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

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rosa Ortiz Barrera. Cindy Cristina Sandoval Mora. José Luis Punzo Díaz.

The Northwest in the state of Durango is a understudied area in which it has now been possible to detect, record and describe archaeological sites and materials. The work carried out at the sites "La Peña" and "El Indio" have marked important milestones for the research of hunter-gatherer groups. The excavation of La Peña, located in a rock shelter, allowed to learn the specialization that these groups had in the development of lithic artifacts, since a lot of Toyah arrowheads were found, a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carlos García. Maria de la Luz Gutiérrez Martínez. Diana Irasema Larios Córdova.

Como parte de los trabajos de localización, registro y protección de sitios arqueológicos durante obras de construcción de una línea de transmisión y sus respectivas Subestaciones eléctricas propiedad de CFE, se realizaron una serie de prospecciones a lo largo de 133 km, logrando así adquirir un nuevo cúmulo de información sobre esta vasta región, que en suma a los proyectos de investigación previos por parte del INAH, fue posible identificar patrones de asentamiento vinculados a una serie de...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jesús De La Torre Vázquez. Víctor Joel Santos Ramírez.

El hallazgo en el año 2010 de puntas de proyectil del tipo foliáceo manufacturadas casi en su totalidad en cantos rodados de riolita, así como la gran cantidad de desecho de talla asociado a ellas, en el sito La Flor del Océano en Sinaloa; cuyas excavaciones continúan hasta el día de hoy, ha propiciado una serie de debates académicos acerca de su antigüedad y tecnología aplicada a ellas. En la presente ponencia, expondremos los resultados de las últimas temporadas de campo del Proyecto...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emiliano Gallaga. Jesús Emmanuel Moreno Valle. Marisela Guzmán Aguirre.

In the summer of 2014, we conducted a rescue project in the Galeana Valley, Chihuahua on a site recorded early on. The site name is Rancho Santa María II, has a surface of 30,000 m2, and was identified for the high amount of FCR on surface mainly from ovens (several of them identified in surface). In addition, nearly 350 projectile points were found (fragments 70% and complete 30 %), some of them from the Paleo-Indian period. Four excavation units were performed at the site, mainly on ovens to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only ALFREDO FERIA CUEVAS. KARIM BULHUSEN MUÑOZ.

Dentro de la dinámica social de los grupos cazadores recolectores encontramos una evidente relación con el medio ambiente, en donde con base a un gran acervo de conocimientos, explotaban los recursos naturales y aprovechaban perfectamente el uso de los espacios. En ambos casos, dicha explotación se manifiesta con la presencia/ausencia de diversas evidencias materiales, las cuáles mediante un minucioso registro arqueológico sistematizado nos permite reproducir contextos, que una vez analizados...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Papadopoulos.

The dichotomy between the "dirt" and the "word" has loomed large in the study of the Greek past, in a manner not shared by many other regions. This is true, ironically, for both the historical and prehistoric period. The interplay between the material record with the textual and the iconographic records in Greece is rich and complex, and one that extends across a broad time range. Disjunctions across these different avenues of inquiry are numerous, and often ignored. But it is precisely in these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christophe Pottier.

The study of Angkor was predominantly the domain of epigraphers, art historians and architects for much of the past century of research. To some degree it continues to be. This focus, to its great credit, has reconstituted a millennium of the political history of Khmer society prior to the 16th-17th C CE. The effect has however, been to prioritise a historicist viewpoint, leading to the material record of the monuments being fitted in to the expectations of textual interpretation....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachael Lane.

The relevance of the archaeological past to the present is not usually considered an ethical, or moral issue, except in the context of western heritage and conservation values. There appears to be both internal conditions to archaeology, as well as external conditions, that prevent the relevance and use of archaeological knowledge. The notion of relevance is frequently embedded in presentist discourses in the humanities and social sciences with an emphasis on sociality, and social recursive...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Beaudry.

A process begun afresh for each archaeological site or research project involves constructing the archive through integrating differing lines of evidence. For historical archaeologists the archive includes written records, oral traditions, and material culture; often elements of the archive provide overlapping, conflicting, or entirely different insights into the past, requiring resolution and integration because of differences in scale, completeness, representativeness, temporal resolution,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dan Penny. Tegan Hall.

The demise of Angkor and its city-region offers insights into the vulnerability of giant low-density cities to climate extremes. At Angkor, the iterative growth of massive, convoluted and intractable infrastructural networks progressively decreased the resilience of the settlement to changing circumstances by restricting or removing adaptive strategies. The nature and consequences of the water crises in Angkor between the 13th and the 16th centuries has been revealed by a combination of remote...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anders Andrén.

The material turn in archaeology – and in humanities in general – has led to a new interest in the non-verbal and non-signifying aspects of the material world. Instead of discussing meaning of objects, issues such as longterm durance and agency of objects have come into focus. Consequently, many archaeologists have turned away from the textual metaphor to a recognition of the otherness of materiality. However, this material turn has above all taken place in a dialogue with modern ruins and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa Lucero.

In response to growing needs for dry-season water, the southern lowland Maya constructed increasingly larger and more complex reservoirs at major centers throughout the Late Classic period (550-850 C.E.). Annual rainfall replenished reservoirs and nourished rainfall-dependent crops. In exchange for access to reservoirs during the annual dry season, farmers contributed goods, services and labor to kings and their administrators. When several multiyear droughts struck between 800 and 900 C.E., the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Willeke Wendrich.

Studying ancient Egypt, with its rich textual, iconographic and archaeological records, requires an interdisciplinary approach. Any research along these lines will at some point find both concurrences and discrepancies in the information. Especially the latter require further analysis, involvement of yet other sources and lead to the realization that we need to theorize the fundamentally different types of information, audiences, purposes, and sometimes cross-purposes, of the things we...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Roland Fletcher.

Human beings use three signalling systems, words, actions and material which differ in their replication rates, the degree to which the signals persist and their magnitude. Speech replicates rapidly and transmits a signal over a small distance that last only briefly. Action in the form of positioning and gestures replicates more slowly and can carry its signal for somewhat longer. Material by contrast is replicated more slowly, sometimes very slowly. Material signals, such as the dimensions of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peta Longhurst.

Historical archaeology has recently been concerned with the study of a diverse range of institutions – of confinement, of education, of religion, of punishment, and of reform. Disjunctions between the social ideals on which these institutions were founded and the material realities permeate much of this literature, often interpreted through a framework of resistance to institutional power. Lu Ann De Cunzo (2006) has characterized institutions as trialectical spaces -simultaneously conceived,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Drennan. Adam Berrey. Christian Peterson.

We are accustomed to temples, platforms, plazas, tombs, statues, fortifications, raised fields, or other large-scale constructions as archaeologically conspicuous signs of the successes of early complex societies. Archaeologists often assign major roles to such public works in creating social cohesion and extending elite power. This may be a consequence of material benefits, such as increased agricultural production or protection from attack, or it may represent the materialization of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andres Troncoso.

Para el centro norte de Chile (valle de Limarí, 30° lat. S.) se ha propuesto un período Formativo anclado en la noción de progreso y domesticación de plantas y animales, el que marcaba un salto evolutivo dentro de la secuencia histórica de los grupos prehispánicos de la región, evidenciado en la aparición de la alfarería. Aunque en los últimos años se ha discutido la relevancia de la incorporación de la alfarería en la vida de estas comunidades, lo cierto es que se continúa entendiendo este...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Estefania Vidal Montero. Uribe Rodriguez Mauricio.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to a critical review of the concept of Formative (ca. 2800-1000 AP) and its ontological and epistemological assumptions through our studies in Tarapacá, in the Atacama Desert (Chile). Through this case, our purpose is to complicate the notions or radical distinctions between nature and culture, farming and gathering, mobility and sedentism, among other categorizations upon which the Formative as Neolithic Revolution has been defined. The materiality...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamín Ballester. Estefanía Vidal. Elisa Calás. Constanza Pelegrino. Patricio Aguilera.

Los cazadores-recolectores han sido tradicionalmente entendidos como formas sociales caracterizadas por sistemas simples de organización, estructuras políticas levemente jerarquizadas, bajo desarrollo económico y tecnologías primitivas. Esta imagen trazada a partir de generalizaciones desmedidas se encuentra hoy muy lejos de representar la enorme diversidad soluciones sociales y modos de vida de las poblaciones que han basado su subsistencia en la caza-recolección. Dentro de esta heterogénea...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alejandra Vidal Elgueta. Magdalena García. Jorge Razeto. Pablo Mendez-Quirós. Mandakovic Valentina.

Se discuten los nociones de progreso y complejidad social arraigados en la concepción del Formativo, a partir de la evidencia de antiguos campos de cultivo, hoy en desuso, asociados a las aldeas formativas (sensu. 1000 a.C- 1000 d.C) de Caserones, Pircas, Ramaditas y Guatacondo, localizadas en la región de Tarapacá, Chile. Se presentan la coexistencia de al menos dos sistemas agrícolas diferenciados, uno que denominamos continuo o anual y otro discontínuo o estacional que requirieron del manejo...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Urban.

Research conducted in the adjoining Naco and Middle Chamelecon and Cacaulapa River (MCC) valleys of northwestern Honduras has revealed a wide array of ceramic firing facilities and implements used in fabricating pottery vessels during the Late (AD 600-800) and Terminal Classic (AD 800-1000). The diversity of manufacturing processes is especially well represented at two major workshops, one located at the Naco valley center of La Sierra and the other at the site of Las Canoas in the MCC. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marne Ausec. Patricia Urban. Jacob Griffith-Rosenberg. Reagan Neviska. Chelsea Katzeman.

Ongoing design description and analysis have revealed commonalities in the decoration of diverse ceramic artifact classes. Here we outline the specifics of these design features, focusing on depictions of monkeys and birds, geometric designs such as crosshatching and dots, and how these are used individually and in combinations. The use of similar designs on diverse pottery artifact classes suggests a commonality of accepted design elements, although there are differences between classes in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caroline Del Giudice. Patricia Urban. Edward Schortman.

Investigations conducted in the Naco valley and its environs within NW Honduras from 1975-2008 have revealed multiple facilities in which ceramic containers were fired. The vast majority of these date to the Late (AD 600-800) and Terminal Classic periods (AD 800-1000). Their diverse forms and dimensions hint at variations in aspects of production including the temperatures at which the vessels were heated and the degree of control artisans exercised over the manufacturing process. One line of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Mason.

Petrographic and SEM studies of the lustre-painted glazed pottery of the Islamic world between c. 700 and 1400 have defined an elite, high-technology ware made in few centres, at times only one centre for the entire Middle East; with a distribution network that spanned the Old World. Production centres such as Basra in Iraq, and al-Fustat in Egypt created some of the most advanced and influential ceramic types of the period, utilising technologies developed locally. But scientific laboratory...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edyta Marzec. Peter Day. Katherine Grillo.

"Nderit" pottery is associated with the earliest pastoralists in eastern Africa, c. 4000-4500 bp. and is found at both settlement sites and ritual "pillar sites" surrounding Lake Turkana in northwestern Kenya. Several of the known megalithic "pillar sites" are large communal cemeteries and contain very large numbers of Nderit sherds, yet little research has been carried out on these ceramics in terms of their technology or provenance. Primary research questions concerning the early pastoralists...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Veronica Testolini.

Excavations at Miranduolo, Tuscany revealed a substantial Medieval settlement and castle, with a rich architectural and ceramic sequence from the 7th-13th century. The ceramic record is dominated by coarseware, mainly cooking pots, which offer a reliable indicator of date at the site, but also a window on everyday life, of choices regarding food preparation equipment. Petrographic analysis has been employed in order to understand if these coarsewares were produced by the village inhabitants for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Gilstrap. Peter M. Day.

It is widely recognized that Mycenaean states varied in their structure and organisation, were linked to different types of crafting industries, a range of trade networks and a host of consumer preferences. The Saronic Gulf is a paradoxical space that physically separates Mycenaean geopolitical states/regions, while its waters facilitate the interregional movement of people, goods and ideas. The application of thin section petrography and INAA to observe the movement of pottery, the most...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Donna Roper.

The pottery produced by the Pawnee of the central Great Plains of North America underwent extensive modification in the eighteenth century. Although twentieth-century archaeologists described the "early" and "late" materials, they did not adequately characterize how Pawnee potters modified their craft in terms of vessel morphology or technological practice, nor did they consider pottery function. Thus, we have no satisfactory account of this change. Situated in the context of technological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Isabelle Druc.

Building upon the slow-science movement, and the work of Olivier Gosselain and others, this presentation examines how our understanding of ancient ceramic production depends upon the path a research may take. It argues for a re-articulation and re-evaluation of qualitative observation, small number of samples and quantitative data. The Rojo Grafitado case presented arose from research hazards, curiosity, and a regional perspective on ceramic production. During the first millennium B.C. in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gareth Perry.

Ninth-century England witnessed major social upheaval. Viking armies moved throughout the north and east, towns flourished again for the first time since the Roman period, and land ownership was fundamentally transformed. Significant in the material record is a veritable revolution in pottery production; pottery was wheel-thrown, kiln-fired, and made on a near industrial scale. A number of production centres were established under a Viking elite hailing from regions characterised by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Roberta Mentesana. Peter M. Day. Vassilis Kilikoglou. Simona Todaro.

Since the Final Neolithic, Phaistos hosted consumption events leaving deposits of pottery and animal bones, and was a pottery production location from at least the earlier phases of the Early Bronze Age (EBA). A recent re-examination of this important site has produced not only a Neolithic-EBA sequence unrivalled in Crete, but also a deep understanding of the ceramics, tracing change and continuity over this key time of transition, which some have seen as a transformation with an exogenous...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Clare Burke. Peter Day. Eva Alram-Stern. Katie Demakopoulo.

Forming part of a broader programme of macroscopic, petrographic, SEM, and NAA analysis of ceramics from Mainland Greece, this paper focuses on the Late Neolithic to Early Bronze II sequence at the site of Midea in the Argolid. Through investigating the technological variability present at Midea, our results suggest significant differences, and continuity, in technological choices over time. Most notable is the decline of grog temper between the Final Neolithic and Early Bronze Age periods....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ann Cordell. Neill Wallis. Thomas Pluckhahn.

Swift Creek Complicated Stamped pottery found throughout much of the lower Southeastern U.S. is arguably the premier material for the systematic study of Woodland interactions. The unique impressions of individual carved wooden paddles are often found on pottery at multiple sites, lending an unparalleled level of detail and spatial resolution to social connections. Furthermore, the distribution of vessels potentially reflects a broad range of interactive practices among a large proportion of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Killick. Edwin Wilmsen.

It may seem counterintuitive that colonists travelling substantial distances on foot into new territory should have carried ceramic vessels with them, but in some cases the evidence from ceramic petrography shows that they did. This case study examines the movements of the first pottery-using migrants into northern Botswana between the first and the fourth centuries CE. Southern Africa was the terminus of the long expansion of Bantu languages from their region of origin in present eastern...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Lawrence. Kathleen Marsaglia. Scott Fitzpatrick. Thomas Wake.

Petrographic analysis of ceramic sherds can elucidate manufacturing techniques and exchange systems. We present the first mineralogical assessment via thin-section petrography of archeological ceramics collected from the Bocas del Toro province on the Caribbean coast of Panama. Examined sherds include surface finds collected from archaeological sites on Bastimentos Island and at Cerro Brujo on the mainland, and excavated samples from Sitio Drago, Isla Colon. Thin-section petrography of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Masucci. Hector Neff.

The late prehispanic coastal Ecuadorian societies subsumed as Manteño -Guancavilca, are imagined as seafarers of the Andean region. On balsa rafts they plied a coast dotted with ports; participants in a trading empire. This traditional model of political-economic integration is being challenged with emphasis on regional autonomy and ethnic diversity. It is proposed that the analysis of the "ordinary" Manteño -Guancavilca vessels can contribute to this debate. Large, coarse paste, roughened...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Liye Xie. Leping Jiang. Weijin Huang.

Bone spades crafted from large mammal scapulae recovered from archaeological contexts have generally been assumed to be earth-working implements, based on analogies with ethnographic artifacts. On the Ningshan Plain in eastern China, hundreds of scapular spades have been discovered. The majority of these scapular spades belong to the early Hemudu culture (7,000-6,000 BP), with a few earlier examples dating to the last stage of the Kuahuqiao culture (7,200-7000 BP). To identify the use contexts...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chunxue WANG. Yinmin YANG. Chunxue WANG. Xing GAO. Ning WANG.

The appearance of art is an important development in behavioral modernity. In this paper we address the production of early Holocene ostrich eggshell beads. Such beads have been found in many Chinese late Paleolithic sites and also the early Holocene site of Shui Donggou. The study of these ancient beads will help us to better understand early craft production and the role art played in the development of society. In this paper, we present the results of our experimental ostrich shell bead...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hong Chen. Xiaoling Zhang. Chen Shen.

Use-wear analysis has become an essential method for the functional study of lithic artifacts from archaeological assemblages. However, research concerning multi-stage use-wear formation is poorly developed. In this paper, we report the results of an experimental study focusing on flake scar patterns, rounding and polish formation in multiple stages. For comparative data and interpretation, nine cases of single working tasks were undertaken on scraping bone with Onondaga chert from Ontario Lake....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yuzhang YANG. Weiya LI. Chenglong YIN. Zhijie CHENG. Juzhong ZHANG.

Shunshanji is an important Neolithic age archaeological site in Jiangsu province. However, until now hardly any paleo-ethnobotanical research has been accomplished. In this paper, microbotanical remains such as starch grains and phytoliths were used to investigate the ancient plant utilization at this site. In addition, carbonized seeds from portulacaceae, rumex, chenopodiaceae, asteraceae were recovered through flotation analysis. Both stone tools and pottery vessels yielded plentiful starch...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Qi-Long Cui. Juzhong ZHANG. Yuzhang YANG.

Word Count =147. 200 maximum. Jiahu is one of the most important settlement sites of the Chinese Middle Neolithic Age (ca.7000-5500 BC) and is located in the upper Huai River Valley, China. During excavations, a number of ground stone tools were uncovered. Use-wear analysis and replication experiments were conducted in order to understand the functionality, usage and contact materials of these tools. Our experiments involved stone shovels, axes, adzes, gouges and other common stone tools from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Juzhong Zhang. Ling Yao. Yuzhang Yang. Weiya Li.

Since 2010, we have extracted plentiful plant micro-remains from the surfaces of both stone artifacts and pottery recovered from the Jiahu (9000-7500 cal. yr BP), Peiligang (8500-7000 cal. yr BP) and Tanghu sites in central Henan Province, China. Through micro-morphological examination, starch grains and phytoliths from Oryza, Triticeae Dumort and millet were identified. These remains reflect the existence of mixed farming of rice and millet in the upper reaches of the Huaihe River 7000 years...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Geoffrey Cunnar. Fengshi Luan.

A relatively rich burial, M33, was excavated in 2000 at the late prehistoric, Longshan period center of Liangchengzhen by a collaborative team from Shandong University, The Field Museum, and Yale University. The most unusual grave good was a turquoise artifact located on the left arm of the interred. This presentation provides a description of contextual, use-wear, comparative and replication analyses in order to better understand the nature of the turquoise artifact and the burial ritual for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yanhua Song. Xiaoling Zhang. Chen Shen.

In this paper, I report on the use-wear analysis of quartzite artifacts. This is one of the first systematic examinations in China for raw materials other than chert and obsidian. The experiments demonstrated that different use-wear patterns were observed on the different raw materials when the contact materials, use-motion and experimenters were the same. So our research supports the idea that there is no single solution for use-wear analysis. The different characteristics of use-wear...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zhuang Lina. Zhou Runken.

he Dongshancun Site is located in Zhangjiagang city in Jiangsu Province in the eastern area of China. The site is only 2 kilometers from the Yangtze River. During 2008-2010, the Nanjing Museum excavated about 37 tombs belonging to the Songze Culture (3900-3100BC). Excavations revealed that some of interred were buried with abundant pottery vessels, jade artifacts, and other well-made stone tools such as the stone yue axe, stone adze and stone chisel. In this paper, we employ a low-power method...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wei Ge. Weijin Huang.

Carbonized black debris was found in many fu pots recovered from an early stratum at the Hemudu site (c. 7000–6500 cal. BP). The debris resembles food residues. Although this kind of debris has been regarded as residues of cooked rice for a long time, so far no specific research has been conducted. To clarify the nature of these residues, we carried out a microscopic morphological analysis and stable isotope analysis on one of the specimens. The morphological analysis found starch granules of a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ying Guan. Xing Gao.

Archaeological plant residue analysis has developed considerably in China during the last ten years. In terms of the Paleolithic, state of the art technology has been broadly and successfully applied by archaeologists at various sites. Issues about stone tool function, plant use, the origin of agriculture and the like can now be deeply discussed with the direct evidence of residues from stone artifacts. This is the case for either chipped stone or ground stone tools. However, this technology...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Qiang Wang. Dong Li. Qing Wang. Mingqi Li. Xiaoyan Yang.

The analysis of starch grains from the Xijincheng site showed that most of the starch was from barley (Hordeum spp.) which accounted for about 70% of the total starch grains. Other starches included foxtail millet (Setaria italica), broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum), sorghum (Sorghum spp.) and a small amount of starch grains from Leguminosaes and root tuber plants. Combined with the analytical results of carbonized remains, we conclude that ancient Xijincheng people adopted the pattern of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Wagner.

Archaeology in cultural resource management uses methods designed to cover large areas of land, however the results are rarely interpreted as part of a landscape. Instead, the focus is usually on the densest areas of artifacts, without consideration for the types of data that might lie within the less-dense areas. This is primarily a problem of interpretation, although it is exasperated through the use of discontiguous sampling units and through the continued requirements of out-dated methods...

DOCUMENT Citation Only April Beisaw.

The lands around New York City’s rural reservoirs contain ruins of residences, schools, churches, farms, and other businesses, displaced by watershed creation that began in the mid-nineteenth century. But even the forests around them are artifacts of the abandonment. Here, the spaces in between buildings and trash piles are the places where the region’s economy flourished before the reservoir changed everything. Treating each ruin as an individual site would ignore the interconnectedness of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Watts-Malouchos. Zarko Tankosic.

The identification, designation, and definition of the ubiquitous archaeological "site" are foundational to archaeological survey. These standard classificatory practices frequently emplace rigid spatial and temporal boundaries around human activities and portray past landscapes as simply consisting of "sites" and the unoccupied spaces outside of "sites". However, the people, places, and material things that constitute physical and social landscapes are dynamic, and the boundaries between them...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin King. Heather Richards-Rissetto. Kristin Landau.

The concept of visibility: what or who is visible and who can see what, provides archaeologists with information about power, ideology, and interaction. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) allow us to quantify the visibility of archaeological features in landscapes and 3D visualizations and gives us a way to experience these past landscapes. In Maya archaeology, most visibility studies measure the visibility of monuments as a means to understand the role of architecture within ancient Maya...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eva Hulse.

As in all archaeology, geoarchaeologists sample discrete loci and use those data to make generalizations about broad areas. When interpolating and extrapolating from known data points, errors may be introduced which can bias interpretation. Here, examples from CRM illustrate some of the challenges of analyzing discontinuous or otherwise incomplete spatial data. SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meghan Buchanan.

Archaeological studies of hypothesized regional abandonments often perform what Tim Ingold (2008) refers to as "a logic of inversion;" by drawing lines around sites, regions, and spaces we create boundaries in which life is lived, and by extension, create spaces where life is not lived. In examples of abandonments, the absence of evidence related to human living spaces is taken as the absence of (human) life. In other words, when we demarcate "abandoned" or "unoccupied spaces" (noted as such by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Johnston.

One of the basic tenets of the landscape approach in archaeology is that we need to think beyond the idea of discrete sites and consider instead the use of an entire landscape (or landscapes). From this perspective, places in a landscape that do not contain "sites" as understood in the conventional sense were nevertheless woven into the lives of ancient people. This means that, in order to understand the past, we need to understand both the places where people left things behind and the places...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kevin Wiley.

The Middle Neolithic circular ditched enclosure of Goseck in Central Germany was built and used during the Stichbandkeramik period. Subsequently, during the Gatersleben period, another ditched feature was constructed, which intersected the earlier enclosure. However, between these two periods, in the intervening century, during the Rössen period, the site was not in use. This temporal gap has been glossed over in narratives of the site that stress continuity. This paper will examine the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zenobie Garrett.

The end of the Roman Empire is marked archaeologically by an impressive shift in material culture. Changes in land organization and the use of more ephemeral building materials created a largely invisible and difficult to detect post-Roman landscape. Archaeologists initially assumed such landscapes were abandoned as a result of the political and economic chaos resulting from Rome’s fall. Work in northwest Europe in the past two decades, however has shown that new techniques can help locate these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Nelson.

In recent years, geophysical survey techniques have allowed archaeologists to identify subsurface cultural features—a dataset that has filled previously empty spaces on our site maps and made our interpretations of ancient landscapes all the richer. Significantly, geophysical datasets reveal not only features, but also the empty spaces in between those features. This paper explores the spaces between geophysical anomalies—the courtyards, plazas and paths that are common yet rarely investigated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan Kassabaum.

The mound-and-plaza complex is a hallmark of late prehistoric sites in the Lower Mississippi Valley. While these mounds and the spaces between them have been the focus of much productive research, many mound-and-plaza centers began as circular or oval-shaped middens and only later incorporated mounds. Moreover, sites organized around central "empty" spaces are common starting in the Archaic period. I argue that by examining these earlier and less frequently studied examples of "plazas," we can...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Clark.

It is common for open air sites dating to the Pleistocene to lack organic preservation, including bone. Many of these sites also do not contain features such as hearths. Therefore, the dominant signal that remains is the result of lithic reduction. Because knapping is a reductive process, it creates a large amount of waste material and this debris dominates the artifact count numerically and volumetrically. Lithic pieces associated with other types of activities, such as wood working or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Lack. Todd Bostwick.

A significant amount of research in Hohokam archaeology has been dedicated to understanding the structure of interaction and exchange. One particular model that has gained recent momentum is that of a marketplace economy revolving around ballcourt events that served as gathering points for social and economic interaction. These markets, or trade fairs, would have provided a reliable mechanism for the exchange of goods to spatially and socially disparate populations. Feasting also may have been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Douglas Mitchell. Teresa Ingalls.

Studies of burial practices in southern Arizona and the Tucson Basin have been limited to data from small scale excavations. Recent excavations were conducted at the Ironwood Village site, a late Pioneer and Colonial Period Hohokam village along the Santa Cruz River. Eleven cemeteries were identified surrounding a central ballcourt and plaza, which included over 250 cremations and 4 inhumations. This paper explores burial methods, physical anthropology, funerary accompaniments, and spatial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Motsinger. Shawn Fehrenbach.

The particular challenges at the Ironwood Village excavations—time constraints, burgeoning data opportunities, and management of a complex array of excavation staff and machinery--begged for a modernized approach to data collection and workflow management. PaleoWest Archaeology’s digital workflow system—already four years in development—was customized for the project and implemented throughout. The result was one of the world’s first all-digital major excavation projects, the success of which...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tiffany Cain. Richard Leventhal.

International tourism is a powerful economic force in Mexico today but usually provides little help to indigenous communities except through a long process of economic trickle-down. In addition, many of the ancient sites, the focus of this tourism, are controlled by the nation-state with indigenous peoples often having little say about development or use of the economic benefits. Our recent project in Tihosuco, Quintana Roo is a collaboration between the town of Tihosuco, the Tihosuco Ejido, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caitlin Curtis. Peter Biehl.

UNESCO has long set the example for heritage practice, with site practitioners worldwide motivated to achieve the nearly universally desired World Heritage Site (WHS) status to help preserve and sustain their sites. However, the idealized goals espoused by UNESCO, a global organization, are inherently universalizing, which can render them incompatible with the particularities of each local setting. One illustrative example is Çatalhöyük, Turkey. Since being granted UNESCO WHS status in 2012,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Necmi Karul. Mert Bertan AVCI.

This paper will present the Aktopraklık Cultural Heritage Management Project, which was established as a result of the archaeological evidence excavated from the prehistoric site of Aktopraklık in northwest Turkey. The project encompasses all aspects of archaeological heritage as well as heritage and sustainable tourism. The paper discusses public outreach and interactive engagement through reconstruction of the prehistoric life, ethnographic exhibits, and experimental areas together with the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Josephine Rasmussen.

Within contemporary European heritage discourse, agriculture and forestry are increasingly identified as threats to archaeological remains. At ploughed-over archaeological sites, objects that where once associated with primary depositional contexts become mixed into the top soil, and this enhances their destruction. This paper explores the discourse that revolves around hobbyist metal detecting as a large scale means of rescuing archaeological material from destruction. Based on a case study...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ruth Maher. Julie Bond. Stephen Dockrill. Julie Gibson. Jane Downes.

The Orkney Isles of Scotland, though greatly impacted by environmental shifts, are remarkably resilient and have a 5,000+, long-term occupation sequence. There has been a concerted effort by many researchers to study Orkney’s past in order to help Orkney move forward in the face of current sea-level rise and changing social identities. Current archaeological research is shedding light on land- and sea- scapes of power and monuments of control, social identity through burials & settlement...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Dugmore. Richard Streeter.

Before the Norse settlement, Iceland was characterised by substantial areas of birch woodland in sheltered valleys, highland willow tundra and birch-willow scrub extending into more exposed areas of upland, coast, and marginal wetlands. Terrestrial mammals had been extirpated by the Quaternary glaciations. Aeolian sediment accumulation rates were low and correlated over kilometre–scales. Rapid colonisation by the Norse (perhaps 20,000 settlers in less than 30 years) and their introduction of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ian Simpson. Konrad Smiarowski. Christian Madsen. Michael Nielsen.

In this paper we set out to establish the role of soil nutrient management in the sustainability and resilience of livestock agricultural systems in Norse Greenland (ca. late 9th – 14th centuries AD). Using a landscape sampling framework that includes large church farm, medium sized farms and small farms we use thin section micromorphology and associated SEM-EDX analyses of cultural soils and sediments (anthrosols) in home field areas to identify materials used in the endeavour to sustain soil...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jette Arneborg.

The Norse colonies in SW Greenland were established in the late 900’s and depopulated in the middle of the second half of the 1400’s. The traditional Nordic Temperate Zone pastoralism clearly was at its limits in Sub Arctic SW Greenland. Still, adaptation to the new environment has been described as successful, and the depopulation in the late Middle Ages is considered a consequence of the specialization the successful adaptation leaving the Norse Greenlandic society less resilient and more...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Seth Brewington.

Fowling traditionally played an important role in the subsistence economy of the Faroe Islands. The large-scale, sustainable exploitation of wild seabirds in the Faroes is noted in written sources at least as far back as the 16th century. Though the practice of fowling in these islands no doubt far precedes the earliest written documentation, archaeological evidence for the activity has until recently been limited. However, recent archaeofaunal data are beginning to provide a more complete...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Frank Feeley.

At the start of the 15th century a major commercial fishing was built on the far western coast of Iceland at a farm called Gufuskalar. During the winter months cod fish were caught, processed and dried on site for trade with continental European merchants. This paper details the rescue excavations at the site and discusses some of our preliminary results. SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Konrad Smiarowski.

Changes in climate regimes have played a significant role in the cultural settlement patterns of Greenland for several millennia. This presentation focuses on the Norse Settlement ca. 985-1450 CE and how the terrestrial and marine (wild and domestic) animal resources were utilized, managed and modified in the face of climatic and environmental changes at all levels of the Norse social strata. Datasets from small tenant farms and shielings such as E74 Qorlortorsuaq and E168 , middle size...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ramona Harrison. Árni Daníel Júlíusson.

This paper reconciles the results of the long-term Gásir and Hinterlands Project with the underpinnings of historical research of the area. The harbor and trade site complex at Gásir and the monastic estate at Möðruvellir were central areas in the region. Zooarchaeological/environmental data from these sites and hinterlands sites suggest that Hörgá Valley as closest supplier of animal products, may have changed its livestock management strategies, potentially to partake in increasing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brenda Prehal.

The research that has dominated Icelandic burial practices has until very recently been quite narrow. Burials were excavated to extract the skeleton and artifacts within the grave cut itself, leading to a central theory that Icelandic burials are poor in ritual and culture. Recent excavation and theories, however, have led to open area excavations of pagan cemeteries, which reveal much more complicated ritual. Snorri Sturlusson, the author of the famous Icelandic Sagas and Eddas, might give us...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christian Madsen.

Greenland was settled by Norse hunter-farmers in the decades around AD 1000. Two fjord systems were populated: South Greenland formed the largest settlement area that lasted until c. AD 1450, the smaller Norse settlement area in present day Nuuk fjord being abandoned c. 100 years earlier. New detailed archaeological settlement evidence from the Vatnahverfi-a core settlement area in the Norse Eastern Settlement-is explored in terms of environmental- and food securities relating to community level...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas McGovern.

In 1257 a major volcanic eruption in modern Indonesia produced rapid cooling in the North Atlantic region, and multiple climate proxies indicate onset of summer sea ice in Danmark Strait and N Iceland followed ca. 1260-1300. Zooarchaeological and paleoclimate research has documented the impacts of summer sea ice onset in the Norse Greenlandic settlements (Ogilvie et al. 2009), and documentary sources from Iceland report weather-related famine in the 1270’s. An archaeofauna excavated in 2011 from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Till Sonnemann. Menno Hoogland. Corinne L. Hofman. Eduardo Herrera Malatesta. Jorge Ulloa Hung.

The archaeological footprint of Caribbean pre-Columbian settlements is often subtle; limited to surface scatter of shell, lithic and ceramic material. In the northern Dominican Republic, slight differences in topography have been identified as additional evidence for Amerindian habitation sites. Circular platforms from 7 to 10 meters in diameter, were dug into the hill slope and levelled to form the base of round houses, as shown in recent excavations by the Nexus1492 project. The terraced...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Douglas Comer. Ronald Blom. Bruce Chapman. William Megarry. Bryce Davenport.

The pluvial lakes in the Mojave Desert, Which are today simply expanses of sand in nine years out of ten, were once large bodies of water, many of them linked together by streams and large rivers. Several were fed by the Mojave River, which introduced aquatic life. Fresh water clams were common along the beaches on lakes fed by the Mojave River, which were also places frequented by human groups that were attracted to the resources to be found there, among which were now extinct mega-fauna. Both...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mike Carson.

Landscapes can be appreciated as heritage resources with complex natural and cultural histories, potentially studied through diverse data-sets and intellectual approaches. Toward illustrating some of these prospects, examples are presented from research across the Pacific Oceanic region, drawing on digital elevation models, coding of land cover and other geographic attributes, site-specific geoarchaeological testing, georeferencing of historical maps and images, and traditional ethnohistories as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Sever. Thomas L. Sever. Robert Griffin.

This research documents the effects of human activity upon tropical forests and desert landscapes. The investigation uses both satellite and airborne imagery to understand the dynamics of human adaptation and interaction upon these landscapes, and the role of natural and human-induced past and present changes to climate variability. These two subjects are highly interrelated since human-induced landscape changes can have strong impacts on climate, while natural climate variability can in turn...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bryce Davenport. Douglas Comer. Will Megarry. Alexandru Popa. Sergiu Musteata.

The Moldovan site of Orheiul Vechi has been continuously occupied since the Late Paleolithic due in part to its commanding position over the local landscape and its strategic situation on the nexus of Eurasian cultural flows and population movements. From the Iron Age onward, the inhabitants of Orheiul Vechi took advantage of natural fortifications, tributary access to the Dniester River, and nearby chernozem soils to consolidate a long-term power base. Using data from ongoing archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Will Megarry. Gabriel Cooney. Robert Sands. Douglas Comer. Bryce Davenport.

The Shetland Islands are the northernmost part of Europe where farming was practiced in the Neolithic, between 3800 and 2500 BCE. The islands’ isolated location coupled with distinct environmental factors resulted in distinctive and localized customs and economies. These are most clearly manifest in the production and distribution of felsite polished stone axes and Shetland knives sourced from linear grey-blue dykes in the elevated North Roe region of the islands. These artefacts are found...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sara Morrow. Ian Kuijt. Katie Shakour.

19th and 20th century Irish house wakes memorialized the dead in a spirit of remembrance, revelry, and community healing. A central aspect of the wake was the smoking of pipe tobacco, with funeral goers smoking in the house and at the burial ground often discarding their clay pipes after smoking. Archaeological excavations on Inishark Island, County Galway, Ireland, revealed complete and incomplete clay pipes in a deposit within building 8, a home dating to the late 19th century. By comparing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lauren Couey. Ian Kuijt. Liam Murphy. Max Lopez.

This poster examines the use of ground-penetrating radar in combination with three-dimensional modeling to identify, examine, and virtually reconstruct the subsurface material remains of nineteenth century homes on the islands of Inishark and Inishbofin, Co. Galway, Ireland. In this research we employ a multi-stage research program starting with a ground-penetrating radar survey of multiple house sites and a digital scanning of the ground surface to develop a high-resolution topographical map,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meagan Conway. Ian Kuijt.

This research explores colonial transformation of households and communities on the fringes of empire - the frontier. Often overlooked, these fluid spaces have revelatory potential regarding deeply situated cultural change and social dynamics in the face of catastrophic adjustment. This project focuses on the local processes as embodied by these individual households and rural communities on the coast of western Ireland in order to understand larger regional and national social and cultural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elise Alonzi. Ryan Lash. Terry O'Hagan. Anne Wildenhain. Ian Kuijt.

Many medieval and early modern villages and abbeys in County Galway, Ireland are situated directly on the coast. This study seeks to understand the pathways that marine resources follow as they enter diets of religious and lay Irish populations by using isotopic, ethnographic, and historical evidence. The isotopic portion of this study elucidates how marine-derived isotopes cycle through the coastal Irish landscape and are included in the diet. Ecological sampling on the Atlantic island,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Lash. Terry O'Hagan. Elise Alonzi. Franc Myles. Anne Wildenhain.

Pilgrimage traditions on islands along the coast of Connemara in western Ireland provide a valuable context for exploring the relationship between ritual practice, identity, and political economic change from a long-term perspective. The island of Inishark, Co. Galway, contains a number of ritual remains dating from the 9th-13th centuries, including a church, a holy well, cross-slabs, one or more burial grounds, as well as a number of penitential stone platforms known as leachta. Islanders in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Webster.

When working class European immigrants first arrived on American shores, they had a profound effect on American cities. Throughout the nineteenth century, the processes of industrialization coupled with Boston’s position as a shipping hub created an influx of low-income laborers in need of housing. The Clough House, a colonial home built around 1715, functioned as a single-family residence for a century before being converted into a tenement for the working class. This poster explores the impact...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meredith Chesson. Annmarie Lindzy.

Archaeologists have described and discussed households for decades, yet only recently have them made the theoretical leap from residential structures and coresidential units to peoples’ homes. Homes are built, embodied and enlivened by peoples’ actions, thoughts, relationships, experiences and aspirations. This poster presents the results of an ethnoarchaeoogical analysis of homemaking on the islands of Inishbofin and Inishark (co. Galway) as well as Inishturk (co. Mayo) in western Ireland....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jorge Caro. Maria Pereda. Ivan Briz. Myrian Álvarez. Debora Zurro.

Cooperation studies have become an essential area of knowledge across different disciplines. Within the humanities and the social sciences, it has been used to explain human behaviour as well as the maintenance of the social tissue itself. It has also given clues to explain the variability and the plasticity of human social organization at different levels. In this presentation we focus on Yamana society a nomadic hunter-fisherer-gatherer group that inhabited the southernmost region of South...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carla Lancelotti. Xavier Rubio-Campillo. Matthieu Salpeteur. Marco Madella.

The aim of this study is to model resource management and decision making among hunter-gatherer and agro-pastoral groups in semi-arid zones in order to explore evolutionary trajectories in relation to (a) the appearance of other specialized groups during the mid-Holocene and (b) environmental variability. The study of coexistence and interaction between groups with different subsistence strategies and land-use behaviours represents an interesting research challenge to understand socio-ecological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrea Balbo. Jasmin Link. Jürgen Scheffran. et al..

Following the introduction of agriculture, domestication and permanent settlement in the early Holocene, patrilinear and patrilocal models have become more common than matrilineal and matrilocal ones. While patrilocality is observed at the worldwide level, matrilocality has been associated to specific areas, e.g. sub-Saharan Africa. Matrilocal and patrilocal residence patterns indicate whether as a rule, a newly formed couple settles with or near the female’s or male’s parents respectively. In...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Guillem Frances. Xavier Rubio. Carla Lancelotti. Alexis Torrano. Alex Albore.

Agent-Based Models (ABMs) have been increasingly used to study social phenomena, from the emergence of social norms to population dynamics or cultural transmission processes. Key to this method of computational simulation is the tension for explaining how macroscopic phenomena emerge from the interaction of agents behaving in a plausible manner. However, the behavior is too often encoded as a simple set of condition-action rules. We consider this kind of rule-based behaviour too simplistic,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andreas Angourakis. Matthieu Salpeteur. Xavier Rubio-Campillo. Bernardo Rondelli. Sebastian Stride.

The relation between the main variants of pre-industrial economic production in arid Eurasia, from nomadic pastoralism to irrigated agriculture, is known to have been unstable, with abundant examples of conflict and shifting patterns of land use right up to contemporary times. We present a brief review of our experience using Agent-Based models to identify mechanisms and system dynamics that could help explain the different land use configurations, which have been recorded archaeologically for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Xavier Rubio-Campillo. Enrico Crema.

Several human activities require an optimal number of individuals to maximise their utility, often leading to the coexistence of positive and negative frequency dependence. This generates unstable equilibria, as group close to the optimal size will be invaded by joiners who will increase their fitness by becoming new members, leading either beneficial or detrimental effects to the incumbent members. If a group is optimally sized, incumbent member will experience a decline in fitness, while...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joaquim Fort.

We review a method to estimate the percentages of demic and cultural diffusion in Neolithic transitions (Fort, PNAS 2012). We extend that method and identify mainly demic and mainly cultural regions in Europe. SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeffrey Quilter.

Revised chronologies affect our interpretations of cultural phenomena more than vice versa. This paper explores these issues in relation to the Moche. New dates suggest that the Moche phenomenon occurred later and ended later than previously thought and this is linked to a number of key issues in Andean culture history. The collapse of the Larco ceramic sequence is linked to the undermining of the concept of the Moche state and affects our concept of "Moche," in general. Particular attention...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patrick Mullins.

During the Late Intermediate Period (LIP, 1000-1476 CE), the florescence of the Chimú Empire in the Moche Valley on the coast corresponded with an explosion of fortified and defensive settlement up-valley and into the nearby highlands. Previous scholarship has associated these forts with tentative stages of Chimú expansion into the middle and upper reaches of the Moche Valley, placing the imperial frontier as located in the transitional zone between the river valley and the highlands above....