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

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joshua Schnell.

The recent proliferation of three-dimensional scanning devices and model generation techniques has made the use of 3D models in bioarchaeological research a reality. Despite the numerous applications of 3D modeling both in the field and in the lab, the existing body of research and published literature about constructing, analyzing, and sharing these models within archaeology is slim. The primary goal of this study is to test the accuracy of two of the most popular techniques for digital...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Ericson. Julie Esdale. Whitney McLaren.

The creation of a large live-fire training range in the Donnelly Training Area (DTA) of United States Army Garrison, Fort Wainwright (USAG FWA), required Army archaeologists to integrate standard mitigation techniques with a creative new approach. Extensive survey of the entire Battle Area Complex (BAX) target area and the surface danger zone (SDZ) downrange of targets uncovered over 150 archaeology sites. Twenty-nine sites in the target area were excavated and USAG FWA and the Alaska State...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Romina Martinez. Tamara Whitley.

The Carrizo Plain National Monument contains some of the most significant heritage resources in North America. Appropriate management is critical to the preservation of these sensitive resources. The results of GIS modeling can be directly applied toward a wide variety of historic preservation approaches. This presentation will describe the development of a site location predictive model for the CPNM and its direct application to resource management. The model identifies areas where culturally...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kirk Straight.

The excavation of Temple XIX at Palenque, Mexico from 1998-2002 garnered considerable attention primarily for the recovery of monuments with preserved inscriptions and iconography carved in stone and modeled in stucco. The fragmented state of several monuments, evidently victims of systematic mayhem in antiquity, preoccupied the excavators constantly as monument fragments were recovered from inside and outside the approximately 9 by 34 meter building. These monuments have now been consolidated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Allison Grunwald.

Thirty years ago, the Paleoindian bison bonebed at Carter/Kerr-McGee, located in northwest Wyoming, was interpreted as a winter kill-butchery locale with possible frozen meat storage. The recent complete analysis of these 9,000 year-old bones, originating from about 50 Bison antiquus, and comparisons of the bone fragmentation patterns at this site with those of experimentally broken bones, supports this initial assessment. Preliminary results confirm the presence of 15 regular spiral (fresh)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joanne Baron. Liliana Padilla. Christopher Martinez.

The Classic Maya polity Namaan is referred to in the inscriptions of several sites in Mexico and Guatemala, attesting to its importance as an ally by many neighbors. Namaan has long been identified as the site of La Florida, located on the San Pedro River in western Peten, Guatemala. This position lay at an intersection of routes connecting the large cities of central Peten to the fertile Tabasco Plain and the Usumacinta River Valley. Though many archaeologists and epigraphers have visited the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Detlef Wilke.

Meanwhile absolute concentrations rather than relative, instrument and setting specific values are requested as scientific standard in publishing provenancing results. Recent publications suggest that there is no reliable vendor software for elemental quantification of pottery with pXRF. It is unclear whether this is due to a lack of precision in the given trace element values of reference standards, or uncorrected matrix effects, or both. We faced similar problems when using >30 reference...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mari Carmen Serra Puche.

The archaeological site Xochitecatl-Cacaxtla gave ample evidence of productive activities in different residential areas of the settlement. The research has been enriched with ethnoarchaeological studies we have conducted on the current production of handmade ceramics, textiles, lapidary and mezcal in the communities of the region of Tlaxcala. This diversity of productive activities allow us to create a map of the "city" of Xochitecatl-Cacaxtla distinguishing areas specializing in the...

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

The ancient Maya script evolved over the course of about 1800 years, during which hundreds of distinctive functional graphic units (graphemes) were employed. Previous studies have shown that only a small subset of these graphemes was used at any given time, with bursts of innovation in certain epochs, particularly when the production of monuments spiked. This study revisits the question of the historical development of the Maya script, using the Maya Hieroglyphic Database, a comprehensive...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Magdalena Schmid.

This study aims to improve the dating resolution of archaeological and environmental data from the earliest sites of human occupation in Iceland in order to understand better the timing, scale and rate of the colonization of Iceland. This can be achieved through critical examination of the whole corpus of approximately 650 sites which is now accessible; through cross-referencing of different dating methods – primarily tephrochronology, radiocarbon dating and typology – and through application of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joanna Ostapkowicz. Fiona Brock.

Since 6000 BC, if not earlier, Trinidad has been the gateway into the Caribbean for waves of South American migrants - the first stepping stone in the long chain of islands that make up the archipelago. Its critical position to the settlement of the Caribbean is reflected in its deep archaeological record, documenting the complex interactions between its diverse peoples over millennia. Unique among its archaeological sites is Pitch Lake, one of the largest natural deposits of asphalt in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only François Lanoë. Pierre Desrosiers. Dominique Marguerie. Daniel Gendron.

The site of Kangiakallak-1 (JeGn-2 – AKU-10-018), located near Akulivik (Nunavik, Québec), has yielded several occupations attributed to the Dorset and Thule periods. Level A corresponds to a Thulean winter house for which collapse and preservation in permafrost provides an excellent and undisturbed record of Thulean lifeway. This paper presents the results of a faunal analysis conducted on animal remains found within the Level A house. The dominant species recovered were caribou Rangifer...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ilaria Meliconi.

This is a publishing masterclass covering five major aspects of the publishing process: copyright (what it is and what it's for) ethics (plagiarism, fabrication and falsification); retraction, expression of concern, correction (or erratum). Open Access and CC licenses: what are the options Impact Factor and other metrics: what they are, how they are calculated how to be not just a reviewer but a great reviewer The topics will of course be relevant for all disciplines and all academic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Wylde.

The Canada Alamosa Project in southwestern New Mexico has generated a faunal assemblage of over 24,000 elements that span 4000 years. The assemblage is the result of 13 years of excavations by Human Systems Research at four archaeological sites located on the privately owned Monticello Box Ranch. The bulk of the material was derived from pithouse and pueblo components at the Montoya Site (LA88891), the Kelly Canyon Site (LA1125), the 450 room Victorio Site (LA88889), and the Pinnacle Ruin...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sharon DeWitte.

Leprosy has long interested bioarchaeologists because of its antiquity and because it can cause skeletal lesions. These lesions are primarily associated with lepromatous leprosy resulting from a minimal cellular immune response. This study tests the hypothesis that early-life developmental stress increases the risk of developing lepromatous leprosy by examining the association between skeletal signs of leprosy and other skeletal stress markers. A combined sample of 126 adults from two Danish...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Golitko. Ethan Cochrane. Shaun Williams. Jason Kariwiga.

We report on archaeological and paleo-environmental fieldwork carried out in the area around Aitape, northern Papua New Guinea during June and July of 2014, targeted at understanding human response to environmental and climatic variability during the mid- to late-Holocene. We employ a multi-proxy approach to paleo-environmental reconstruction including geochemical and paleo-botanical analysis of stream and river bank sediments to examine local manifestations of Holocene climatic variability and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam Sellen.

Since the inception of thermoluminescence dating we have known that a significant number of Zapotec effigy vessels in museum collections are fakes, manufactured sometime in the early twentieth century. Some of these forgeries are composites that combine ancient and recent materials, but it is not clear how they were assembled, or how a conservator could restore such an object. In order to fully understand how these composites were manufactured and in what way they differ from ancient ceramics,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mario Battaglia. John Murray.

Archaeological education and outreach is becoming ever more of a priority in a discipline that struggles to make research accessible and relevant to diverse publics. In recent years, this void has begun to be filled through the creation of grade school lesson modules on various archaeological topics. However, though these modules are readily available, little has been done to assess the efficacy of such an educational outreach strategy. To address this gap, a study conducted in collaboration...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Huang. Jane Kolber.

More than a hundred years of archaeological investigation have been focused on Chaco Canyon and, more recently, the Chaco World. Most of that work has been related to Great Houses, Great Kivas and the related material culture found therein. Exhaustive analyses of the archaeological data has brought much to light in our understanding of the Chaco phenomenon, and raised many more questions that are currently being researched. The authors of this paper contend that a wealth of information has yet...

DOCUMENT Citation Only D. Bruce Dickson.

Anthropologists have long used "integration theory" to explain the rise of the state in Mesopotamia. This perspective, derived from functionalism, structural-functionalism, general systems, or cultural ecology, sees state emergence as a response to problems of population growth, ecological distress, competition, warfare, or the need to organize long distance trade. Integration theory is thus "top down." That is, it posits that state governance is imposed upon a population as a social solution...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christina Friberg. Gregory Wilson.

Cahokia was the largest and most complex pre-Columbian Native American society in North America. Its cultural influence extended throughout the Mississippian period Midwest (A.D. 1050–1400). A diachronic investigation of greater Cahokia from its western periphery provides insight into the polity’s consolidation, fragmentation, and collapse. Cahokian groups appear to have annexed portions of the Big River Valley (BRV) in southeast Missouri as part of the polity’s formational Big Bang. However, by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carleton Jones.

While karst environments present methodological and interpretive challenges to archaeologists, they also provide some unique opportunities. One of these opportunities is the ability to date field walls by measuring divergent rates of bedrock erosion underneath and adjacent to ancient walls. Field walls are traditionally difficult to date, either by using morphological typologies or through the association of diagnostic or chronometric materials. The method presented here, therefore, represents a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Roddick.

Andeanists have produced rich ethnoarchaeological studies of specialized potting villages, yet up until now scholars have ignored contemporary ceramic production in the Southern Lake Titicaca Basin. This poster reports on recent work of the Proyecto Olleros Titicaca Sur (P.O.T.S.), a recently initiated project in the village of Chijipata Alta exploring the relationship of learning, identity and social boundaries using both ethnographic approaches (participant observation, oral history, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Deal.

Despite being the area of earliest European occupation in Canada, with ample Contact period ethnohistorical evidence, very little is known about Pre-Contact occupation along the Annapolis River drainage system, in central Nova Scotia. At present there are less than 50 recorded Pre-Contact sites and virtually no private collections. This has long puzzled local archaeologists, as the Annapolis River is an obvious travel route to the interior, and a large (2130 km2) watershed rich in plant and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claire Ebert. Richard George. Julie Hoggarth. Rafael Guerra. Jaime Awe.

The ancient Maya employed a diverse set of economic strategies to access raw materials and finished products. In the Belize Valley, long-distance exchange of obsidian integrated sites into larger local and regional economic systems during the Classic period. We present the results of geochemical sourcing of obsidian artifacts using portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) from Late Classic to Terminal Classic period (ca. AD 600-900/1000) contexts at the sites of Cahal Pech, Baking Pot, and Lower Dover...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Cajigas. James Watson.

El Cementerio [SON P:10:8] is a late Ceramic period (cal. A.D. 943-1481) burial mound in Central Sonora, Mexico. The mound was constructed within the floodplain about 300 meters from the eastern bank of the Rio Yaqui. Micromorphology analysis (the microscopic analysis of undisturbed soils and sediments) was conducted in order to characterize the nature of the soils and sediments used to construct the mound. Samples were collected in situ from excavation units across the mound, with their...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Van Dyke.

Abstract: The site is a local shell mound, south of San Francisco and just east of Brisbane in the shadow of an Ohlone sacred place, San Bruno Mountain. The original site was destroyed in 1947 during the building of Highway 101. But a hundred yards east and underwater 365 days a year, there exist another shell mound, which is exposed a few times a year during extreme minus tides. From the surface of this site, ninety percent of the lithic assemblage is covered with a fine micro art form! In...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Juan Sereno-Uribe. Mario Córdova Tello.

Since 2003 the archaeological project of Chimalacatlán have research the south section of the state of Morelos, along the region known as the Huautla highlands. This archaeological site was excavated by Florencia Müller in 1943, who show to the academic community the importance of the area. So the first activities of the Chimalacalan archaeological project focused on the conservation of various architectural structures of the site, focusing on those buildings that were extremely damage. Then...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brett Houk. Mark Willis. Kelsey Herndon. Chester Walker.

The Chan Chich Archaeological Project (CCAP) has been utilizing Structure from Motion (SfM) technology to document investigations at various scales ranging from individual artifacts to landscapes for the past two field seasons at Chan Chich, Belize. SfM is an imaging analysis algorithm that creates 3D models from a series of overlapping digital photographs, and the resulting data can be exported as a digital elevation model, an orthorectified image, or a 3D model. In 2013, the CCAP successfully...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kara Fulton.

This poster examines how urban families developed and shared neighborhood identities at the Maya city of Actuncan, Belize, ca. AD 800-900, a time when the city experienced rapid population growth as surrounding centers, including Xunantunich, declined. To investigate household relationships, this research considers the nature and location of activity patterns in and around three commoner households to infer shared practices and the shared identities that those activities both enabled and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Abby Swaim.

Multiple ecological factors (e.g., Bergmann’s rule, competition, reproductive rate, home range size, food quality and quantity) may cause changes in animal body size over time. White-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) are ideal for studying these variables due to their importance today (to hunters and to wildlife enthusiasts), their known phenotypic plasticity in response to ecological factors, and their high frequency in zooarchaeological collections. Using post-craninal, weight-bearing bone...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dennis Lewarch.

Using assemblages in over 4,000 4-x-4-m surface collection units from eight Aztec period sites in the Coatlan del Rio Valley of western Morelos, Mexico, I analyze the valley-wide distribution of plain ceramics, decorated ceramics, lithic artifacts, spindle whorls, and figurines in over 300 household middens to define functional artifact sets analogous to the "bundles of goods and services" of economic geographers. Cluster analysis, multidimensional scaling, and network analysis quantify flow of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniella Bar-Yosef Mayer. Yaacov Kahanov. Joel Roskin. Hezi Gildor.

Humans first arrived in Cyprus around 12,000 calibrated years BP. Visits to Cyprus resulted in settlement on the island during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A beginning around 11,000 cal BP. Later occupations of the Cypro Pre Pottery Neolithic B testify to intensive connections with the mainland. We examined the possible routes to sail from the mainland to Cyprus and back by studying: sea level; options of available watercraft; sea conditions and currents; navigation skills; sailing routes; and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Crown.

The discovery of cacao residues in southwestern pottery raises questions about how much southwestern populations knew about Theobroma cacao. A number of possible images of cacao trees and pods suggest that some southwestern people were either familiar with the tree and the fruit that held cacao beans. Comparisons of Mesoamerican and southwestern imagery offer possible parallels in depiction of trees and fruit, and the southwestern material provides potential iconographic models that may be...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gyles Iannone.

Archaeological examination of the remains of the early tropical states in Central America and Asia have demonstrated that, although they exhibit a unique type of settlement pattern, they do represent large, sophisticated, and undoubtedly "urban" state formations. The unique urban footprint of these tropical states – in which settlement units of varying size and complexity are scattered across the landscape, and agricultural lands and green zones extend up to, and even into epicenters – has come...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marco Meniketti.

Industrial design can increase labor management and mobility, increase efficiency, and structure worker behavior. As the industrial period evolved during the eighteenth century experiments in factory layouts produced efficient modes of production. But when the labor is enslaved, efficiency may not always be defined in terms of time or cost. This paper presents the industrial foot-print and spatial design of factories at several sugar plantations spanning over two centuries of operation on a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only April Nowell. Daniel Stueber.

Over the past century, prehistorians studying Acheulian assemblages have focused their energies largely on the handaxe arguing that its iconic symmetrical, tear drop shape can be a window onto the origins and evolution of modern cognition, sociality, language, teaching, skill acquisition, and even symbolic behavior. This focus on the handaxe, and by extension big game hunting, has largely been at the expense of Acheulian small tool and microlithic assemblages and their associated tasks. These...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jill Neitzel.

The colors of turquoise and shell jewelry in the prehistoric U.S. Southwest were imbued with a diversity of inter-related symbolic meanings. To begin to understand these embedded messages, we must consider the results of cultural anthropologists’ different approaches to color perception and archaeologists’ reliance on ethnographic analogy. Stephen Plog’s seminal publication on the color symbolism of Pueblo pottery describes the religious significance of blue/green, the color of turquoise, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cosimo Sgarlata.

My dissertation research at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York which I completed in 2009 involved survey of West Rock Ridge, one of many Triassic "trap-rock" ridges in Connecticut's Central Valley. These are very rugged Triassic landforms made entirely of basalt or diabase that rise like long linear spines above Connecticut's otherwise level and fertile Central Valley. The question of the research was whether data from this new and untested setting could contribute new...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Harris. Rainer Schreg. Corina Knipper. Lynn Fisher.

This poster explores the history, methods, motivations, and contributions of three avocational archaeologists whose lifelong legacies helped to shape an international research project on the Neolithic settlement of the southeastern Swabian Alb in Germany. Their efforts to document site locations and build significant private collections span three generations, from the 1920s to today, and led to the discovery of a rich archaeological landscape previously unrecognized by professional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicole Lohman.

Researchers and park staff recorded rock art at Petrified Forest National Park with a number of different and disparate approaches over the past half-century. As part of a graduate research project a standardized multi-scalar approach for recording rock art at the park was developed. The development process examined the efficacy of four different approaches for creating panel sketches. A comparison of the variables of time to complete, accuracy, and perceived ease for each method revealed the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Michael. Bethany Slon. Rachel McConnell.

Poor skeletal preservation is a ubiquitous problem in the Maya area, complicating the use of macroscopic techniques aimed at producing age range estimates. An important, but underutilized, set of skeletal approaches to aging employ microscopic methods, which rely on quantifying age-related histomorphological changes. This study focuses on histological structures in ribs and has two objectives: 1) to refine age estimations for burials from two rockshelters in the Caves Branch River Valley, Belize...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cheng-Yi Lee. Maa-Ling Chen. Peter Ditchfield. Mark Pollard. Ching-Hua Lo.

Carbon and nitrogen isotope compositions of human bone collagen (n=5) were analyzed to discover the paleodiet of Neolithic people of Yuan-Shan (YS) Culture, in northern Taiwan. A local isotope baseline was constructed by 71 faunal samples. Four inferences are drawn: (1) pigs share similar isotope compositions with deer, which indicates they were herbivores rather than omnivores. It had a great possibility that the pigs were raised by human and we suggest that C3 plant was used as pig’s feed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabriel Sanchez.

We use ArcGIS and spatial analysis to quantitatively test a proposed association between chipped stone crescents and wetland environments in western North America. Dating between ~12,000 and 8,000 cal BP, crescents are often found in association with stemmed points of the Western Pluvial Lakes or Western Stemmed traditions. Many scholars have suggested that crescents served as transverse projectile points for hunting waterfowl, others have viewed them as more generalized and multi-purpose tools,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa DeLance.

Analysis of Maya female imagery has generally centered on the role of women as depicted on monumental architecture. While we understand these depictions to be tools of propaganda, they are often used to make assertions about the lived experience of ancient Maya women. In contrast to the analysis of highly politicized and highly public imagery depicted on monumental architecture, this paper examines depictions of feminine performance on a personalized medium: Maya painted vases. More...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Margie Burton. Patrick Quinn. Rhiannon Byrne-Bowles.

We selected 40 pottery samples from different levels within three separate excavation units at the site of Mine Wash (CA-SDI-813, 1100-310 BP) in central Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. The composition of these small, undecorated sherds was characterised by a combination of thin section petrography and INAA. This was compared to a now extensive petrographic and geochemical database of ceramics and raw materials from the San Diego region. Our analysis reveals a compositionally diverse assemblage...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melissa Darby.

It’s been almost two score and four hundred years since Francis Drake and his company in two ships, the Golden Hinde and a small ship only known as Tello’s Bark, landed somewhere on the west coast of American. This interlude was during what became known as ‘The Famous Voyage’ (1577-1580). Seventy to eighty men-- and a pregnant black woman named Maria—disembarked, built a rough fort, and remained for five or six weeks. The geographical location of this landing has been the subject of much...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Carleton. Mark Collard. Dave Campbell.

Determining the causes of conflict in the Maya region during the Classic Period is an important undertaking. Conflict was a prominent feature of relationships among Classic Maya polities and has been implicated in the collapse of Classic Maya society. Recently, Kennett et al. (2012) have argued that reduced rainfall led to increased conflict in the Lowland Maya region between ca. 300 and 900 CE. They arrived at this conclusion after comparing epigraphic records of conflict and variation in δ18O,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kimberly Munro.

The Cosma Archaeological Complex was first documented during a survey in the summer of 2013, outside of the small community of Cosma, Peru. Cosma is located 2600 M.A.S.L at the headwaters of the Nepeña river valley, in the Department of Ancash. This past season was the first to map and excavate within the site complex, which includes three Early Horizon temple mounds, a domestic area, and a hilltop fortress. The 2014 work focused on the main mound of Karecoto, a multistoried ceremonial mound,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yukiko Tonoike.

The semi-arid steppe of the Lower Khabur Basin of northeastern Syria is a climatically marginal zone for agriculture, yet there have been episodes of settlement over the past 9000 years. Archaeological surveys have recorded more than 300 sites whose age, type and distribution on the landscape are reflections of changing socio-natural systems. The region is particularly suitable for detecting changes in both environmental and socio-political spheres because of its environmental marginality, yet...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Beatriz Ventura.

The eastern valleys of the Cordillera Oriental, in north Salta, Argentina, were a sector of the eastern frontier of Tawantinsuyu. We proposed that the Inca created a state enclave with mining-metallurgical goals in that sector. To accomplish this, populations (mitmaqkuna) were moved from other parts of the empire, which required the implementation of a significant agrarian system to support them. These valleys may have been producing goods of great value that might have comprised a single...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brooke Arkush. Richard Hughes.

Investigating Prehistoric Obsidian Source Utilization in Birch Creek Valley, Eastern Idaho Brooke S. Arkush and Richard E. Hughes The Birch Creek Valley of eastern Idaho lies just west of the Continental Divide in a region containing numerous obsidian sources. Although the rich archaeological deposits contained within this high desert area were first investigated more than fifty years ago, relatively little excavation-based research has occurred there since the late 1960s and our...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kenneth Tankersley.

Big Bone Lick in northern Kentucky has been a critical site in the historical development of North American Quaternary vertebrate paleontology and archaeology since the 1700s. Solid-sediment cores, stream profile excavations, vertebrate paleontology, archaeology, accelerator mass spectrometry radiocarbon and optically stimulated luminescence dating, and stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analyses were undertaken to address the lack of a modern study of the Quaternary chronostratigraphy and to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Goldfield. Ross Booton.

It is an enormous challenge to reconstruct the complex and dynamic interactions between Prehistoric human groups, their resources, and their landscape from the archaeological record. This poster presents a unique model for exploring the relationship between Neanderthals and reindeer during glacial phases of the Middle Paleolithic in southwestern France, using data from zooarchaeological assemblages and experimental values for Neanderthal metabolic rates. I have developed a set of calculations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joan-Mary Ogiogwa.

Cultural survivals should ordinarily be thought of as anthropogenic in nature as they generally result from the conscious and unconscious influence of humans on their natural environment in an attempt to respond to the cultural, historical, spiritual and environmental challenges facing them. To this extent, the Rock engravings on the Omutedo Rock shelter located along the Ijebu-Igbo highway in Ogun state; south western Nigeria has carved a pathway in the way the present inhabitants think about...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Mondo.

This paper is meant to clarify some of the layers to the source of NeoClassicism from the beginning to the first half of the 18th century. The unknown Villa D'Elbeuf, next to Herculaneum, in southern Italy was the museum of the imagery for the ideals of NeoClassicism. Before being the Herculaneum Museum it was lived in and visited by many of the key aristocracy, literary, architectural and artistic global leaders of the NeoClassical era. The site of Villa D'Elbeuf in Portici is the termination...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victoria Moses.

The Area Sacra di Sant’Omobono in Rome, situated on the banks of the Tiber River at the base of Capitoline Hill, contains evidence of Rome’s people from the earliest inhabitants to modern day. This research utilizes zooarchaeological analysis to investigate how the space was used in three time periods: Archaic, late Roman, and Medieval. The diachronic analysis of the faunal remains reflects the range of uses at the site during its occupation and highlights the integration of quotidian...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dante Angelo.

The concept of public archaeology has become ubiquitous since the last decade and, gradually, it seems to have been accepted as an important component of archaeological research. However, despite the wider popularization of the concept, its operationalization still poses challenges to archaeologists interested in surpassing the academic and professional sphere. Here, I reflect on the procedural guidelines and implications that public archaeology has recently attained and some of the challenges...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nathan Stevens. Jeffrey Rosenthal.

The Late prehistoric archaeological record of the Southern Sierra Nevada can be distilled down to two very visible elements: bedrock mortars and obsidian. Both were imported from outside the area, with obsidian coming from the east and the idea of the bedrock mortar coming from the west. We argue that the presence of transported obsidian, much of it deposited prior to 1000 cal BP, and the later establishment of bedrock mortars encouraged more persistent use of this landscape. We see this as an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gerad Smith.

The objective of this paper is to model the effect that the presence/absence of specific ecological variables has on the passive movement of raw materials from their point of origin to their point of deposition in the archaeological record. This study takes place in the Talkeetna Mountains of Southcentral Alaska. The model was built using ArcGIS, informed through ethnographic, historic, and modern ecological and archaeological data, and structured using a theoretical framework from Human...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joni Manson.

Archaeologists often wring their hands and bemoan the lack of regulations or guidelines designed to protect archaeological sites from destruction during development. Section 106 of the NHPA applies only to projects receiving federal funding, licenses, or permits. ARPA applies only to federal and Indian lands. Several states have State Historic Preservation Acts that apply Section 106-like regulations to state projects. Some cities have adopted legislation to protect cultural resources. However,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Yoder.

For over 40 years some archaeologists have labored under a distorted interpretation of the fifty-year rule in which anything over 50 years of age becomes ‘archaeological’ and therefore must be recorded and evaluated for eligibility to the National Register of Historic Places. A re-examining of federal law shows that this is a mistaken interpretation. Data from the Intermountain Antiquities Computer System indicates that if this practice continues the number of featureless historical sites...

DOCUMENT Citation Only L. Curet.

Recent research in the Caribbean has produced strong evidence of long distance interaction throughout the Circum-Caribbean region, including possible direct exchange between Central America and the Greater Antilles across the Caribbean Sea. A recent casual survey of the Caribbean collections in the Smtihsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian and the National Museum of Natural History has identified two objects that may add information on this topic. The first one is a three-pointer...

DOCUMENT Citation Only M. Shackley. Leah Morgan.

The Mogollon-Datil Volcanic Province in western New Mexico has been a subject of geological and geoarchaeological research for over three decades. These Tertiary Period major events incorporated significant areas of crust over tens of thousands of km2 and the rhyolite glass produced from these events are consequently similar in elemental composition even though the five major sources are isolated over a 100 linear km radius, and cross a number of cultural territorial boundaries in the late...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gary Haynes.

The Inglewood mammoth site near Largo, Maryland, radiocarbon dated in 1982 to 20,000 rcybp, shares some features with other mammoths in North America and Mexico. It had no lithics associated with the bones, and some of the elements had been fragmented. Over 25 years ago I interpreted the bone-breakage as recently done by heavy equipment, but another researcher now interprets it as done by humans in antiquity. I provide a first look at the site’s bone maps, sediment profiles, and other essential...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alistair Paterson. Jonathan Walz.

This paper explores new approaches to conducting archaeology and making histories in and of the Indian Ocean. First, it outlines previous practices and uses of archaeology in the region. Secondly, it suggests "questions that count" as avenues to re-representing aspects of communities and their entanglements across this aquacentric space and through time. In part, we employ more recent pasts and sources to unveil deeper histories with contemporary implications for this cosmopolitan region and its...

DOCUMENT Citation Only César Méndez. Omar Reyes. Amalia Nuevo Delaunay. Héctor Velásquez. Valentina Trejo.

The hunter-gatherer occupation of the Andean forests is a major issue for understanding the variability of human adaptations in Patagonia. The paucity of sites at key locations and the incomplete understanding of the climate-human dynamics undermine the full comprehension of the exploration and colonization of such habitats. We present recent work on Alero Las Quemas, a rock shelter with occupations starting at 6110 cal BP, currently located in the forest-steppe transition of the Aisén region...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marsha Sims.

Interactions, entry, timing - issues of the "First Americans" have been strongly debated. This paper sets these issues within the parameters of archaeology and recorded histories/reinactments by people that address some of these debates. Debated lately is outrepassé, reverse hinge, or overshot. This technique for reduction stone reduction is used in Clovis technology and it is particularly common in Nohmul, in a workshop under a Late Classic Meso American ballcourt, tlacho, a religious context....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adrienne Bryan. Lisl Schoepflin.

What happens when two imperial ideologies collide? How and why do indigenous objects of worship continue to be sacred 500 years after that collision? After defeating the Inca, the Spaniards during the late sixteenth and seventeenth century attempted to eradicate Inca religion and its influences from the indigenous memory during the famous extirpation of idolatry. While conversion to Christianity was largely successful, it also initiated a process of fusion as Andean elements subtly integrated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Cirillo. Alexandra McGough. Julie Ding. Rebecca Jabbour. Gary Richards.

Investigating the only known prehistoric example of trigonocephaly, a condition thought to result from premature sutura frontalis fusion, we address cranial shape changes in this condition that have been previously limited in scope and based on living individuals. The individual derives from a prehistoric context on Santa Rosa Island (CA-SRI-24), dates to 1500-1650 AD, and is housed at the PHMA, UC Berkeley. Ninety-three 3D landmarks were collected from normal skulls for comparison (n=43, range...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Guadalupe Zetina-Gutiérrez. Armando Anaya-Hernández.

The aim of this paper is to show how remote sensing (LiDAR, photogrammetry and satellite imagery), along with GIS are changing the ways in which archaeological resources are being identified, recorded, and researched. Traditional methods and techniques are not enough to prevent the potential risks that these resources face due to the accelerated pace of growth of a globalized world. Thanks to the development of Information and communications technologies (ICT), archaeologists now have a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Cole. Pastory Bushozi. John McNabb. Martin Bates. Phillip Toms.

The Early Stone Age (ESA) site of Isimila is located on the Iringa plateau, Tanzania, close to the East African Rift Valley. Due to the abundance of handaxes present at the site in both primary and secondary contexts, Isimila has long been recognised as a key site of international importance for understanding the behavioural complexity of our hominin ancestors often compared alongside major East African e.g. Kalambo Falls, Olduvai Gorge and Olorgesailie (Kleindienst and Keller 1976; Mcbrearty...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Raymond Doherty. John F. Lieb. Brad Lieb.

The George and Saleechie (Shillichi') Colbert site in northeastern Mississippi is an early 19th century Chickasaw occupation that has yielded extensive evidence of a well-travelled site, with a wide and prolific scatter of period artifacts, including pearlware, flintlock gun parts, wagon and harness hardware, Chickasaw pottery, trade beads, and in situ architectural foundation features. Historic documentation indicates that Colbert’s home served as the Chickasaw council house, where the treaty...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jack Rossen.

Ancient Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) settlement patterns have been commonly presently as a series of well-spaced two acre defended agglutinated villages. Inter-village space was generally viewed as dangerous within a landscape of endemic warfare. Surveys and excavations in the Cayuga heartland (east side of Cayuga Lake) of the Finger Lakes region, central New York, are altering that vision. By at least the 15th century, agricultural complexes and stations were established between villages. These...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melissa Miller.

The need for a method to determine if a lithic flake is a product of human manufacture or a product of natural forces is an essential one in archaeology. This project directly compared known geofacts with known artifacts sampled from Oklahoma and Jordan at the attribute level. The comparisons were evaluated statistically in order to determine which attribute characteristics are statistically significantly different between the sampled geofact and artifact assemblages, with the objective of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dennis Griffin.

In March 2009, a couple walking along Oregon's central coast found a large, old looking, animal sacrum floating in a tide pool that had been modified to look like the head of an animal with a garnet used as an eye. Where this bone had originated, whether it represented an artifact that could have eroded from a local shell midden, or was placed on the beach to stump local scientists all remained in question. Since its discovery, many scientists have volunteered their time to try and unravel this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joe Collins. Richard Langford. Thomas Gill.

Sedimentological investigations were conducted on Unit 2 of Rimrock Draw Rockshelter (35HA3855), a deeply stratified, multi-component Paleoindian site located in the Harney Basin, eastern Oregon. Field descriptions and end-member mixing analysis (EMMA) of grain-size distributions of 13 sediment samples identified six stages of site formation: three stratigraphic units (SU), two unconformities, and a Bt soil horizon. EMMA resulted in the characterization of three end-members (EM) that correlate...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christina Warinner. Jessica Hendy. Camilla Speller. Matthew Collins.

Humans have exploited animal milk as a food resource for at least 8500 years, but the origins, spread, and scale of prehistoric and historic dairying remain poorly understood. Indirect lines of evidence, such as lipid isotopic ratios of pottery residues, faunal mortality profiles, and LP allele frequencies, imply a complex history of dairying at the level of populations. However, in order to understand how, where, and when humans consumed milk products, it is necessary to link evidence of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Eubanks. Ian Brown.

The Drake’s Salt Works Site Complex in northwestern Louisiana was one of the most intensively-utilized salt production sites in the south-central United States during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. According to the historic record, the Caddo salt makers at this saline were capable of producing hundreds of pounds of salt each year to sell to nearby European and American Indian groups. Given the limited availability of salt away from coastal areas, participating in the production and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Jordan.

Plantations on the nutmeg-bearing Banda Islands are contemporaneous with early North American plantations and are an excellent place to investigate cross-cultural responses to colonialism. The Banda Islands were the world’s sole source of nutmeg in the 16th century and control over this spice was a major goal for European powers during the Age of Expansion. Consequently, the Banda Islands were the location of early experiments in colonialism by European powers and can provide information for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wesley Bernardini.

Communities can be conceptualized along a number of dimensions – spatial, demographic, economic, ritual, among others. This study proposes that it may also be productive to consider communities organized around vision. It is well established that people construct mental representations or "cognitive maps" of their surroundings to organize spatial information and experiences and for spatial orientation and navigation. Populations who shared significant portions of their cognitive maps are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Weiss.

An essential part of California hunter-gatherer diet was ground foods, such as acorns. Grinding food with the use of mortars and pestles likely required extensive kneeling. Most of the food grinding among prehistoric Californians was likely accomplished by females. In Ryan’s Mound (CA-Ala-329; N = 284), for instance, 33% of females were buried with mortars or pestles whereas 14% of males were buried with mortars or pestles (Chi-square = 10.48, P < 0.001). A rich literature on kneeling effects on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ahmed Alsherif.

The Tuareg speak the Berber language, which is called Tamajaq/Tamasheq/Tamahaq. The language is known as Tamasheq by western Tuareg in Mali, Tamahaq among Algerian and Libyan Tuaregs, and Tamajaq in the Azawagh and Aïr regions, Niger. Generally, the Tuaregs are Muslim, semi nomadic, and traditionally stratified group of people who has lived in the Saharan and Sahelian regions of Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Libya, and Algeria. The word Tuareg which is plural comes from Tarqi or Tarki that is the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steven Katz. Addison Kimmel.

The changing nature of contract and academic archaeology has led to new safety challenges that cannot be addressed simply through adherence to OSHA regulations. In this paper we move beyond the still-relevant environmental safety challenges that were the focus of earlier work on archaeology and workplace safety, and examine anthropogenic safety issues that can commonly arise during fieldwork. We address issues such as potential theft, assault, harassment, uncontrolled animals, as well as the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tristan Carter. Daniel Contreras. Danica Mihailovic. Theodora Moutsiou. Sean Doyle.

A two-year geo-archaeological survey of the Stélida chert source on Naxos (Cycladic islands) has documented Middle Palaeolithic activity across the site, both near the best quality chert outcrops and in front of two small rockshelters. The material is dominated by products from a discoidal core technology, followed by Levallois flake and blade industries. The assemblage part-relates to the Denticulate Mousterian, which in Greece – along with Levallois technologies – are exclusively related with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sandra Gaskell. Danette Johnson. James Les. Lois Martin. Sis Calhoun.

As the exploration into the political and legal relationships between the United States and Indian Tribes continues into the area of building codes and regulations for non-modern and ancient traditional methods, what transpires here at Wah-ho-ga may have a broad range effect upon traditional structures in other Native American territories all over the nation where traditional ceremonial practices occur. The current building codes based upon far different construction methods and materials cannot...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patrick Wilkinson.

Haitian Vodou is a syncretic religion that combines elements of West African beliefs and indigenous Taino culture overlaid onto a rigid framework of forced Catholicism. One aspect of the religion that has not been investigated is the modern use of caves as a specialized local for various types of rituals, each having a specific purpose. This paper will discuss the use of both ethnographic and archaeological investigative techniques to differentiate the various purposes of cave ceremonies and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fabrizio Galeazzi.

In this paper I will present ADS 3D Viewer, a project designed to develop a 3D real-time system for the management and analysis of archaeological data. The main aim of this interactive application is to give users the ability to access archaeological data to ground-truth interpretations. Thanks to the ADS 3D Viewer, in fact, multiple experts will share and analyse 3D replicas of the archaeological excavation record, which can be revisited and subject to new analytical techniques over the long...

DOCUMENT Citation Only C. Michael Barton. Marco Janssen. Dawn Parker. Allen Lee. Sean Bertin.

Reproducibility, enabled by transparency in reporting, is the gold standard for science. It is not systematically repeating scientific research, but the potential to do so that maintains high quality in research practice. Reproducibility also drives scientific advance because it enables new research to build on prior accomplishments. This ethos is especially effective because it emerged from within the scientific community. Archaeology espouses this reproducibility ethos, made all the more...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Madsen. Carl Lipo.

Simulation is an increasingly central tool across many theoretical frameworks but especially in evolutionary archaeology. Simulation and numerical analysis is routinely employed in hypothesis tests and model development. Simulations, however, have a well-deserved reputation as difficult to replicate and test, and it is rare that researchers beyond the authors can build upon a previously published simulation study. To improve replicability, and to make our work accessible, we employ standard...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julian Richards.

In order to make our research results reproducible we must first of all make our research data available, so that others can re-use them, and test our results. In turn this requires long term digital data preservation and open access to data. Data sets must also be citable via permanent digital identifiers. This paper will discuss the experience of the UK’s Archaeology Data Service in making data available for re-use, and our evidence for such re-use. It will highlight, in particular, the use of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Dye.

This paper presents a case study of how open methods and practices of reproducible research facilitated collaboration in the archaeological community that led to the solution of the long-standing problem of when Polynesians colonized Hawai`i. Central to this effort was creation of a compendium from which the dating analysis could be replicated. Practical advice is offered on how to create and share a compendium using software tools familiar to archaeologists. SAA 2015 abstracts made available...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ben Marwick.

Scientific progress depends on the evaluation of findings through replication. While exact replication of results is often infeasible because of limitations of time and resources, a minimal standard of reproducibility is emerging as a norm of practice in contemporary computational and biological sciences. This standard refers to authors making available the data and code used to generate the key figures and tables of their publications. In this paper I review some approaches to reproducible...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Bevan.

For some time, interpreted languages such as Python, Matlab and R have made it easy to document and run computational function calls either line-by-line or in a script. While the spatial functionality provided within these environments has long been seen as inferior to GIS packages, it has now reached considerable maturity. The open source, multi-purpose and often ‘bleeding edge’ nature of these working environments also mean that there are often considerable analytical advantages to using them...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steven Sarich. Timothy James Scarlett.

The Davenport Pottery manufactured earthenware and stoneware in Utah, between 1853 and 1888. This poster uses data from a broad range of analyses, including XRF, INAA, petrography, and mechanical stress testing to develop profiles of the outcomes of technical processes at the pottery shop. These characteristics then provide insight into various key research topics in archaeology, including pottery systematics, life-expectancy and depositional time lag, experimental archaeology, and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shan Zhao. Jaroslaw Drelich. Timothy James Scarlett.

The Fired Clay Ceramic Rehydroxylation Dating (RHX) technique shows potential for establishing date of manufacture for archaeological ceramics, however for certain samples, such as those recovered at Umbro Greek and Sant’ Ancieto sites, the calculated ages were outside of the expected range by many thousand years. The observation of this over-shooting issue suggested that either the non-refractory mass (Mnrc) or some strongly bonded physical water were left during the ordinary drying process at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Scarlett. Jaroslaw Drelich. Carl Lipo. Elizabeth Niespolo. Shan Zhao.

Michigan Technological University, California State University-Long Beach, and Arizona State University scientists have been collaborating on a critical assessment of the novel RHX Dating technique, pioneered by Wilson et al. (2009). This chronometric technique, if proven reliable, will transform archaeological dating practices. We have conducted multiple trials with a wide range of ceramic types from Neolithic through Early Modern, using varied set ups of instrumentation and thoughtful lab...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Glenna Nielsen-Grimm. Greg Farley. Edgar Ortega. Richard D. Hansen.

The Great Central Plaza of the West Complex at El Mirador lies on an early and important alignment for the entire city. Excavations of two small altar platforms, and test units of structures on the boundaries of the plaza and the Leon Plaza suggest that this was probably among the earliest areas of the city, and continued to have symbolic and ritual importance throughout the Middle and Late Preclassic periods at El Mirador. The Central Acropolis creates the southern boundary, the east and west...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Josué R. García García.

This paper develops Maya urbanism and architecture this complex acropolis type of El Mirador site. In order to perform an analysis of this building, proposing a graphical representation allowing their virtual and theatrical reconstruction of the same. This hypothetical proposal is modeled based on historical information and recent archaeological evidence in this sector. The Grand Central Acropolis is located southwest of the nucleus of the settlement and as its name suggest, It is a great...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Donald Forsyth.

Investigations in the Mirador Basin over the last thirty or so years have demonstrated that the region was one of intense occupation over a long period of time, particularly during the period that has come to be known as Preclassic. This period was marked by evidence of changes in the complexity and increasing uniformity in various cultural characteristics such as architecture, sculpture and iconography. In a similar manner the development of the ceramic industry provides evidence of a process...