Anthropic activity markers: archaeology and ethnoarchaeology

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

People tend to recurrently use specific areas of their living space, producing an accumulation of evidences (chemical and/or physical) that represent the result of the activity performed. The possibility to identify and connect these evidences to the activity that generated the record is pivotal to our understanding of past human behaviour. Ethnoarchaeology and experimental archaeology drive the inferential reasoning that creates the models connecting the distribution/concentration of proxies with specific activities. We define these models as 'anthropic activity markers' and propose a transdisciplinary approach to reduce problems of equifinality whereby the same pattern might be caused by several activities. In particular, the analysis of the spatial distribution of the fingerprints under study is considered fundamental for the definition of anthropic activity markers.This session aims to gather contributions from scholars in different fields, willing to challenge this issue from different points of view and at different scales (landscape and domestic or productive structures), going from a macro to a micro scale, from “space”, to “place”. We invite contributions that include different approaches, such as remote sensing, archaeological prospection, botanic analyses, chemical analyses, archaeozoology, microdebitage, and micromorphology. Archaeological and ethnoarchaeological contexts are welcome to show the potentiality of the approach.

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-28 of 28)

  • Documents (28)

Documents
  1. Activity Area Analysis of Elite and Commoner Spaces in the Ancient Maya City of Actuncan, Belize (2016)
  2. Chemical residues as anthropic activity markers. Food production and consumption (2015)
  3. Combining residue analysis of floors and ceramics to identify activity areas and the use of space (2016)
  4. Detecting the functions of patios in a Classic Maya regal palace at La Corona, Guatemala. (2017)
  5. An ethnoarchaeological study on anthropic markers from a shell-midden in Tierra del Fuego: Lanashuaia II (2015)
  6. Exploring the Changing Roles of Maya E-groups: Geochemical Analysis of E-group Plaster Floors at Actuncan, Belize (2017)
  7. Extraction of Soil Biomarkers from the Sacred Cacao Groves of the Maya (2016)
  8. Integrated Anthrosol Prospection at Betty’s Hope Historic Sugarcane Plantation, Antigua, British West Indies (2015)
  9. Knowing My House: An Indigenous Theory and Practice of Being (2017)
  10. Mercury pollution and the ancient Maya: where, why and how. (2015)
  11. Microarchaeology applied to foumier deposits: the use of phytoliths, spherulites and ash pseudomorphs as a tool for reconstruct livestock practices. (2016)
  12. Micromorphological study of concotto surfaces protected by the Avellino Eruption in 3,780 BP at the Afragola village in Southern Italy (2015)
  13. Modelling Anthropic Activity Markers: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Study of Plant-Related Domestic Activities (2017)
  14. Nested Proxies: Multi-scalar Approaches to Interpreting Human-Landscape Interactions (2015)
  15. New Perspectives on the use of Yucca in the arid Southwest: archaeobotany and experiment (2015)
  16. On Swiddening and Pigs: The Management of Micronesian Agroforests (2016)
  17. Past human activities: ethnographic and geostatistical models from North Gujarat (India) (2015)
  18. The People Who Harvest Together, Live Together. Ethnoarchaeological considerations on a Late Chalcolithic archaeobotanical assemblage from Çadır Höyük, Turkey (2017)
  19. Reading memories of past practices in the landscapes of poverty domination: an ethnoarchaeological study in Morelos, Mexico (2015)
  20. Residue Analysis of Plastered Floors and Function of the Rooms at Teopancazco, Teotihuacan (2017)
  21. Root, Fruit and Dirt: using ethnoarchaeology and archaebotany for constructing reference collections of plants in activity areas in Eastern Amazon (2016)
  22. Seeds for the gods: chía (Salvia hispanica) in Teotihuacan ritual offerings (2017)
  23. Spatial Analysis of Domestic Structures (2016)
  24. Starch Grain Analysis of Bedrock Mortars in California: Implications to Our Understanding of California Prehistory (2017)
  25. Supper’s ready. Preparing and cooking food in Italian Protohistory (2016)
  26. Untangling Activity Areas in Open Spaces: Ethnography at Jandhala, North Gujarat, India (part II (2016)
  27. Using geochemistry, phytoliths and ethnographic analogy to interpret Neolithic settlements in southwest Asia (2017)
  28. Where are the lives? Characterising settlements from small artefactual debris (2015)