide. In 2012, a larger boat was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Fitzpatrick. Jessica Stone. Justin Tackney. John Krigbaum. Greg Nelson.

Ongoing research at the Chelechol ra Orrak rockshelter in Palau, Micronesia, has revealed the presence of one of the oldest (ca. 3000-1700 BP) and most demographically diverse cemeteries in the Pacific. Archaeological excavation of only a small portion of the site indicates that dozens of individuals were buried here for more than a millennia. Subsequent osteological analysis coupled with recent attempts to extract ancient DNA and stable isotopes (Sr and Pb) have shed new light on genetic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Peterson.

The spread of Islamic influence throughout Island Southeast Asia and into the Philippines Archipelago was rapid and extremely effective in the second millennium AD. This model of colonization utilized down-the-line and proxy trading through Taosug and Iranun raiders as well as by the establishment of entrepôts established through intermarriage and local exchange. Power flowing through horizontal networks cemented regional networks and exported an extensive power structure into an otherwise...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cecilia Smith.

Historical documents provide most of what is currently known regarding Spain’s subjugation of the Philippine archipelago. However, in this paper I discuss how archaeological evidence of indigenous prestige economies enriches our understanding of the interaction between the encroaching Spanish colonizers with indigenous polities. My study of imported ceramics found in the Malangwa watershed, Negros Oriental indicate that, contrary to Spanish records, indigenous access to foreign prestige goods...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sandy De Leon.

Investigations of social interaction and notions of community among island societies of Southeast Asia during the Metal Age (500 BC-AD 800) are very limited, especially in the Philippines. This general lack of well-documented settlement, household and burial data, and underdeveloped theoretical frameworks interpreting the archaeological remains, impede our understanding of social organization in the period and fail to contextualize the appearance socially stratified and politically centralized...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wolfgang Alders. Jared Koller.

This paper investigates the potential defensive functions of rice terrace construction in Ifugao, Philippines, through an exploration of how landscape analysis and 3D modeling might contribute to established archaeological and ethnographic understandings of the region. While still under debate, a growing body of archaeological evidence suggests that the settlement of the Ifugao highlands and the development of intensive rice terrace farming may have been a strategy for avoiding political...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jared Koller. Kaoru Ueda.

Southeast Asia is a region whose inhabitants have long been engaged in long-distance trade connected through ocean and river systems. This paper presents the preliminary results of a petrographic study on earthenware samples from archaeological sites in Singapore, Indonesia, and Thailand in order to scientifically investigate the putative trade networks. The preliminary results show a complex picture of local production and imported ceramics, one that changes depending on the location and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam Lauer. Alexandra McDougle.

Infant death in Ifugao villages has only been viewed through a lens of modern ethnography. Recent excavations at the Old Kiyyangan Village site have revealed new information on the resource base, trade networks and impact of outside groups on the prehistoric and early historic Ifugao. This work has produced a small sample (16) of individuals who died at, or around, full term to the age of two years. The age, health, and mortuary profiles of these skeletons will be presented and placed into...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mikhail Echavarri. Stephen Acabado.

Local wisdom and nationalist sentiments would have us uphold the long-held belief in the age of the Ifugao Rice Terraces, espoused by pioneer anthropologists of the Philippines, Roy F. Barton and Henry Otley Beyer. Recent findings by the Ifugao Archaeological Project (IAP), however, have provided new information which have driven us to rethink this proposed date, primarily because of the dearth of archaeological data to support the "long-history" model. Evidence is now pointing to a relatively...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bobby Orillaneda.

Current historical and archaeological evidence portrays fifteenth century CE maritime trade in Southeast Asia as a complex and multi-layered landscape. A main argument centers on the factors that shaped the development of this intra-regional trade. Some scholars consider foreign entities (e.g. China and some Indian states) as the primary instruments that heavily influenced Southeast Asian socio-political and economic affairs while others promote Southeast Asian agency and contends that it is the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ellen Hsieh.

The establishment of Spanish Manila in 1571 marked a turning point in global history. Historians have extolled the roles of Manila as a hub of global trade networks and a key locus of cultural exchange between the East and the West. Nevertheless, the power relationships that defined colonial life in the Manila area were taken for granted by scholars. The major ethnolingustic groups of colonial Manila - the Spaniards, the indigenous Tagalog, and the Chinese - formed a specific urban landscape...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eszter Banffy. Anett Osztás. Alex Bayliss. Alasdair Whittle.

The Alsónyék Neolithic site was found in the course of a motorway project. The earliest occupants were the first farmers arriving from the North Balkans. After a short gap two later Neolithic occupations were followed by an immense settlement and cemetery of the Lengyel culture: 120 robust houses and in sum 2400 burials could be excavated alone on the motorway track, and this size, completed with geomagnetic surveys, is left without any parallels in Central European Neolithic. In this key area,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Derek Hamilton. Colin Haselgrove. Chris Gosden.

Traditional approaches to the Iron Age have constructed complex chronologies based on artifact typologies, mainly pottery and metal, with radiocarbon long being neglected. Such views are now untenable, with recent Iron Age research showing that typological dating produces sequences that are regularly too late. Furthermore, regional syntheses anchored by chrono-typologies fail to provide a robust analytical methodology for better understanding the nuances of the settlement landscape and social...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Seren Griffiths.

The associations of decorative motifs on Neolithic pots from the Alsace region of the upper Rhine valley, eastern France, have been rigorously studied by Philippe Lefranc and Anthony Denaire using correspondence analysis. Separate sequences are available for the Early (LBK) Neolithic pottery and for a series of related Middle Neolithic ceramic styles, running from the later sixth to later fifth millennia cal BC. Within the ‘Times of Their Lives’ project, the absolute chronology of this cultural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arkadiusz Marciniak.

Anatolian and Central European Neolithic reveal some striking parallels in social developments. Different communal arrangements appear to be predominant in the Early Neolithic and autonomous household occupying discrete residences and performing most domestic activities in the house became clearly bonded entity only towards the end of this period and beyond. Recently conducted Bayesian analysis of a large number of AMS radiocarbon dates from both areas allow the pace of changes of the domestic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alex Bayliss.

For the fortunate few, dendrochronology allows an annual window into the archaeological record. Over the past 20 years, however, Bayesian chronological modelling has brought chronologies precise to within the scale of past lifetimes and generations within the reach of all archaeologists. Explicit statistical modelling allows radiocarbon dates to be interpreted within the framework of existing knowledge provided by associated archaeological evidence, providing more precise dating and thus...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Randall McGuire. Ruth Van Dyke.

Fernand Braudel said, "History may be divided into three movements: what moves rapidly, what moves slowly and what appears not to move at all." Archaeologists gravitate towards the longue durée–cultural continuities and traditions–but our most important questions have traditionally focused on transformative changes such as the rise of the state, the collapse of empires, or the origins of agriculture. Armed with imprecise dating methods, archaeologists have tended to view transformative changes...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Pauketat. Thomas Emerson.

An early Mississippian world came about at and around Cahokia in the eleventh century CE owing to the convergences of people with other organisms, celestial objects, atmospheric conditions, landforms, and elements, each with their own distinctive temporalities and affects. Understanding those convergences historically entails grappling with timing and duration, and we offer a Bayesian reading of the latest radiocarbon datasets considered against the backdrop of the suspected periodicities of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Ortman.

One of the basic challenges facing archaeology is translating surface evidence into population estimates with sufficient chronological resolution for demographic analysis. The problem is especially acute when one is working with sites inhabited across multiple chronological periods. In this paper I present a Bayesian method that deals with this situation. This method combines uniform distributions derived from a local pottery chronology with pottery assemblage data to reconstruct the population...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alasdair Whittle. Nenad Tasic. Wolfram Schier. Eszter Banffy. Alex Bayliss.

The Times of Their Lives project has produced modelled date estimates for the major phases of the Vinca complex in SE Europe, spanning the later sixth to mid-fifth millennium cal BC. That is a considerable advance in our understanding of the broad rate of cultural change. But site-specific date estimates within the complex also allow detailed comparisons of the timing of the introduction of novel material forms, especially in pottery, down to a much more precise scale. Examples from the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tim Kohler. Stefani Crabtree. R. Kyle Bocinsky.

Analyses using tree-ring dates provide an attractive test-bed for examining effects of temporal coarse-graining in archaeological contexts, due to the high-resolution of dendrochronology. After compiling a database of every known tree-ring date in the U.S. Southwest, we use tree-ring-date counts and locations as proxies for gridded human population estimates in the upland portions of the SW US. Grid-squares that lose dates are connected to nearby grid squares that gain dates as we move from one...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zackary Gilmore. Asa Randall. Kenneth Sassaman.

One of archaeology’s unique strengths is the ability to construct cultural histories that span vast spatiotemporal scales. It is imperative, however, that these so-called "big histories" be balanced with consideration of the actual events through which they were experienced and contributed to by real people occupying diverse contexts. In the southeastern U.S., the initial adoption of pottery technology has been variously portrayed as either a protracted diffusionary process with few discernable...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacob Fisher.

Zooarchaeological research conducted under the conceptual realm of behavioral ecology has generally focused on the decision-making processes made during and immediately after hunting activities, at the cost of studies that explicitly attempt to predict culinary processing according to ecological or social conditions. It is critical that archaeologists develop tools for predicting and identifying culinary processing methods if our goal is to fully understand prehistoric foraging decisions. Since...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Terence Murphy. Karen R. Adams. Keith L Johnson.

Quids are small wads of fiber that were chewed or sucked by prehistoric Native Americans and then spit out. To identify the plants used for making a selection of quids from Antelope Cave, we extracted DNA from 10 quids, used polymerase chain reaction to amplify a 250-base section near the chloroplast trnL gene, and determined the sequence of the amplified fragment. DNAs from the 10 quids had identical base sequences, and these matched corresponding sequences from authentic samples of Yucca ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adauto Araujo. Karl Reinhard.

Human and animal coprolites revealed an interesting group of parasites, some of which have never been found before in archaeological context. The Rocky Mountain Wood Tick, Dermacentor andersoni, were found in two human coprolites. These were probably crushed and ingested. Acanthocephalan eggs found in the human coprolites were consistent with Macracanthorhynchus ingens. This is the first well-documented infection among Ancestral Puebloans and suggests that people at Antelope Cave had different...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Keith Johnson.

Antelope Cave is a large limestone cavern sunk beneath the rolling hills of the Uinkaret Plateau in northwestern Arizona. Native Americans lived in the cave intermittently for 4000 years during the Archaic and Puebloan periods. Environmental conditions over those thousands of years appear to have changed little. This paper addresses the variety and abundance of local resources available to the cave's inhabitants who lived in this semi-arid region north of the Grand Canyon. Flora in the vicinity...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Adams.

Unburned yucca (Yucca) quids with wild tobacco (Nicotiana) contents have preserved within Antelope Cave in northwestern Arizona. Although the cave was visited during the Archaic, Southern Paiute, and Euro-American periods, material culture remains and radiocarbon dates indicate heaviest use by the Virgin Anasazi (A.D. 1 - 1000). Quids are wads of fiber twisted or knotted into a ball for insertion into the mouth. Ten of the quids examined were clearly made from the fibers of Yucca plants, based...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karl Reinhard. Isabel Teixeira-Santos.

Results of 20 Antelope Cave coprolites show both consistencies and inconsistencies with other Ancestral Pueblo coprolite analyses. Most of the human coprolites appear to be late summer and early fall depositions. Four principle plant foods were ground to a fine flour: maize kernels, dropseed caryopses, sunflower achenes, and cheno-am seeds. Maize and dropseed were found in six coprolites each and they did not co-occur. Microscopically, maize starch occurred in seven coprolites. Thus, maize was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joel Janetski.

The dry deposits of Antelope Cave on the Uinkaret Plateau in northwestern Arizona have yielded a rich artifact assemblage and abundant faunal and botanical remains dating to the late Archaic, Basketmaker II, and especially late Pueblo I/early Pueblo II times,. The collections recovered through archaeological work provide especially useful insights into Ancestral Puebloan life in this region. These activities include rabbit drives for food and the production of rabbit skin textiles, sandal repair...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Walden.

In this presentation I examine the dice games played by the ancient Maya and investigate the interpretation proposed by several Mayanists that these games were used primarily for divinatory purposes. I examine the archaeological contexts of these ‘patolli’ boards and review the substantial body of ethno-historical and ethnographic material from broader Mesoamerican contexts in order to scrutinize the interpretation that these games served as divinatory devices and to offer other interpretations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gerardo Gutierrez.

In this paper I examine the context and performance of acrobatic games in Mesoamerica using archaeological, ethnohistorical, and ethnographic representations of contorsionists, tightrope walkers, equilibrists, dancers on stilts, jugglers, and participants in rotational devices, like the Palo Volador and the Huahua. I underline the importance of acrobatic games in ritual festivities and secular events where improvisational and professional performers staged spectacles and played tricks designed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Stauffer. Kent Reilly.

This presentation examines the archaeology, folklore, and iconography attesting to the antiquity of the Apalachee Ball Game. We will examine the "Apalachee Ball Game Myth" as recorded by Friar Juan Paina in 1670 as well as several Mississippian carved shell objects (ca. AD 1350, Craig Mound, Spiro, Okla.) that thematically express episodes in this myth. From the evidence gleaned from these several sources we can demonstrate that the ideology underlying the Apalachees’ Ball Game dates from at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Ives. Gabriel Yanicki.

We are currently undertaking new investigations of the Promontory Cave 1 and 2 (Great Salt Lake, Utah) collections Julian Steward excavated in the 1930s along with renewed excavations in both caves to explore Steward’s suspicion that these AD 13th century assemblages were created by migrating ancestral Apacheans. Artifacts for gaming are richly represented, including a ball, hoops, feathered darts, cane, wooden, and beaver tooth dice, and markers or counting sticks; a guessing game using buried...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ronald Williamson. Martin Cooper.

Lacrosse, Canada’s national sport, originated with the pre-contact racket and ball games of the Iroquoian and Anishinaabeg peoples of northeastern North America. Like many traditional Indigenous games, racket and snow snake events represented much more than sport, involving aspects of physical prowess, warfare, prestige, gambling, dreaming, curing, mourning and shamanism. Gambling, in particular, was an important cultural activity that according to seventeenth century accounts, resulted in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara Voorhies.

This talk appraises the contribution of Stewart Culin, a self-taught ethnographer, to the study of games of indigenous North Americans. His exhaustive survey, published in 1907 by the Bureau of American Ethnology, remains the single comprehensive resource for archaeologists seeking to examine games in the prehistoric record and as such is well exemplified by the presentations in this symposium. Culin’s study, initiated in collaboration with Frank Hamilton Cushing, began in 1891 in connection...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Evans.

Gambling and divination both pit the hopes of the petitioner against an uncertain future outcome. Popular for millennia, they seem to inhabit distinct spheres of interest, secular and spiritual, but overlap as the individual tries to assess the odds and garner available forces of knowledge, luck, or patronage of the spirits. In Aztec culture, this overlap linked the spiritual realm of divination and the base entertainment presented by gambling (which they regarded as dissolute, though common). ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabriel Yanicki.

In Piikáni oral tradition, the namesake of southern Alberta’s Oldman River is a place in the Rocky Mountains where Napi, or Old Man, taught the various nations how to play itsewah (lit. ‘wheel game’) as a way of making peace. In the centuries since, travellers, adventurers, and scholars have recorded several accounts of Old Man’s Playing Ground and of the hoop-and-arrow game that was played there; this gaming tradition is shared by peoples on either side of the continental divide, with gambling...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kevin Leonard.

About A.D. 1320, the bones of ten people were cremated in an ossuary on Canada's east coast. Grave offerings recovered from the eroding site in 1990-91 included fragments of tiny, calcined bone rods and charred plum pits with smoothed surfaces. They are interpreted as parts of a gaming set that probably included a shallow wooden bowl and a small bag to hold the dice, still used by members of the Mi’kmaq First Nation to play waltes. Although game sets were traditionally a woman’s property, 17th...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Zych.

Games have the ability to change the course of relationships between people, whether through direct engagement as participants or spectators. This paper explores the peripatetic nature of the pre-contact Chunkey game and its role in the initial and sustained spread of Middle Mississippian lifeways from the greater Cahokia region near modern day St. Louis, beginning around A.D. 1050. While Middle Mississippian culture quickly spread throughout the midcontinent at this time, the Chunkey game...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David S. Anderson. Marijke Stoll.

For over a century, the Mesoamerican ballgame has received copious attention in the academic literature. Much of this attention, however, has focused on either the control and promulgation of the game by elite actors, or the game’s interconnections with indigenous cosmogonies. Because of this intense focus on the game as elite and/or ritual practice, we often lose sight of the communal role it may have held. Anthropological research into the cultural role of sport suggests that while sport...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Catherine Cameron. Lindsay Johansson.

This paper explores an apparently common outcome of gambling among the indigenous inhabitants of North America – the enslavement of individuals who wagered themselves (or their family members) and lost. Archaeologists are becoming increasingly aware that slavery was not a post-contact phenomenon, but existed prehistorically in societies operating at a variety of socio-political scales from bands to states (Cameron 2008, 2011, in prep., Kohler and Turner 2006, Koziol 2012). Most captives were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Domingo Carlos Salazar-García. Chelsea A. Leonard. Robert C. Power. Stephanie L. Schnorr. Amanda G. Henry.

Reconstructing hominin diets is hindered by biases in the methods used to recover dietary information, and by our narrow interpretations of modern forager behavior. A better understanding of these limitations necessitates re-examination of dietary evidence in the archaeological record. Zooarchaeological and stable isotope data suggest that medium and large game dominated the diets of Middle and Upper Paleolithic foragers, and environmental reconstructions indicate that energetic returns from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only R. Matson.

The abandonment of the Four Corners area is a longstanding problem in archaeology. Recent work has shown that the terminal occupation was concentrated into a limited number of large defensive sites. This resulted in an extreme emphasis on maize, which was untenable because of maize's low amounts of Lysine and Tryptophan. I describe the processes that led to this settlement pattern and the evidence for this diet. I then explain how the combination of the settlement pattern and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wendy Nelson.

Archaeological investigations conducted in the late 1980s at Fish Slough Cave, Owens Valley, California recovered over 300 well-preserved human coprolites. When the nutritional profile of the diet inferred from coprolite analysis was compared against optimal foraging model predictions, based on energetic returns, the diet was considered to be deficient. However, when the same data were considered from a nutritional ecological perspective using macronutrients (e.g., water, protein, fat and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Buck. J. Colette Berbesque. Brian Wood. Chris Stringer.

Accounts of gastrophagy (consumption of prey stomach material) are widespread in ethnography. The practice is recorded from different latitudes, subsistence strategies and with a wide variety of prey; however, many such reports are anecdotal. Conversely, where recent authors mention gastrophagy it is typically marginal to their main research. Little is therefore known about the frequency, seasonality, demographic factors, species composition, and relative dietary contribution of gastrophagy and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jelmer Eerkens. Robert Bettinger. Ryan Nesbit.

Shells are especially visible in the archaeological record of Central California. They comprise much of the midden in the large shellmounds that once lined San Francisco Bay. However, shells are also present in many inland sites, though they were collected from the Bay and hauled many kilometers inland. Seasonality reconstructions using oxygen stable isotopes show that shells on the Bay were typically harvested in two seasons, winter and summer, but inland sites contain shells from just winter....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara Klontz. Linda Scott Cummings.

Evidence of cribra orbitalia in the physical anthropology record has long been interpreted to represent in adequate sources of iron in the diet. Pairing coprolites with naturally mummified bodies from Nubia allowed examination of the diet and correlation with physical evidence retained by the bones at both the population and individual levels. Although the diet included foods sufficiently rich in iron that iron deficiency anemia should not have been a problem, it also contained foods heavy in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Nelson. Christine Halling.

In environments with naturally high or anthropogenically increased fluoride levels (>1.5mg/l), communities are at risk for toxic exposure to fluoride. Groups exposed to toxic levels of fluoride have higher incidence of maladies of the musculoskeletal, reproductive, and neurological systems. With chronic exposure individuals may develop skeletal fluorosis, a condition characterized by osteosclerotic activity evidenced by the ossification of ligamentous and tendinous attachments, along with an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Liam Frink. Celeste Giordano.

Modern humans have been living in the Arctic for over 30,000 years and their ability to adapt to the ecological limitations and challenges is relevant to questions of human adaptation and evolution. However, we know very little about the actual technologies and nutritional implications that were necessary to develop in the northern latitudes. Here we focus on two aspects of Arctic dietary practices that are little understood in the literature and yet would have been essential to successful...

DOCUMENT Citation Only M. J. Mosher.

Illuminating genetic and environmental factors underlying complex traits is a daunting task. Dietary nutrients provide continuous and evolving influence on gene expression, thus affecting individual growth and development and adaptive capacities over the life course. Metabolic traits represent the culmination of many gene-by-nutrient interactions. Genes set parameters for susceptibility to environmental factors, variation in both internal and external environmental dynamics mediating the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jaime Dexter Kennedy. Geoffrey M. Smith.

Over the past five field seasons, collaborative research at the LSP-1 rockshelter in Oregon’s Warner Valley conducted by the University of Nevada, Reno archaeological field school and Bureau of Land Management has revealed a record of human occupation spanning the Holocene. While faunal remains are prominent in the deposits, nutritional information can also be derived from pollen and seed data at LSP-1. This paper presents the results of paleoethnobotanical analysis with respect to diet breadth...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Raubenheimer.

Nutrition has exerted a powerful influence on human evolution and history, and continues to play a central role in global challenges such as food security and obesity. However, the complexity of nutrition presents considerable challenges for researchers to unravel its grip on human affairs. In this talk I will introduce an approach called nutritional geometry that has been developed to aid this process. Nutritional geometry differs from conventional nutritional models in acknowledging that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Isabel Dos Santos. Luciana Sianto. Sheila Mendonça de Souza. Adauto Araújo. Sérgio de Miranda Chaves.

The identification of human food remains from archaeological sites contributes to paleonutrition and paleoepidemiology studies, shedding light on key aspects of human biological evolution and cultural changes.In the present study,macroscopic and microscopic food remains were recovered from human coprolites from Furna do Estrago,Pernambuco State,Brazil.The remains are dated between 1860 +/- 50 (BETA 145954) and 1,610 +/- 70 (BETA 145955) years BP (before present).The region may have been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandra Greenwald. Jelmer Eerkens. Eric Bartelink.

Ethnographic evidence demonstrates that hunter-gatherer children may forage effectively, where ecology, subsistence strategies, and social organization are conducive to juvenile participation. We hypothesize that, in easily navigated environments with food items accessible to children, juveniles will engage in assistive or independent foraging after a period of exclusive post-weaning parental provisioning, and that differences in male and female diets will reflect the sexual division of labor...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Madonna Moss.

Pacific herring play a special ecological role in North Pacific marine ecosystems by converting phytoplankton into energy consumable by a variety of animals, including humans. Northwest Coast peoples have been consuming herring since the early Holocene, and patterns of usage likely changed over time. Herring are available in different forms during different times of the year. This paper will evaluate the nutritional value of herring and seasonal herring products vis à vis other Northwest...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bryan Hockett.

Primitive Economic Man (PEM) paradigms have been popularly applied in economics, nutrition science, sociology, psychology, and anthropology to explain human behavior for almost two centuries. PEM contains two general assumptions: (1) that most humans make cost-benefit decisions to further their own personal economic or political condition; and (2) Darwinian selection favors these cost-benefit trade-offs; in other words, the children of selfish, cost-benefit oriented individuals differentially...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tim Ferguson.

Research in the Virgin Branch Puebloan region indicates that during the middle Pueblo II Period there were strong socio-economic mechanisms linking the lowlands in southern Nevada to the uplands on the Arizona Strip. Ties between these areas are demonstrated by the presence of large numbers of ceramics produced in the uplands that have been recovered from lowland sites. Traditional ecological and economic models suggest that these trade networks may have been a way to reduce risk by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Elston.

Jim O’Connell began his professional career in anthropology as a Berkeley graduate student under Robert Heizer, conducting his dissertation (1971) research on the prehistory of Surprise Valley in NE California. A teaching position at UC Riverside (1970-72) was soon supplanted by a research fellowship (1973-78) in Prehistory at Australian National University during which he pursued ethnoarchaeological research among the Alyawara. In 1978, he joined the Anthropology Department at the University of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Judith Field.

The extinction of megafauna across the globe generates lively and sometimes heated discussion on timing and cause. In the case of Sahul (Pleistocene Australia-New Guinea), the debate is divided into two distinct camps – those that hold a firm belief that humans were responsible, and those that consider the current datasets to thin to provide any definitive answer. These big picture issues are reliant on the acquisition of data from individual sites and data on megafauna comes predominantly from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steven Simms. Andrew Ugan.

The application of HBE and selection thinking can shed light on the study of intensification. This vantage treats intensification as a process, not a threshold, and treats behavior not as normative cultural forms (e.g., "intensive farmers"), but as fluctuating frequencies among alternative adaptive strategies comprising a behavioral mix that may be culturally encoded. There are many ways to work hard. Here we employ case studies from Mendoza, Argentina, and the Great Basin, Southwest, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Stiner. Steven Kuhn.

Short-term constraints that motivate people are an important part of the process social and economic change. Proximate decision (optimality or satisficing) models are particularly useful in archaeology because they play upon basic resource needs and costs in situations where behavior cannot be observed directly. These models are not enough, however, to account for the larger processes by which repeated interactions change the nature of the co-evolving species and the conditions of selection...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Douglas Bird.

O’Connell is best known for championing an approach to exploring the evolution of human behavior and its attendant archaeological patterns through the distinctive lens of human behavioral ecology. His contributions in developing ways to operationalize theory for generating testable hypotheses about big questions in the human experience have indelibly shifted the trajectory of empirically bent studies of subsistence. However, far less appreciated are his keen ethnographic descriptions of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dave Schmitt. Karen Lupo.

Zooarchaeological applications of rationale derived from the Prey Choice Model (PCM) are based on the assumption that prey body-size is a robust proxy for prey rank and post-encounter return rate. The PCM predicts dietary expansion and contraction in response to the encounter rates with large-sized and highly ranked game. In zooarchaeological assemblages, co-variation in the abundances of large and small-sized prey are often viewed as reflecting changes in foraging efficiency and are usually...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter White.

Rather than being just a set of warnings, ethnoarchaeology has made major contributions to a range of archaeological endeavours, especially in Papua New Guinea and Australia. These include broadening our view of stone and wood technologies, of site formation processes and of human-environment relations. 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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Collard.

Identifying the causes of spatiotemporal variation in technological richness and complexity is an important task for archaeology. James O’Connell has proposed that diet breadth can be expected to affect investment in subsistence technology and therefore the number and intricacy of subsistence tools. Narrower diets, he suggests, will be associated with lower investment and therefore fewer and/or less complex tools, while broader diets will be associated with higher investment and therefore more...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Klein.

About 50,000 years ago, modern humans expanded from Africa to Eurasia. Significant behavioral change accompanied this expansion, and archaeologists commonly seek its roots in the African Middle Stone Age (MSA) before 50,000 years ago. Easily recognizable art objects and "jewelry" become common only in sites that postdate the MSA in Africa and Eurasia, but some MSA sites contain possible precursors. Population growth is the most popular explanation for these precursors and for the post-MSA...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jim Allen.

Jim O'Connell arrived in Australia in 1973 to take up a five year research fellowship at the Australian National University in Canberra. Although he returned to the US in 1978, O'Connell has not only maintained diverse interests in Australia and its archaeological record but has also returned there perhaps 25 times to carry out fieldwork, present papers at conferences and to interact with colleagues. It is clear that some of O'Connell's major contributions to world anthropology have been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Meltzer.

In their 2012 paper, 'The restaurant at the end of the universe,' O’Connell and Allen developed a speculative and far-reaching model for the colonization of Sahul, one that sees initial populations as small, spatially concentrated in scattered ‘sweet’ spots, and which exhibited only occasional growth spurts and geographic expansion along extant coastlines. Although granting the obvious differences between the environmental stage and historical conditions under which the Pleistocene colonization...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristen Hawkes.

O’Connell’s Hadza work shows how combining behavioral ecology with ethnoarchaeology magnifies the power of ethnography to help interpret the past. O’Connell’s systematic observations and analyses of Hadza hunting and treatment of big game gave us robust falsification of received notions about our ancestral past, including ideas about scavenging, variation in faunal assemblages, and prey transport. His vision as both an archaeologist and ethnographer extracted the richest kind of evolutionary...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Zeanah. Brian F. Codding. Douglas W. Bird. Rebecca Bliege Bird.

O’Connell (JOC) was among the first to recognize the potential of optimal foraging theory (OFT) as a research strategy for investigating the Broad Spectrum Revolution (BSR). His work in Australia carried profound implications for the BSR that stimulated research particularly in the Great Basin and Australia. Although testing predictions in the archaeological record has proved challenging, these studies revealed aspects of the BSR not anticipated by simple foraging models. Recently, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only K. Ann Horsburgh.

Over the span of his career, Jim O’Connell has shown us by example how advances in genetics can help us better model prehistory when considered alongside archaeological evidence. In this paper I reflect on his career to highlight the way in which science currently considers genetic and archaeological evidence together to (1) create or refine culture historical models of population movement and demography, and (2) to develop insight in to the relationship between hunter-gatherers and their food...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Harkey.

In the Yanamarka Valley in central Peru, the Late Intermediate Period saw dramatic changes. Whole villages moved from the valley floors to dense, defensible hilltop settlements, and were still living there when the Incas colonized this region a century later. The remote locations of many of these sites – both those forcibly abandoned under Inca rule, and those which continued on into the early Colonial Period – mean that numerous domestic round houses, storage spaces, patio walls and pathways...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Lehner.

A twenty hectare swath of Old Kingdom 4th Dynasty settlement that began with the building of the Pyramids at the low southeastern base of the Giza Plateau shows distinct components that must have functioned as neighborhoods in the sense of geographically localized social networks within the larger conurbation. Correlation between architectural patterns and builders’ graffiti with district signs suggests links to larger national networks. Flanking the major Nile port of its time, community...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Santiago Juarez.

In many societies around the world, the concept of community plays a central role in the formation of individual identities. Communities are subject to change and the focus on community identity provides a theoretical approach in which the individual can be situated in a broader sphere of social interaction. I research community through spatial analyses of human constructions at the Preclassic site of Noh K'uh in Chiapas, Mexico. My findings revealed that house-mounds clustered on hill-tops...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alleen Betzenhauser. Timothy Pauketat.

American Indian neighborhoods were very much under construction during the late-eleventh century at Cahokia. A social order that transcends pre-Mississippian village life may now be defined based on large-scale excavations at East St. Louis and Cahokia proper. Architectural patterns and craft production debris within the greater central complex indicate possible religious if not political or ethnic divisions that did not form organically. The central problems of a Mississippian analysis,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Whitten. David Chicoine.

This paper examines and compares the spatial organization of residential compounds in order to reconstruct patterns of neighborhood and urban life at the Early Horizon of Caylán (800-1 BC), Nepeña Valley, north-central coast of Peru. Systematic surface mapping combined with limited horizontal excavations indicate that the urban core of the ancient city was composed of more than 40 residential complexes articulated through a series of streets and corridors. Detailed first-hand mapping of streets...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ricardo Antorcha Pedemonte. Lane F. Fargher. Richard E. Blanton.

Collective Action Theory posits that states are the outcome of bargaining among the individuals, groups, and factions that make up the political community. Thus, the nature of intermediate scale socio-spatial units or social organizations that exist hierarchically between individual households and the state (e.g., corporate groups, clans, neighborhoods, communities, patron-client networks, etc.) plays a key role in determining the political-economic strategies employed by the architects of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only April Kamp-Whittaker. Bonnie J. Clark.

In 1942 Japanese Americans from the west coast of the United States were forcibly relocated to incarceration camps scattered across the interior of the country. Constructed by the Army Corp of Engineers and designed to house around 10,000 individuals, these centers followed a rigid, gridded layout that allowed for the rapid construction of what were ostensibly cities. Residential sections were laid out in blocks, each containing twelve "apartment" buildings to which internees were assigned on...