Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Florencia Rizzo. Sabrina Leonardt. Amber Johnson. Vivian Scheinsohn.

In this work we apply theenvironmental and ethnographic frames of referenceconstructed by Binford (2001) and calculated in EnvCalc2.1 in order to generate and evaluatearchaeological hypothesis for the Central-Western area of Chubut Province (Patagonia, Argentina), an area in which archaeological research has recentlystarted. Patagonia is an elongatedterritory located between 39º W and 55º S in Southern South America. By its shape, it receives animportant oceanic influence which determines the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Theodore Marks. Grant McCall. Andrew Schroll. James Enloe.

In his landmark work, "Constructing Frames of Reference", Lewis Binford attempted to create a series of models relating hunter-gatherer adaptive responses to observable climatic and ecological dynamics. In Southern Africa, the large scale shift toward microlithic technologies associated with the Middle to Later Stone Age transition is believed to coincide with the environmental changes that occurred around the Last glacial Maximum. It has been frequently hypothesized in the African literature...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Darlene Applegate.

Instruction in introductory archaeology courses focuses on student understanding of key concepts such as artifact, preservation, formation processes, context, stratigraphy, and association. This poster presents hands-on activities for applying key archaeology concepts in the undergraduate classroom.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fernando Ozorio De Almeida. Brenda Bowser. Sachiko Sakai.

This study provides an example of the potential for optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating to resolve chronological questions that cannot be adequately addressed using conventional radiocarbon dating alone. We have applied this method to ceramics from the Teotônio site, located beside the Teotônio waterfall on the upper Madeira River in southwestern Amazonia. This site can be understood as a persistent place, with several occupations ranging from at least 6000 BP to recent times, when...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kate Trusler.

Since the 1950s, zooarchaeologists have noticed that the expected number of each skeletal element varied from the recovered frequencies. Determining the reason for such variation is an important aspect of zooarchaeological research. Several approaches to understanding skeletal part frequencies are current, including density mediated attrition and differential transport. One method of interpreting skeletal part frequencies that is underused in studies of complex societies involves food utility...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Huw Groucutt.

The last five years have seen a rapid acceleration in research on Late Pleistocene Arabia. A growing number of Late Pleistocene archaeological sites have now been identified. While Pleistocene hominin fossil remains are currently unknown in Arabia, a fast expanding corpus of faunal remains and paleoenvironmental archives provide important contextual information for hominin occupations. Claims have been made for close similarities between Arabian and broadly contemporary East and Northeast...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sabrina Meyer. Frank Rühli. Christian Auf der Maur.

In 1985/86 the parish church of St. Georg, Sursee was excavated. The archaeological findings showed that the ecclesiastical beginnings of the church date back to the early Middle Ages. In the early 7th century CE a wooden church was built near burials dating back to late antiquity. In total, five occupational phases for the cemetery can be associated with five construction phases (one wooden and four stone phases) of the church. Of the 223 recovered burials, only 119 individuals were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sydney Hanson. Jade d'Alpoim Guedes. Steve Weber. Thanik Lertcharnrit.

Thailand is a relatively new frontier for archaeobotanists, having suffered in the past from a shortage of archaeobotanical research. While archaeologists in Southeast Asia have begun to chart when and how rice and millet agriculture developed and spread, a clear picture of prehistoric agriculture in central Thailand has yet to emerge. This paper describes some preliminary results from a series of sites that have been occupied from ca. 2500 BCE to 500 CE. These are Non Pa Wai, Non Mak La, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caitlin Holloway.

Vegetation and plant resources can impact forager mobility and subsistence strategies. However, misconceptions about the preservation of organics in subarctic archaeological contexts and underestimations of the importance of plant resources to foraging societies limit paleoethnobotanical research in high-latitude environments. This research addresses these issues with analyses of archaeobotanical remains found in hearth features from multiple components (approximately 13,300 through 8,000 cal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Courtney Hofman. Torben Rick. Sabrina Shirazi. Jesus Maldonado.

As many recent genetic and archaeological studies have shown, humans have intentionally and unintentionally moved plants and animals around the world. The California Channel Islands provide a unique environment to explore ancient translocations due to their close proximity to the California mainland, long human occupation (~13,000 years) and limited terrestrial diversity. Here we present our interdisciplinary approach to investigating the origins of California Channel Island terrestrial mammals...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jerald Ek. Carlos Pallán Gayol.

The past decade has witnessed a revolution in our understanding of Classic Maya geopolitics, particularly in reconstructing asymmetrical interpolity relationships dominated by expansionist states. Employing variable political strategies, including both direct and indirect rulership, the Kaanu’l Dynasty dominated a large network of kingdoms across the Maya Lowlands. This paper examines the impacts of the expansion and dissolution of the Kaanu’l state in western Campeche, within the northwestern...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Gurstelle.

The Museum of Anthropology at Wake Forest University has several collections that are of great interest to archaeologists. Three of our collections are presented: the Rights collection, the Lam collection, and the West Mexican collection. The Rights collection consists of nearly 20,000 artifacts collected by the Rev. Douglas Rights in the first half of the 20th century from archaeological sites near Winston-Salem and in the western Piedmont of North Carolina. The Lam collection consists of over...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Benchley. Norine Carroll.

The Archaeology Institute at the University of West Florida in Pensacola includes a regional archaeological museum and curation facility. Approximately 450 archeological collections and associated project archives from terrestrial and underwater sites are available to researchers and students. Projects conducted by the Institute along the northern Gulf Coast since the 1980s, and more recently by the Department of Anthropology, include Prehistoric through Industrial era archaeological sites...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anabel Ford.

The El Pilar community is dynamic and includes the most proximal villages, the general communities of Cayo and Peten, the nations of Belize and Guatemala, and from there the greater international community interested in the culture and nature of the tropics. From its first archaeological recognition in the 1980s, El Pilar was destined to be play a role in the conservation and development of the Maya forest. Large and imposing, with monuments straddling the political line that separates Belize...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Gibb.

The Anthropocene epoch, garnering the interest of geologists and environmental scientists for the past decade, has now entered the archaeological lexicon. As in other disciplines, questions remain about what Anthropocene means and when it began, as well as how it differs from the Holocene. This presentation explores some of these issues and offers a ground-up approach by which conventional approaches in archaeology might be adapted to a reassessment of the human experience and the role of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Vivian James.

This paper builds on ideas expressed by Taylor (1948) and Schiffer (1988) to argue that there is a foundational theory in archaeology that is pervasive, definitive, and underlies all archaeological epistemology and praxis. It is so basic an idea that it is thought of as an assumption rather than a theory, yet it is a major contribution from archaeology to scientific knowledge and practice. This theory is "context," which goes far beyond the three dimensions of object-space-time advocated by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Rubertone.

Social archaeology today takes research far beyond questions of “subsistence and dating.” It pushes inquiries into historic and recent pasts and is unapologetic in its embrace of anthropologically-informed, hybrid methodologies. Not in the least, it maintains a keen awareness of the role that socially-engaged research can play in the contemporary world. Since the 1990s, multifaceted and collaborative archaeological studies of Native Americans have systematically challenged dominant, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Jazwa. Michael Price. Douglas Bird.

Agent-based models are useful tools for modeling decision making and its system level effects when the system being modeled is too complex to be accurately described by a simple mathematical model. This is important archaeologically because site distributions and material assemblages represent the aggregate results of many individual subsistence decisions that take place in a complex ecological and social landscape. In this poster, we present an agent-based model for subsistence intensification...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charles Boyd. Donna Boyd.

To anthropologists (as most North American archaeologists consider themselves to be), the ultimate goal of anthropology is the understanding of human cultures. Archaeologists define past cultures through the repeated clustering of specific sets and types of material objects and features in space and time. However, are archaeologists (and cultural anthropologists, for that matter) truly able to reconstruct and "see" that "complex whole" that Edward Tylor defined as culture in the 19th century? In...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Danielle Romero. Barbara Roth. Darrell Creel.

Recent excavations conducted by the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in conjunction with the Gila National Forest Service took place at the Elk Ridge Ruin, a large Classic period (AD 1000-1150) pueblo in the Mimbres River Valley, New Mexico. This project was done as part of mitigation efforts to protect the site from flood waters in an arroyo that cut through the western portion of the site. Excavations were done in three pueblo rooms that were positioned along the arroyo cut and were the most...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Carlson.

In the holokarstic Sinkhole Plain, sinkholes provided access to cave entrances for shelter, water, chert outcrops, and contain distinct microenvironments. As closed basins, sinkholes accumulate sediment from the surrounding catchment, burying archaeological deposits, sometimes rapidly. Therefore, these sites can provide critical information concerning paleoenvironmental change and human use of the surrounding landscape. Excavations were undertaken at Crumps Sink in the summer of 2015 to assess...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Autumn Cool.

For several decades it has been known that aerial thermography can be used as a geophysical prospecting method. The accidental discovery of an ancient Sinagua agricultural field complex in 1966 prompted a series of experiments throughout the 1970s and 1980s, which confirmed the effectiveness of aerial thermography in archaeological applications. Even so, thermal imaging was rarely utilized in archaeological field research due to the extreme costs and high level of technical expertise demanded by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Cramb.

Here I report the findings of a 2015 archaeological and oral-history based reconnaissance survey of two remote Oceanic atolls. Manihiki and Rakahanga are located in the in the Northern Cook Islands of East Polynesia. This dual island system has been the subject of few systematic archaeological studies. Yet, the existing data for the atolls suggests that they may be ideal for the archaeological study of the social-ecological dynamics of sustainability and resilience in small island environments....

DOCUMENT Citation Only L. Curet. Lisa Stringer. William Pestle.

This paper summarizes and reviews the results obtained in the past five years of the Archaeological Project of the Ceremonial Center of Tibes. Special attention will be paid to field discoveries, particularly to activity areas and architectural structures. The presentation will also served as introduction to the rest of the simposium.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cindy Sandoval. Enrique Chacon. Elsa Olimpia Palacios. Erika Rosales. Magdalena García.

This paper is a preliminary result of the archaeological survey and recording surface of the "Project Pipeline Chihuahua and Durango". The relevance and importance of the identified sites lies in being unique in the area, located in places of possible transit that allowed to humans groups moved from one camp to another camp and one workstation to another, according to the plain and sometimes even stay overnight at the site. The transit zone of small bands of hunter-gatherers has been recognized...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Massey. Alex Elvis Badillo.

While aerial photography is still widely used for the "brute force" identification of archaeological sites, multispectral remote sensing approaches hold the greatest potential for archaeological surveys because of their ability to detect hidden or subsurface archaeological remains. This poster examines Quiechapa, a small rural municipality located in the foliage covered mountains in the southwestern state of Oaxaca, Mexico, which has never before been studied by archaeologists and likely...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mikael Fauvelle.

Located on the Pacific Coast of Chiapas, the site of Fracción Mujular is best known for three carved stela bearing Teotihuacan associated stylistic elements, first identified by Carlos Navarrete in the 1960s. The relatively modest architecture of the site, combined with evidence for long-distance connections, makes Fracción Mujular an interesting place to investigate the impact that inter-regional political and trade relationships during the Early Classic had on the lives of common people. ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aaron Kuntz. Andrew Murphy. Brett Lenz.

In spring 2014, a 60-foot crack was discovered in the Wanapum Dam, a large hydroelectric dam on the mainstream Columbia River. In order to avoid catastrophic failure of the dam the reservoir it impounded was drawn down 26 feet. As a run-of-the-river dam, a complete drawdown is not normally planned, and more than 4500 acres of inundated landscape was exposed for the first time in more than 50 years. Under normal operating conditions, around 1400 archaeological sites are known to exist along the...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Francis McManamon.

The stewardship of archaeological monuments and sites began even before the NPS was created. In the US some of these early efforts occurred at sites that later would become part of the National Park system. The management of archaeological resources has become more scientific and systematic since its earliest days, but we still learn from past efforts and codify what works into contemporary practice. Current efforts focus on the maintenance and protection of archaeological resources; improving...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Douglas Kullen.

Nineteenth and twentieth century grain threshing operations left imprints on the rural landscape and social fabric of midcontinental North America. Traces of threshing activity are seldom recognized archaeologically, despite the importance of this activity to the history of agricultural development and rural lifeways in the Midwest and Plains regions. Changes in threshing technology followed a chronological sequence with inter-regional variability. Different stages of the technology can be...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Schott.

The Petrified Forest National Park in northeastern Arizona contains abundant archaeology sites located in dune settings. Archaeological research in the area has shown apparent correlation between archaeological site locations and dune geomorphology, suggesting that prehistoric inhabitants frequently targeted dunes for habitation sites. It has been proposed that this relationship may be due to extensive use of dune soils for agriculture. This paper investigates soils and geomorphology of dune...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gwen Bennett.

Archaeological and historical data, combined with GIS analysis gives us new perspectives on 11th c. medieval period envoy missions from the Song Dynasty (960-1279) to the Liao Empire (907-1125) Middle Capital in Chifeng Inner Mongolia, China. The envoys’ routes can be recreated on maps, and optimal route and viewshed analyses give us insight into the Liao’s concerns about these foreign missions crossing their territory and how they addressed them. Furthermore, population estimates can be made...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chieh-fu Jeff Cheng.

This research explores the historical development in the Lakulaku River Basin in the eastern section of Yushan National Park in Taiwan from the 18th century to the present through a landscape archaeological perspective. The Lakulaku River area has a complex history. Indigenous Bunun group, Qing Empire from China, and Japanese colonial government had once occupied this region, leaving the traces of human activities that change the natural landscape. This research analyzes these traces of human...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Qian Gao.

Today the increasing commercialization of cultural heritage draws archaeology and tourism into ever-closer contact. With the fast development of tourism, archaeological sites are utilized for their multiple potentials as revenue generators, public education providers, national identity promoters, and many other roles. It should be noted that these potentials are defined by the various values that a society attributes to its archaeological heritage. That is to say the values of archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Sobel. Virginia Hutton Estabrook.

Archaeologists rely heavily on contingency table analyses of count data to infer relationships between variables and proportional differences between populations. For example, archaeologists often use contingency table analyses of sample data to make inferences about inter-site variation in lithic raw material type proportions. The most common methods for making these inferences are the Chi-Square test and Fisher's Exact test. However, the former cannot be applied to small samples and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Phyllis Messenger.

Heritage studies and public history are the publicly engaged and community-accountable practices of historical scholarship, whether it is based in archival research, archaeology, architecture and preservation, landscape studies, or other related areas. Archaeologists share a commitment to public interpretation, education, and preservation with these other disciplines, and graduate education must reflect this reality. Today’s scholar-practitioners need to understand the connections and common...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arlene Fleming.

Archaeology contributes to local, national and international economic development in numerous respects, a fact that is gaining increasing attention through study and analysis. For years, large-scale multi-year excavations provided seasonal wages to local workers and supported community craft industries, although the revenues were rarely quantified or regarded as local economic development. Archaeological sites, when featured as tourist attractions, can comprise a lucrative source of revenue for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hanna Marie Pageau.

This paper is an education and curriculum development perspective on hands-on research, including the process of evaluation of learning outcomes. Field Schools are an integral part of education in the field sciences, and particularly in archaeology where field identification of artifacts and features is not reproducible in other contexts. Field schools in general are targeted toward advanced undergraduate students,those already in graduate school, and students able to pay thousands of dollars to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Kurnick.

Over the last two decades, archaeologists have increasingly debated whether and how archaeology can be used to promote public welfare and foster progressive social change. Some scholars have emphasized the methodological importance of praxis. Others have emphasized the pragmatic need for public intellectuals. And, still others have emphasized the ethical necessity of community engagement. In this paper, I maintain that archaeology can and should be an ally in the effort to understand, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeanne Moe.

In the past 30 years, archaeologists have taught children and youth about the processes of archaeological inquiry and the results of archaeological research. Hundreds, if not thousands of education programs have sprouted over the last 30 years; some have endured while others have faded away. Some efforts and programs are aimed at formal learning in school classrooms while many others are based in informal settings such as museums, outdoor learning centers, after-school programs, and many others....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Risa Arbolino. Kit Nelson.

In the 1960s women were beginning to make major strides in the field of archaeology. It is also during this time that informal mentoring relationships began between women active in the field and young women interested in pursuing their interests in archaeology. One such example is the role of Bertha Dutton with the Girl Scouts during the early 1960s. Working out of Camp Elsa Seligman, Girl Scouts conducted survey and excavation within Sandoval County. Their field notes, archaeological field...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alicia Odewale. Joshua Torres.

The national parks on the island of St. Croix (Christiansted National Historic Site, Salt River Bay Historic Park and Ecological Preserve, and Buck Island Reef National Monument) engage thousands of visitors every year and stand out as some of the most historically and ecologically important sites in the Caribbean region. Cultural resource management projects within these parks have a new focus on community outreach and local youth engagement initiatives. Developing more inclusive programming,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Curtis.

Yosemite National Park (California) receives an overwhelming four million visitors per year. While most visitors remain in the developed areas of the park, many people venture forth into the 704,556-acre Wilderness areas for recreation and solitude - the sheer frequency of which leads to resource impacts unprecedented in many other Wildernesses. In response, park resource managers developed the “Wilderness Restoration Program” in 1987, a program designed to directly mitigate and alleviate the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca OSullivan.

Over the past 10 years, staff from the Florida Public Archaeology Network (FPAN) have developed curricula, programs, and trainings that educate both the general public and land managers about archaeology and Florida's unique past. While many of these initiatives might take place in a classroom or lecture hall, FPAN archaeologists also get out in the field to organize community archaeology projects that engage the public with the discovery of their own pasts. This presentation will highlight some...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marcus Hamilton. Briggs Buchanan.

In this paper we discuss recent work at the Mockingbird Gap Clovis site, New Mexico, and the surrounding region, designed to understand how Clovis hunter-gatherers utilized and adapted to the regional landscape and its available resources. Focusing on lithic raw material use, we show that the Clovis occupants of Mockingbird Gap had access to a wide diversity of high quality raw materials from a large area of the Southwest. Moreover, Clovis raw material network analysis across the continent...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Whitley.

Why does archaeology matter in the 21st century? One value is its ability to help us understand how humans react to changing circumstances, not with law-like statements but instead in terms of general behavioral patterns. The social context south-central California rock art, a record of visions or dreams, is an example of this fact. As partly indicated by rock art, the Medieval climatic anomaly led in one area to a population collapse but, in a related region, to population increase and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Poplin. Howard Cyr. Kandace Hollenbach. David Baluha. Carolyn Rock.

A multi-disciplinary approach was taken during recent archaeological investigations at multiple Everglades tree island accretionary middens. The research design focused on recovering as much information as possible to ascertain the evolution of tree islands across the Everglades with respect to human adaptation. An immense amount of material was recovered, which permitted researchers to reconstruct paleo-botanical environments, soil formation processes, and human adaptations on these tree...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Markus.

The Block Family Farmstead in Washington, Arkansas represents the first documented Jewish immigrant family to arrive in the state and their home is the most extensively excavated Jewish Diaspora site in North America, dating to the first half of the 19th Century. The site gives unique insight into the domestic practices of a Jewish family on the frontier in absence of an ecclesiastical support network or coreligionist community. The faunal assemblage recovered primarily from the home’s detached...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Florin Curta.

The vast steppe corridor that begins in north-central China and ends on the Middle and Lower Danube has been the habitat of many communities of nomads, and the object of intensive archaeological research. Ever since Svetlana Pletneva, research on the late nomads in the steppe lands now within Russia and Ukraine has focused on burial assemblages, especially on burial mounds. However, new lines of research have opened in the last few decades, which highlight new categories of evidence: stone...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Brianna Rafidi. Christopher Carr. Mary Kupsch.

The potential for accurately reconstructing prehistoric Woodland and Plains Indian societies’ notions of human soul-like essences using symbolically rich mortuary remains and art can be improved when analogous, comparative ethnohistorical information is collected systematically and with sensitivity to tribal and regional variations. Literature on 49 historic Woodland-Plains tribes produced 643 cases informing on nine selected subjects: number and locations of souls in an individual, number of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrzej Antczak. Luis Lemoine. Ma. Magdalena Antczak.

Since the 1950s, the archaeology of Margarita, the largest island of Venezuela, has been neglected leaving open an important lacunae in the current knowledge of Venezuelan and Caribbean archaeology. In 2008, human bones were accidentally unearthed on the island, allowing the recovery of two individuals and associated cultural materials that included lithics, shells, and red ochre. The archaeological layer and human bones date to between 4,090 and 2,160 BP. The osteological analyses show...

DOCUMENT Citation Only April Nowell. Nan Gonlin.

Archaeologists have been in the dark on the topic of the night for far too long. Like any other aspect of human behavior, the nighttime has firmly planted itself in the archaeological record, ready for us to uncover it, if only we seek it out. Relying upon the material trails that humans leave behind, it is not only possible but productive to pursue an archaeology of the night to enlighten and broaden our knowledge of the human past. Artifacts, features, structures, and sites provide clues to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Stuart. Marcello Canuto. Tomas Barrientos.

The integrated program of epigraphic and archaeological research at La Corona, Guatemala aims to document, analyze and understand the development of this highly unusual Maya center during of the Classic period. Known as Saknikte’ in ancient texts, La Corona served as the locus of a small court with its own dynastic history and exhibiting close and long-lasting familial and political ties with the far larger Kaanul or “Snake” kingdom centered at Dzibanche and Calakmul. Architectural excavations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lourdes Pérez Iglesias.

The study of bone modifications in archaeology becomes an important source of information for understanding aspects of food anthropology and extinct human groups, as well as it improves the knowledge of these aspects in poorly documented historical stages. This applies to the first moments of Spanish colonization in the north of Holguin. This paper includes elements of the exploitation of faunal resources in two marked Indo-Hispanic archaeological contexts in northeastern Cuba: Chorro de Maita...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Harold Kelly. Raymundo Dijkhoff.

Archaic Age migration and settlement on Aruba The Archaic Period of Aruba falls between 2500 BC to 900/1000AD and is characterized by nomadic ‘fisher-hunter-gatherers’ with a predominantly marine, coastal orientation, occupying different areas of the island. Their diet consisted mostly out of marine food and to a lesser extent hunting of small game and foraging. The majority of the so-called preceramic sites are coastal shell-middens predominantly located on limestone. The sites of Canashito and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Corinne Hofman. Angus Mol. Emma Slayton. Menno Hoogland.

This paper builds on the idea that Caribbean Archaic Age communities were highly mobile and connected. Study of fisher-collector sites in the Northeastern and Southern Caribbean has shown that Archaic Age communities managed extensive subsistence/ resource/activity systems, involving intra-archipelagic and mainland-island voyaging. The connectivity patterns and resource landscapes of these two regions will be discussed. We see a set of vital resources, which would remain important for later...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Roger Colten. Brian Worthington.

The broad patterns of Archaic or pre-ceramic subsistence adaptations are not well known for the broader Caribbean region partly due to the ecological variability among the islands and limited quantified faunal data from sites of appropriate age. The state of knowledge for Cuba is hampered by a limited number of radiocarbon dated archaeological sites. In this paper we present quantified vertebrate faunal data and radiocarbon dates from three Cuban sites, Las Obas, Vega del Palmar, and Los...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kimberly Sumano. Joshua Englehardt.

The site of Los Guachimontones, in central Jalisco state, Mexico, has long been the subject of intensive archaeological research, beginning in the 1970s with Weigand’s investigations of the site’s unique circular architectonic configurations. Nonetheless, a detailed understanding of intra–site architectonic variability eludes adequate explanation and obscures our comprehension of the internal sociopolitical dynamics of the site. To address these lacunae, this paper compares two distinct areas of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anthony DeLuca.

During the Late Formative to Classic period (300 BC – 550 AD) in the highland lakes region of Jalisco, Mexico, a number of concentric circular ceremonial monuments known as guachimontones were built by the shaft tomb culture. The largest site in the region is Los Guachimontones near the town of Teuchitlan. The site is thought to have been governed by competing familial groups within a corporate framework rather than a single powerful ruler. The platforms that are a part of a guachimonton are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rafael Guerra. Claire Ebert. Jaime Awe.

The presence of shared architectural elements and configurations between major ancient Maya centers has often been attributed to socio-political affiliation and/or emulation of influential centers by their neighbors. In this paper, we examine the site plans and settlement systems for the monumental centers of Cahal Pech and Lower Dover in the Belize Valley to identify parallel trends of the growth of monumental architecture through time. Cahal Pech is one of the earliest permanently settled...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Pool. Michael Loughlin. Manuel Melgarejo Pérez. Gabriela Montero Mejía. Kyle Mullen.

A combined program of aerial LiDAR mapping and pedestrian survey is documenting significant intra-regional variation in pre-Hispanic architectural plans in the Eastern Lower Papaloapan Basin of southern Veracruz, Mexico, reflecting the interplay of ecological adaptation, political integration, factionalism, and extra-regional influences. Consistent association of domestic mounds with small bajos in low-lying areas suggests intentional (as opposed to accretional) mounding and landscape...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Annick Daneels.

Investigations at several of the thousands of pre-Columbian mounded sites along the southern Gulf coast of Mexico revealed the existence of monumental earthen architecture. These supposedly "simple mounds" resulted to be sunken plazas, pyramids, palaces, ball-courts, tombs and altars that were part of an urban layout. In high-ranking sites, buildings are recurrently associated with deposits reflecting several distinct rituals involving human sacrifice. Such findings bring added evidence for the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamín Ballester. Estefanía Vidal. Francisco Gallardo.

Architecture, as a material device that is perceived and experienced, involves the creation of spatial and visual signatures within a landscape, effectively connecting social groups and territories. In this paper, we explore the role of architecture and monuments in processes of territorialization, land tenure and the use of space among hunter-gatherers of the Pacific coast in the Atacama Desert, Northern Chile. Between 7,000 to 1,000 BP these groups developed diverse ways of making and using...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dolores Dávalos Navarro.

The pueblo tradition, located in the American Southwest and Mexican Northwest, has received greater attention in the United States than in Mexico until recently. The present research evaluates how the Mexican Northwest differs from the southern portion of the American Southwest using architectural characteristics. The use of consecutive rooms at ground level characterize the architecture of the puebloan communities in the study area. These room-blocks had different construction techniques and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shelby Anderson.

In 1952, J.L. Giddings defined the Arctic Woodland Culture as a unique northwestern Alaskan inland lifeway combining elements of both Eskimo and Athabascan cultures between approximately 800 BP and the contact era. He proposed that Arctic Woodland people were closely tied to both coast and interior through seasonal movements and exchange systems, and hypothesized these ties made a semi-permanent lifeway along the river possible. Subsequent research refined local chronologies and raised new...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sally Lynch.

The site of Huaca Colorada, in the Jequetepeque Valley, on the North Coast of Peru, is an ideal location to examine cultural interchange and technological innovation from both a production and consumption perspective due to its occupation during the Middle Horizon (AD 600 – 1000). This period is marked by sustained cultural interaction throughout the Peruvian Andes. Evidence for this interchange at Huaca Colorada is found in the mixing of a number of different ceramic traditions within...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeffrey Dobereiner.

For half a century, scholars have listed Mesoamerica and South America alongside the Near East, Egypt, China, and India as independent loci of emergent social complexity. Yet, recent scholarship has placed an increasing emphasis on the role of multi-regionalism and mobility in the emergence of world civilizations. These theoretical shifts, alongside suggestive findings of agricultural, material, and ideological unity in the Formative Americas, require us to ask: were pathways to complexity in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Darrin Lowery.

With respect to the peopling of the New World, recent research has focused on linking genetics with the archaeological record. Given historical analogies, there were probably multiple accidental or intentional settlement attempts or migrations into the Americas, which ultimately failed. These failures would have left an archaeological record, but no "legacy" genetic signature among the successful New World settlers. The lecture will address this issue based on recent research at several possible...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa Catto. Virginia L. Butler. Kathi A. Ketcheson.

Archaeologists widely incorporate websites into public archaeology projects and rely on them as primary vehicles for connecting with the non-archaeologist public for many reasons: they are relatively inexpensive to create, adaptable to most any content, and potentially accessed by a global population. While websites have great potential for advancing public understanding of the human past, to date there has been little consideration of what makes a “good” public archaeology website. Our project...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Holly Wright.

This is a pdf copy of the PowerPoint slides used for this presentation in the SAA symposium. ARIADNE is a four-year EU FP7 Infrastructures funded project, made up of 24 partners across 16 European countries, which hold archaeological data in at least 13 languages. These are the accumulated outcome of the research of individuals, teams and institutions, but form a vast and fragmented corpus, and their potential has been constrained by difficult access and non-homogeneous perspectives. ARIADNE...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Antonia Barbosa.

Geometric enclosures found over a 400 sq. km area in Western Amazonia were built in patterned ways that involved depth, width, and morphology of monumental ditches excavated in a clay soil matrix. Pattern eventually included care for solar orientation. A study of 419 geometric enclosures showed that around 60% of them were clearly oriented according to the sun’s trajectory and its maximum distance from the Ecuador, e.g. the solstice. One of the working hypotheses is that the agricultural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alex Kara. Antonia Foias. Kitty Emery.

Here I present "Arqueologos", a new plugin for the QGIS desktop GIS software designed for archaeologists. While there have recently been many applications of 3d graphics for the digital reconstruction of archaeological features and artifacts, 3D technology has yet to significantly impact how archaeologists interpret their excavation data. This is especially true for individually insignificant ceramic, lithic, and other small artifacts that, when aggregated and studied across space, arguably form...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jorge Rios.

La zona arqueológica de Mitla ha sido en los últimos años una fuente de información arqueológica y paradigma de la conservación y manejo. Su desarrollo paralelo a las políticas publicas culturales del Estado Mexicano ha derivado no solo en un sitio arqueológico abierto al público sino una serie de eventos sociales y culturales registrados en libros y artículos, que hablan de una interacción de la comunidad local de manera profunda con su patrimonio. Este trabajo pretende mostrar el desarrollo de...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kim Richter.

The Huasteca has long been portrayed as an isolated, peripheral culture of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. However, recent archaeological and art-historical research challenge this view. The artistic evidence from the Huasteca points to a prolonged cultural dialogue with neighbors along the Gulf Coast, as well as to stylistic and iconographic affinities with Central Mexico, Oaxaca, and the Maya region. Archaeological excavations, especially at the site of Tamtoc, in San Luis Potosi, have revealed a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan Leight.

Art-making is an essential element of Mesoamerican culture. Asserting the primacy of the art object as a site of inquiry can provide a fascinating framework for organizing, imagining, and interpreting the past. This paper considers art objects produced during the Late Classic (ca. 600-900 CE) by the Maya Ik’ polity in Petén, Guatemala. The elaborately painted surfaces with naturalistic figures, realistic color schemes, and detailed hieroglyphic inscriptions about artists, patrons, and regional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Moriarty. Antonia Foias. Ellen Moriarty.

More than a decade of research in the Motul de San José area has produced a rich corpus of household middens and domestic artifact assemblages reflecting a wide range of social statuses and occupations at a diverse set of local centers. This body of data permits a detailed bottom-up consideration of patterns of production, consumption, and distribution for a wide range of goods within and between member communities in the Late Classic Motul polity. This paper examines the evidence for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sherman Horn.

The temporal position of the Middle Preclassic (c. 900 – 350 B.C.), situated between the earliest permanent settlements and hierarchically organized Late Preclassic polities, makes it a critical period for understanding the development of complex societies in the Belize Valley and the Maya Lowlands. From 2004 – 2009, the Belize Valley Archaeological Project’s excavations produced a trove of information on the Middle Preclassic occupation beneath Plaza B in the epicenter of Cahal Pech....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fanya Becks. Alan Leventhal. Rosemary Cambra.

This paper will be presenting the preliminary results of analyses of archaeological soils collected from within burial contexts at the Yukisma Site between 1993 and 1994. The Yukisma Site is a mounded cemetery site located in what is now Milpitas California, and was used as a burial ground from AD 540-1687. This cemetery was disturbed by construction in 1993. Over 243 individuals were recovered, and later reburied by the Muwekma Ohlone Indian Tribe of the San Francisco Bay Area. While the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Danti. Allison Cuneo.

Cultural Heritage Initiative—Planning for Safeguarding Heritage Sites in Syria and Iraq (CHI) is headed by The American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR) and is funded by a cooperative agreement from the US Department of State, Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. Active conflict in Syria and northern Iraq is contributing to the damage and destruction of cultural heritage. This research project aims to 1) raise awareness in Syria and Iraq and among the international community about current...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caitlin Wichlacz.

The Salado Phenomenon has long been of interest to Southwestern archaeologists, and perhaps the most notable signifier of the phenomenon is a suite of pottery types collectively referred to as Salado Polychromes or Roosevelt Red Wares. Previous researchers have tended to focus their ceramic studies on the Salado Polychrome pottery itself, and few have attempted to situate these vessels within the context of the broader ceramic assemblages of which they were part. Often, this kind of information...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nora Flegenheimer. Natalia Mazzia. Celeste Weitzel.

This presentation discusses possible causes affecting the distribution of fishtail points in the southern Cone. This distribution is discontinuous, with large territories without diagnostic remains and areas where sites are concentrated. Also, most of the sites with this type of points exhibit few specimens, with remarkable exceptions in Uruguay, the Argentinian Pampa and Patagonia and southern Chile. We will present thoughts arising from long term research in a micro region in the Argentinian...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Davis. Steven Hackenberger.

The U.S. Army Yakima Training Center (YTC) contains over 1,300 archaeological sites. Thirty years of inventory and archaeological testing have produced a significant body of archaeological reports and databases. Two university programs, several CRM firms, and now the Wanapum Band and Yakama Nation are working with the U.S. Army, studying and protecting the unique natural and cultural landscapes of the Yakima Uplands within the YTC. Synthesis of this work for the purpose of archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathy Loftis. Alex Cherkinsky. Robert Speakman.

The ability to generate accurate and reliable radiocarbon dates for bone is of great importance in archaeology. Radiocarbon measurements are routinely performed on hydrolyzed bone extract, which may contain exogenous organic matter. The presence of exogenous organic matter may then affect the accuracy of the estimated radiocarbon dates. Several pre-treatment methods have been previously developed to minimize contamination from exogenous sources of organic carbon. Here, we assess the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Donelle Huffer.

The historically introduced House Rock Valley bison herd in northern Arizona has, in recent years, migrated from the eastern Arizona Strip onto the Kaibab Plateau within Grand Canyon National Park. Bison are considered a nonnative species to the southern Colorado Plateau, and the animals adversely impact sensitive ecosystems prompting National Park Service wildlife managers to pursue their removal. Archaeofaunal evidence of bison in the Grand Canyon and neighboring regions, however, raises...

DOCUMENT Citation Only C. Fred Andrus.

Archaeologists are beginning to apply two new analytical techniques to estuarine mollusk shells: inferring paleo-salinity from sclerochronological oxygen isotope profiles and assessing anthropogenic waste loading from mollusk nitrogen isotope measurements. These related approaches may offer insight into subsistence priorities and environmental alteration, but data from each should be interpreted with caution until these proxies are more completely validated. Potential uses and limitations of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jason Ur.

A variety of evidence has been used to suggest that the Assyrian kings and their planners made dramatic changes to the landscape of the imperial core, and these changes were deliberate. This evidence mostly consists, however, of anecdotal observations and uncritical readings of propagandistic royal inscriptions. The hypothesized planned Assyrian landscape also conflicts with the results of systematic archaeological research on preceding Bronze Age landscapes, which were largely self-organized....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Simon Martin. Ramón Carrasco. Rogelio Valencia.

The metropolis of Calakmul has a pre-eminent place in Classic Maya history that is best understood from a multi-disciplinary perspective, combining the study of its extensive archaeological remains with that of its monuments, both in terms of inscriptions and imagery. This paper focuses on a hundred-year span, from the seventh and eighth centuries CE, which covers the reign of three of its best-known rulers. Representing the highpoint of the Snake kingdom’s “international” influence, this small...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lara Noldner. Shirley Schermer. Suzanne Buffalo. Johnathan Buffalo.

A long-standing relationship has existed between the University of Iowa Office of the State Archaeologist (OSA) and tribal entities including the Meskwaki Nation. The precedent-setting burial law established in Iowa in 1976, 14 years prior to the passage of NAGPRA, has long required equal treatment and reburial of Native American remains. The law gave the OSA statutory authority for upholding the law and established the OSA Indian Advisory Council (IAC). Maria Pearson (Yankton Sioux) and Donald...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabrielle Vail.

The northern Maya lowlands provide a rich corpus of painted texts associated with the interior and exterior walls of buildings; capstones serving to seal off vaulted chambers, which often contain burials; and painted screenfold books, or codices. In a number of cases, these texts and their associated pictorial component were painted to commemorate—or provide the template for—important rituals. Many of these rituals can be identified based on ethnohistoric sources, including Diego de Landa’s...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Stevens.

Auditory Exostoses (AEs), commonly called "surfer’s ear," are benign bony swellings in the external auditory canal and most often occur due to regular exposure of the ear to cold water and wind. Some of the highest frequencies of AEs encountered are found in Archaic Period populations of the Green River Valley, Kentucky. Previous measurements of sample populations have shown a range of 12.6 to 34.9 percent of adults with one or more AE, with even higher percentages existing among the male...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yamile Lira-Lopez.

A pesar de lo escarpado del terreno, entre montañas y valles, se asentaron grupos humanos en distintos periodos cronológicos desde el Preclásico hasta la Colonia. Algunos de esos valles permitieron la comunicación entre los poblados cercanos, otros, entre regiones geográficas más distantes como la Costa del Golfo, el Altiplano Central y la región oaxaqueña, evidenciando presencia o influencia olmeca, teotihuacana, nahua y costeñas, en los sitios hasta ahora conocidos. Por estar en un punto...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marlena Antczak. Maria Magdalena Antczak. Andrzej Antczak. Miguel Lentino.

Abstract This paper presents the results of the analyses of an assemblage of over 3,000 bird remains systematically recovered in various late pre-Hispanic sites (c. AD 1000–1500) on the islands of the Venezuelan Caribbean. We discuss possible signatures of seasonal occupancy of the island campsites as inferred from the bio-ecology of the identified bird specimens. The data indicates that several families of birds were persistently targeted by Amerindians for food and/or feathers, and their bones...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ariel Taivalkoski. Caroline Funk. Debra Corbett. Brian Hoffman.

Zooarchaeological avifauna analyses demonstrate that wing elements tend to be overrepresented in archaeological assemblages from diverse temporal and cultural contexts. There have been several explanations for this phenomenon including bone density, differential transport and more recently, Bovy’s social zooarchaeological interpretations for the overall overabundance of wing elements, as well as specifically of distal wing elements in the Watmough Bay assemblage. The avifaunal assemblage...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nadya Prociuk.

Unique to the northwestern corner of the Iberian Peninsula, the ceremonial baths of the Iron Age Castro Culture present an entry point for our understanding of the social and symbolic mechanisms at work in Castro society. Not found anywhere else in Iberia, the precise use and meaning of the structures remains controversial. Were they an indigenous development, or a technology borrowed from the Roman world? Was their use related to personal grooming or ritual cleansing? Located within...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Cohen.

Aztec presence in Guerrero, Mexico is documented ethnohistorically, but archaeological work can be difficult to undertake in this volatile region. The Triple Alliance provinces in Guerrero served as important sources of tribute, but also as buffers against the hostile Purépecha regime to the west. Though Aztec imperial strategies varied in different provinces, tribute policies in Tepecoacuilco were thought to have facilitated intensification of production and reorganization of economic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sneh Patel.

The craft industries and trade networks of the Indus Valley are perhaps some of the most well understood and explored aspects of this early South Asian civilization. While the nature of production and spatial distribution of certain commodities are known, it is still uncertain within what form of economic structures these exchanges transpired. This paper proposes that the "bazaar" might provide a suitable framework through which to understand the exchange of these commodities. While bazaars...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson. Torun Zachrisson.

With the expansion of the Eastern trade route during the 9th and 10th centuries a regular contact with the markets of the Muslim world was established. Long-distance trafficking of slaves became an important commodity. It was a high risk venture that required a new level of organisation, control and logistics. The full extent of the trafficking is not known but it included moving people and goods in both ways along a route that offered little infrastructure and difficult terrain. Trafficking of...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Whitney Battle-Baptiste. Elizabeth Chilton. Elena Sesma.

Over the past several decades there has been a great deal of archaeological excavation and analysis of both U.S. and Caribbean plantations. However, many of these research projects are designed to address archaeological research questions rather than some of the pressing problems faced by descendant communities concerning their heritage. In 1994, UNESCO launched their “Slave Route” project, with the aim of “contributing to a better understanding of the causes, forms of operation, issues and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pam Crabtree.

In the past 15 years, we have seen significant methodological developments in zooarchaeology, including the uses of isotopic studies, aDNA, and geometric morphometrics. However, all of these methods depend on careful identification of animal bone materials and the preservation of their archaeological and stratigraphic context. This paper discusses basic methods of identifying, recording, archiving, and storing zooarchaeological collections in ways that will make them amenable to research by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only L. Meghan Dennis.

Within videogames, archaeology is often not itself a focus, but provides a flavor or character-defining style based on pre-existing stereotypes of the discipline as presented in other forms of popular culture. This frequently results in utilizing the practice of archaeology as a form of secondary content, designed to provide a financial or game-play bonus to the player character, while allowing access to objects of cultural patrimony and license to commodify those objects. Through an application...