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

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Saunders.

My ethnographic research documenting the sacred geography of the northern rim of Lake Atitlán, Guatemala, has identified numerous contemporary sacred locations linked to ecologically critical areas. Some of these are archaeological monuments, while surface surveys of most others evidence pre-Hispanic materials. Additionally, previous survey (and limited excavation) documented a number of area archaeological sites dating to the Maya Preclassic, with some exhibiting habitation up to the present;...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joshua Birchall.

A central concept in historical linguistics is that of the sprachbund, or linguistic area, where languages of different families show shared structural traits as a result of long-term social interaction rather than shared inheritance. Through language contact phenomena such as bilingualism, calquing, the formation of trade languages, etc., this process of linguistic diffusion and convergence sometimes flies under the scientific radar, especially in regions such as Amazonia where there tend to be...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Day.

Recent analytical programmes on pottery of the Aegean Bronze Age have identified compositional patterns that not only link the early third millennium to the late second millennium BC, but also clearly lay the foundations for production through to Roman times. Continuity in ceramic craft practice can be understood in terms of specific choices made in raw material selection and manipulation, but also at times through the recurrence of characteristic methods of vessel forming and even the nature,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sander Van Der Leeuw.

I owe Vern Scarborough a great debt for the opportunity to look into the dynamics of Maya research in the context of the IHOPE Maya project. As a historian and prehistoric archaeologist, I have been struck by the way in which, in the research, two perspectives were commingled: the prehistorian's perspective looking (back) towards the origins of the heyday of (Classic) Maya culture and the historian's perspective looking (forward) for the emergence of certain elements of it. It seems to me that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathleen Huggins. Paul Goldstein. Matthew Sitek.

This paper expands on previous work which concluded that the Omo M10A Tiwanaku temple in Moquegua, Peru, was constructed using, in some amount, adobes containing cultural materials from antecedent Huaracane populations. Exploring this data further may reveal social and ecological conditions during construction of the Tiwanaku temple at Omo M10A. Analyses will include spatial distribution of Huaracane sherds within architectural collapse, and associating these architectural collapse areas with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ken Seligson. Tomás Gallareta Negrón. Rossana May Ciau. George J. Bey III.

Burnt lime was one of the most significant and ubiquitous materials utilized in the daily lives of the ancient Maya. Lime was a key ingredient in the mortar that they used to construct monumental edifices and residential structures, as well as the lime plaster that they used to coat the facades, floors and interior walls of these structures. Lime was also crucial for maintaining a viable maize-based diet through the nixtamalization process. The recent identification of a series of ring...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yumi Huntington.

Throughout ancient Andean culture, animals and their attributes have been depicted in objects of material culture associated with religious ceremonies, political authority, and social status. So far, scholars have focused on only a few types of animals, including felines, serpents, caimans, and eagles, for their significant roles in Andean cosmology and society. One important animal has largely been neglected: the bear, which is actually a major species in the Andean habitat, and which also...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Damien Marken.

As a key example of indigenous New World urbanism, the development, organization, and abandonment Classic Maya cities are subjects of great anthropological importance. Despite their comparative significance, for much of the twentieth century Classic Maya centers (ca. 250-950 C.E.) have been viewed by the public and many scholars as "non-cities," the capitals of complex polities, but lacking the residential density characteristic of fully urban places. Roland Fletcher has recently proposed that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marie Kolbenstetter.

Traditionally, polychrome pottery from Late Classic and Early Postclassic Honduras has been considered as falling under or being subjected to the Mesoamerican sphere of influence, as well as showing certain Central Mexican affiliations. Yet, the Lower Central American connection has rarely been explored. This connection is nonetheless present as can be observed throughout the diversity of Honduran polychromy. In this paper, the influence of the Greater Nicoyan style on Honduran polychrome...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hector Neff. Sachiko Sakai. Brendan Culleton. Douglas Kennett.

Plumbate, the most widely distributed pottery of Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, has been sourced to the Pacific coastal region of Soconusco, near the present international border between Mexico and Guatemala. In recent fieldwork, several Plumbate production contexts were excavated. In addition to large volumes of Plumbate and Plumbate wasters, these deposits contain large amounts of wood ash and solid ceramic cylinders of various sizes, from finger-size up to rolling-pin size. Complicating...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christina Bolte. Jay D. Franklin. Nathan K. Shreve. S.D. Dean.

We have conducted shoreline surveys of archaeological sites on major streams in upper East Tennessee for several years. In 2011, we added luminescence dating to this work. We discuss how luminescence dating has added robust chronological resolution to our work and how it has informed our hypothesis-building efforts. We address the protohistory of the region and the identification of early Cherokee towns here. Before adding luminescence dating as an integral facet of our work, we believed these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Feathers. Astolfo Araujo.

The Alice Boer site, in the Rio Claro region of São Paulo state, Brazil, gained some renown in the 1970s as a possible pre-Clovis site. It was excavated in the 1960s by Maria Beltrão and produced a questionable radiocarbon date of 14.2 ± 1.2 BP (uncalibrated) drawn from a very small (for conventional dating) charcoal piece near the bottom of an ant-disturbed cultural layer. A TL date on burned chert of 11 kya was also produced. The presence of artifacts in the lower layers and the integrity of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Janine Gasco.

In the Soconusco region of Chiapas, Mexico, we are still struggling with refining the Postclassic ceramic chronology. At the site of Gonzálo Hernández, the evidence suggests that the principal occupation of the site was during the Late Postclassic period (ca. 1300-1520CE), but a small percentage of sherds date to earlier periods. In an effort to approach the local ceramic chronology from a new perspective, a small sample of sherds were dated using luminescence dating. The results have clarified...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eloise Gadus.

Data recovery investigations at site 22CH698, located in Choctaw County, Mississippi, employed luminescence dating of ceramic vessel sherds to complement radiocarbon dates and establish cultural stratigraphy within the site’s thick Holocene alluvium. The dating results, along with diagnostic artifacts, indicate that the site components, representing some 2,000 years of occupation, are mixed. Yet the luminescence dates underscore a strong Miller I through Miller III phase occupation (ca. 100 B.C....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Diego Calaon.

Venice in the 8th was a key trade centre in the Mediterranean. Between 742 and 812 AD the centre of Venice was not located were it is today. The Duke’s palace and his headquarters were in Malamocco Island. Malamocco is a never-never land (“Isola che non c’è”): its location on the lagoons has never been positioned accurately, and traditional archaeology methods have failed in the description of the materiality of the site. How can modern archaeology fill this gap and project a holistic research...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Randee Fladeboe.

The archaeological record of the American Southwest and North Mexico contains evidence that for hundreds of years, ancient peoples transported, kept and possibly bred tropical macaws at several major population centers. Archaeologists are still working to understand exactly how this was accomplished, but the fact that this evidence indicates aspects of macaw husbandry has been underappreciated. Ethological data on human and macaw interactions in similar contexts in the present can help inform...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Hitchcock. Amber Johnson. Luke Edwwards.

In the 1980s, Lewis Binford (1931-2011) started an analysis of hunter-gatherer site structure that was later put on hold in order to organize ethnographic and environmental data to use in the analysis (Binford 2001). Although the frames of reference were constructed, Binford never completed his analysis of site structure. This poster represents an initial attempt to realize Binford’s vision of a controlled analysis of site structure at a large regional scale using data he organized for this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bulent Arikan.

Central Anatolian Plain, which was once covered with a Pleistocene lake, witnessed major environmental transformations from the Epipaleolithic to the end of the early Holocene. As the paleolake dried up it exposed valuable resources such as soil and created marshlands where the earliest Neolithic settlements, such as Aşıklıhöyük (10th millennium BP) and Çatalhöyük (9th millennium BP) emerged. These sites represent the first locales of human experimentation with domestication and they represent...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patrick Dolan. Colin Grier. Markussen Christine. Katie Simon.

We present the results of magnetometry survey of four houses at the Dionisio Point site, a 1,500 year-old settlement in the Gulf Islands of southwestern British Columbia, Canada. Intensive excavations have uncovered much of one of five substantial houses. It is the remains of a shed-roof plank house, the winter residence of a large multi-family corporate group. We suggest that the rest were contemporaneous households organized in a similar fashion and that Dionisio likely constituted an example...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Cajigas.

La Playa (SON F:10:3), in Sonora, Mexico, is an Early Agricultural period (2100 B.C.-A.D. 50) archaeological site which has the remains of an irrigation canal system. The Early Agricultural Period is characterized by the development of agriculture in the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico. Due to severe erosion at La Playa, intact canals and cultivated soils had not been located for study. Magnetic gradiometry was used to detect intact agricultural features buried by alluvium....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steven De Vore.

Mound City Group is a Hopewell mound and enclosure site located in south-central Ohio. The site was originally mapped by Ephraim Squier and Edwin Davis in 1846. The prehistoric earthworks consisted of 24 mounds within a square embankment wall and surrounded by eight borrow pits above the right bank of the Scioto River. In 1917, the mound group was leveled by the U.S. Army during the construction of the World War I training camp of Camp Sherman, except for Mound 7. After Camp Sherman was razed in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Crystal Dozier.

Starch granules can be recovered from a variety archaeological contexts and have been used to interpret cooking technologies. This set of experiments investigated some taphonomic considerations to interpreting chicha (corn beer) production from starch granules. The first experiment examined how far the maize starch granules travelled from the grinding station. Starch could be recovered as far as 10 meters from the grinding site, with dense starch collections happening less than 40 centimeters...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeanne Lopiparo.

This paper examines the role of domestic craft production and the fragmentation and interment of locally made goods in the reproduction of social identities and networks of social relations at two Late to Terminal Classic (600-900 AD) sites, Chinikihá in the Western Maya Lowlands of Chiapas, Mexico and Currusté in the Ulúa Valley, Honduras. The life histories of the products of small-scale, household-based industries were intimately tied to the life histories of their producers, enchaining the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Franco Rossi.

As repositories for scientific secrets and ritual expertise, the four extant Maya codex books have proven an indispensable source for understanding ancient systems of religion and socio-political thought. But despite the undoubted existence of codex books during the much earlier Late Classic period (600-900 C.E.), the tropical climate’s decay-inducing effect on organic material has thus far prevented their recovery in the archaeological record. In this paper, I discuss the Los Sabios mural at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Larissa Smith.

Studies of hunter-gatherers have recently garnered less attention than ever before. This has occurred in large part due to a correlation between a reduced number of forager societies and relevancy with such reduced numbers. In effect, there exists a dogma where studying hunter-gatherers is no longer pertinent to today’s society, nor to the anthropological subfield. However, my paper begs to differ. Hunter-gatherer studies, specifically my own amongst modern populations of the Ata of Negros...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Halstad McGuire.

The early medieval period is often thought of as a grim, violent era, characterized by conflict and social inequality. It is typically dominated by adult male narratives, albeit with a growing body of work centred on women’s lives. Children have remained in the shadows, sometimes seen but rarely heard. There is limited archaeological evidence for children’s activities and even less appears in textual sources from the Middle Ages. This paper explores the ways in which medieval children’s toys and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tanya Peres. Theresa Schober.

The contents of shell-bearing sites are routinely used to make inferences regarding resource availability, subsistence practices, technology, and as proxies for past environments. Variability in the genesis of shell matrix within an archaeological site and the cultural context of its use and reuse can introduce bias into these interpretations. The authors previously developed a model of shell matrices inferred as midden, mound, and feasting deposits based on visual characteristics, artifact...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tamira Brennan.

Community is an expandable concept, at once representing social groups from scales as small as the household to those as broad as pathways of communication. This paper highlights the importance of examining archaeological data at these multiple spatial scales, but also at various scales of time, in order to more fully explore the social and historical processes that directed community development along their varied courses. Examples from several Mississippian period mound centers in the American...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erlend Johnson.

The ability of Maya Ajaws to project political power outside of their capitals is a widely debated topic: some investigators sustain centralized territorial models for Maya political organization, and others defend segmentary models. The location of Copan on the southern fringe of the Maya world gives a unique opportunity to study this phenomenon because political boundaries in this multicultural environment are more visible than in other Maya kingdoms. We will explore the tempo and degree of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marc Levine.

This paper draws on a case study of the making of Maya: Hidden Worlds Revealed, a “blockbuster” traveling exhibit, to examine issues related to the business, development, and curation of museum exhibits featuring Mesoamerican culture and history. On the business side, museums face challenges in funding exhibits, managing risk, and ensuring return on investment. Development efforts struggle to deliver exhibits in tune with the public’s changing tastes without sacrificing institutional goals to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Atkins Spivey.

Colonoware is an important object of the colonial era that continues to invoke debate surrounding the ethnic identity of its makers. However, attempts to tie an “exact” ethnicity to colonoware production dismiss the deep structure of social processes tied to these objects created, used, and sold by both enslaved African American and Indigenous communities. This paper combines archaeological, oral history and documentary research conducted on the Pamunkey Indian Reservation located in tidewater...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Chatters.

For almost 20 years, the >9000 year-old skeleton known as Kennewick Man has been the subject of rumor, media hyperbole, lawsuit, political posturing, and even some good science. Archaeological, osteological, morphometric, stable-isotope, chronometric, and genetic studies have now been completed and reported and more than 50 scholars have presented their findings in internet publications, journals, and books. Widely divergent claims have been made about this man’s heritage and place of origin. He...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ofer Bar-Yosef.

The common assumption that environmental shifts force humans to change the technology or types of their stone tools is examined on the basis of the Paleolithic of Mainland China. During long periods of time humans made core and flake industries from local hard rocks whether various types of quartz and even flint. This presentation will summarize the Pleistocene sequence of China stressing the traditions of the producing the same lithic industries. Rare examples of bifacial assemblages will...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jon Hageman.

Construction of the Mesoamerican Ethnobotanical Database (MED) began in 2010 and is wrapping up in 2016. The MED began as an informal collection of images for the use of one archaeological project and became an NSF-supported online reference for public use. Based on the collections of the Searle Herbarium and hosted by the Field Museum, this online searchable database contains images of over 2500 plant vouchers, close-ups of reproductive plant parts, and seeds where available. Images are linked...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eleanor Harrison-Buck. Astrid Runggaldier. Alex Gantos.

Among contemporary Tz’utujil Maya, the Mam are the “Year Bearers” of an ancient 260-day ritual calendar still used today in highland Guatemala, celebrated annually when the seasons change from dry to wet. This spring celebration corresponds with Semana Santa (Holy Week) and is when the maize is planted and cacao and other fruits are harvested. Preceding Easter, young male initiates travel on foot down from the highlands to the cacao groves that have existed in the coastal lowlands since ancient...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Virginia Harvey. Mike Buckley. Phillip Manning. Victoria Egerton. Andrew Chamberlain.

The endemic terrestrial mammals of the Cayman Islands in the western Caribbean Sea all appear to have become extinct since the start of human colonisation 500 years ago. Extinct fauna include two species of the soricomorph Nesophontes and three species of Capromyid rodent. Introduced rodents and domesticated species now exclusively represent the terrestrial mammal fauna of the Cayman Islands. The Cayman Islands are carbonate-dominated successions typified by karst limestone that includes...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Rowe.

The Pleistocene…basically a no-man’s time that is stuck between the disciplines of archaeology and paleontology when it comes to the animals that inhabited that period of time. For American archaeologists, they are often old, sometimes too old to consider them as having archaeological connotations. For Paleontologists, these are not fossils and by some paleontologist’s standards are considered too young for paleontological studies. It is important to archaeologists to understand these animals...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kenneth Cannon. Shaun Nelson. John Crane. James Long.

Since 2011 USU Archeological Services has assisted the Utah Army National Guard in the management and interpretation of its varied cultural resources. The work was conducted through a Cooperative Agreement between the UTARNG and Utah State University Quinney College of Natural Resources. Initially, USU Archeological Services worked with the UTARNG on data recovery in advance of firing range construction, however the presence of unexploded ordnance required great changes in project scope with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aric Archebelle-Smith.

The Manasota Culture prospered from around 500 B.C. to A.D. 800 along the Florida coastline that stretches from Tampa Bay to the northern end of Charlotte Harbor. The Manasota Key Cemetery in Englewood, Florida, is one of the largest known Manasota burial sites with one hundred and twenty-two documented burials. Wilbur "Sonny" Cockrell excavated the site along with a team of Florida archaeologists and local volunteers from 1988 to 1989. Very few publications discuss the Manasota Key Cemetery. Of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Bruno. Katherine Moore. José Capriles. Andrew Roddick. Melanie Miller.

Multi-year excavations at four sites on the Taraco Peninsula, Bolivia have produced rich plant, faunal, ceramic, and isotopic data that shed light on early foodways in the Lake Titicaca Basin of the Andes. In this paper, we explore the roles food played for the various political entities that emerged and subsided throughout the Formative (1500 BC-AD 400) and Tiwanaku (AD400-1100) periods. From the small, autonomous village polities of the earlier Formative periods to larger, political centers...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Henri Bernard. Emiliano Melgar.

Since its discovery in 1969, the site of Arroyo Pesquero, in Southern Veracruz, has been an emblematic town with an Olmec offering that guards some similarities with the sites of Manatí and La Merced, related to the divinities of water and fertility. In the bed of the river were deposited masks, axes and other objects in jade with an excellent manufacturing and beauty. The sculptures of this site with an archaeological context are now stored at the Museum of Anthropology in Xalapa. In this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Walker.

Among the many challenges for landscape archaeologists is the “palimpsest” nature of the landscapes that they try to study. Archaeologists around the world have long been at work using GIS to study a wide range of questions across scales from meters to thousands of kilometers, and from single occupations to thousands of years. Thinking of archaeological landscapes as a palimpsest uses the recognition that connecting individual landscape features exclusively to a single moment or period of time...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Hare.

The integration of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and photogrammetric data processing into existing field techniques simplifies and accelerates mapping and environmental reconstruction. Ongoing investigations in and around Mayapán face the common challenge of mapping archaeological and environmental features and attributes in the context of difficult terrain and dense surface cover. The 2015 field season depended on UAV photography and photogrammetric processing for site and excavation photos...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katie Simon. Christine Markussen. Cameron Monroe.

The Royal Palace of Sans-Souci, a UNESCO World Heritage Site located in the town of Milot in northern Haiti, served as a central political space within the short-lived Kingdom of Haiti (1811-1820). Despite the critical importance this site holds for our understanding of state formation in the years following the Haitian revolution, we know precious little about the construction history of the site itself, which extended back into the Colonial Era. During the summer of 2015, archaeologists from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Juliette Mitchell. Gordon Noble.

In later Iron Age Scotland, the Picts begin to bury their dead under barrows and cairns, but the social, ideological and political triggers for this change in burial practice are unclear. One of the reasons is that the archaeological data has never been properly synthesized. No written sources exist in Scotland at this time so the archaeological data represents an important untapped resource. This talk will look at monumentalisation of Pictish barrow cemeteries and their relationship to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Keegan.

It has long been assumed that the original inhabitants of the Bahama archipelago practiced lifeways that were essentially identical to those practiced on their larger neighbors. Recent research suggests that there actually were substantial differences, including a much higher degree of mobility and a focus on maize instead of manioc cultivation. Some of these differences may be attributed to their origins in Cuba, versus Hispaniola; and the possibility that their ancestry can be traced to what...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Bethard. Anna J. Osterholtz. Zsolt Zyaradi. Andre Gonciar.

During the last four decades bioarchaeologists have enriched what we know about the lives of past people; however, many questions remain unexplored and understudied. Among these, the lived experiences of expectant mothers and their newborn infants have not received much attention in the bioarchaeological literature. Moreover, few scholars have attempted to understand how women who experienced a failed pregnancy or loss of a newborn infant have dealt with this reality, particularly in terms of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lauren Herckis.

Marine fossils carried an important symbolic load for elites in the Classic Maya city of Palenque. Recent excavations demonstrate that marine fossils were intentionally employed in a variety of ways by commoners in hinterland domestic contexts as well. Despite a shared symbology, such use varied across the landscape: inhabitants of different neighborhoods had different practices surrounding these materials. The special significance of marine fossils in commoner households is particularly evident...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Crock. Nanny Carder. Sebastián Castro.

Archaeological investigations in the northern Lesser Antilles have demonstrated Amerindians’ dependence on marine foods and maritime exchange throughout the Late Ceramic Age. While these data confirm the assumption that small island populations were, by necessity, maritime adapted, they also reveal subtle variability in the degree to which islanders’ depended on marine resources and the extent to which they engaged in interisland exchange networks. We use environmental and archaeological data to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Tremayne.

One of J.L. Giddings’ most important contributions to Arctic archaeology was the discovery and definition of the archaeological cultures known as the Denbigh Flint complex and Norton tradition from the stratified Iyatayet site. There, Giddings produced a descriptive analysis of each culture's tool forms and speculated on their lifeways. His work, however, was designed primarily to answer typological questions rather than processual or adaptive ones. Over the past seventy years, few studies...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jewel Gentry. Donna L. Gillette.

Rock art images, generally associated with outdoor landscapes and boulders occur in an unexpected context and very sacred space in the California Spanish colonial community of Mission San Miguel the Arcángel. The Mission Community consisted primarily of Salinan and Tulare native populations and included neophyte Indians from previously established nearby Missions. It has been suggested that images found etched throughout the sanctified interior are analogous to California Indian rock art with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Russell Weisman.

Total solar eclipses are perhaps the most dramatic of celestial events. During a total eclipse, for a few moments, while the moon passes unseen between the earth and the sun, viewers positioned directly in line with the sun and moon experience totality. The sun goes black. Day turns suddenly to dusk, winds stir and animals assume their night time behaviors. It is then and only then that the sun’s luminous and variable corona becomes visible. Solar eclipse representations have been widely...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maxine McBrinn. J.M. Adovasio.

At various times, archaeologists have proposed that the Great Basin Fremont, who lived in Utah and nearby areas between AD 500 and 1250, were Pueblo colonists, a purely indigenous Great Basin development, intrusive Athabaskans, or something in between. Fremont material culture is generally not very different from that of their neighbors, except in a few cases. Four artifact categories distinguish the Fremont: rock art and pottery depictions of trapezoidal figures; grey coiled-construction...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shelby Manney.

Archaeologists have long argued that the built environment is an expression of prehistoric community organizations, social interactions, and changes through time. Traditionally, archaeologists have interpreted buildings and settlement landscapes as proxies for estimating population size; indices of power structures; representations of community organization; markers of social interactions; etc. Even though there has been an increasing awareness of the importance of architecture it has been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marie-Isabelle Cattin.

During the Magdalenian in Switzerland the climate was very cold and the landscape was treeless. Faunal assemblages are dominated by horse but include arctic and alpine species. Lithic assemblages include backed bladelets (used to make composite projectile points) and tools used to butcher and process prey. The appearance of bipoints marks a shift in projectile point technology that coincides with an increase in juniper in the pollen record. The débitage show continuity with the preceding period...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Senatore.

Global growth of whaling activity in the 19th century brought the incorporation of remote and unknown areas such as Antarctica to the modern capitalist world. Logbooks were the official records of the activities of whaling voyages. Even before maps, written words in logbooks comprised the first records written in-situ about the experience of these newly incorporated spaces. Thee logbooks were often produced as a process, day by day, while the action was taking place. Due to the rich and detailed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lucas Martindale Johnson. Lisa M. Johnson.

Using a recently analyzed lithic deposit, from Caracol, Belize, this paper considers ancient Maya crafting from a materialist perspective. Through this perspective, we consider Caracol’s chert technology not as separate and distinct from obsidian, implicating a separate community of crafters, somehow less prestigious or knowledgeable, but rather, we argue that similarity in material properties enabled the utilization of identical reduction techniques. Those techniques in crafting were shared...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Neill Wallis.

During the 7th century in Florida, a decisive shift is apparent in the ways people were positioned in relation to burial sites and how they manufactured and interacted with portable objects. The transition ushered in the Weeden Island archaeological culture, well-known for the prevalence of exquisitely crafted pottery vessels and a characteristic mortuary regime widely adopted across the Gulf coastal plain and beyond. This paper examines the historical moment of change in terms of shifting...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jillian Mollenhauer.

In Formative Mesoamerica the built environments of San Lorenzo and La Venta became unique topographic assemblages combining local and regional materials drawn from riverbeds, salt domes, nearby hills, and distant volcanic peaks. These sites can be viewed as microcosms of their regional landscapes, incorporating natural forms and geographic referents as a way to manifest elite authority over the natural and human worlds. Integrated into these architectural settings were large-scale sculptures...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Worth.

Despite the fact that archaeological ceramics have long been viewed as a proxy for ethno-political identity, recent research exploring the precise relationship between ceramics and identity during the historic-era southeastern United States provides increasing support for the conclusion that geographic variability in archaeological ceramics is best viewed through the lens of practice, and that archaeological phases correspond better to communities of practice than communities of identity. When...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Rachel Opitz.

PDF of slides presented at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Christenson.

Although the Matthew Effect was originally used by sociologist Robert K. Merton for the disproportionate credit given to eminent scientists in cases of collaboration or independent discoveries within a professional discipline, it also is appropriate to apply it to situations where professionals take away or gain credit for work done by amateurs. Examples of such an effect are provided with an examination of the more general issue of how knowledge of discoveries is transmitted in archaeology and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dirk Van Tuerenhout.

The Houston Museum of Natural Science hosted an exhibit on the Maya 2012 phenomenon. This presentation reviews the various stages of preparing an exhibit from initial concept to cutting the ribbon. In particular, the speaker will address developing the storyline, object selection and marketing of the exhibit.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fred Valdez.

More than 25 years of collaborative research with Dr. Scarborough has provided for interesting ups & downs in understanding prehistoric Maya activities. Beginning at Cerros, intervening distant research, rejoining at Kinal (Guatemala), and culminating in NW Belize (for now) has allowed for a fascinating journey of archaeological investigations. Presented here are both scientific endeavors as well as events from field activities during nearly three decades of mutual research interests from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniela Triadan. Takeshi Inomata.

The rich data from elite households at the Classic site of Aguateca indicate that each household was a relatively autonomous economic unit of production and consumption of staples and utilitarian goods. While individual households were also specializing in the production of a variety of prestige items, there is little evidence for central control of any sphere of the economy by the royal court or elites. Individual households also seem to have maintained their own long-distance relationships...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hannah Plumer.

This presentation will examine paleopathology among the ancient Maya through the analysis of the skeletal remains from three different medium Maya sites in northwestern Belize. Osteological health indicators such as trauma, porotic hyperostosis, cribra orbitalia, osteoarthritis, and various dental health issues will be assessed both within and between the three sites. The sites to be discussed are Blue Creek, Nojol Nah, and Xnoha all of which are located along the Bravo Escarpment in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leah McCurdy.

Inspired by the important development of architectural energetics methodologies in Maya studies, I explore current research concerning monumental construction practices and labor at the ancient Maya site of Xunantunich, Belize. I discuss the foundational energetics principles applied to the major acropolis of Xunantunich, known as the Castillo, and highlight how virtual reconstruction plays a role in developing such energetics studies. Most importantly, I discuss how the scale of monumentality...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tiffany Lindley.

My research examines the responses of Maya hinterland households to Terminal Classic (AD 780-900) socioeconomic transformations. My fieldwork focuses on Floodplain North, one of five settlement clusters in the Rancho San Lorenzo Survey Area in Belize’s Mopan valley. While adjoining settlement clusters have been intensively studied, my excavations are the first at Floodplain North. To date I have completed 25 test excavations, sampling all of the mounds in the settlement cluster. Preliminary...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lori Phillips. Erin Thornton. Carlos Peraza Lope.

It has been largely assumed within Maya archaeological research that the native ocellated turkey (Meleagris ocellata) was consumed but not managed, and the domesticated Mexican turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) wasn’t introduced to the Maya region until 1000-1500 AD. Recent investigations have begun to question these assumptions and our research aims to further illuminate this complex topic. Through morphometric and stable isotope analyses of zooarchaeological remains of both species, we investigated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alleen Betzenhauser.

Cahokia, the earliest and largest Mississippian (A.D. 1050–1400) mound complex, is situated in the American Bottom of Illinois. It is widely considered to be the center of a regionally integrated polity complete with subsidiary centers, specialized settlements, and rural farmsteads. Investigations at Cahokia proper and in the surrounding countryside over the past 50 years have provided a wealth of data concerning settlement layout, structure size and shape, and the differential distribution of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Pullen.

The southern Greek Final Neolithic period extends for over 1500 years, ca. 4700 – 3200 cal BC, but has resisted satisfactory subdivision in largely due to the lack of stratified excavations. Nevertheless most scholars follow Phelps’ 1975 division into an earlier and a later phase, each with distinct ceramic features, but this division combines data from many different regions, and finds from surface surveys or from poorly dated contexts. A series of stratified radiocarbon dates from Ksagounaki,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Madsen. Carl Lipo.

Seriation is a long-standing archaeological method for relative dating that has proven effective in probing regional-scale patterns of inheritance, social networks, and cultural contact in their full spatiotemporal context. The orderings produced by seriation are produced by the continuity of class distributions and unimodality of class frequencies, properties that are related to social learning and transmission models studied by evolutionary archaeologists. Linking seriation to social learning...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Halston Meeker.

Two stone circle sites, T-W-Diamond (5LR200) and Killdeer Canyon (5LR289), offer insight into occupation length and structure use intensity. The two are located in northern Colorado, in the hogback zone along the Front Range of the Southern Rocky Mountains. Elizabeth Ann Morris and the Colorado State University field school excavated the sites in 1971 and 1982. This paper summarizes my thesis research, examining how temporary stone circle habitation sites actually are. Stone circle sites can...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Lapham. Ronald Faulseit.

Cerro Danush is located in the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico, within the Dainzú-Macuilxóchitl region—an area that underwent significant sociopolitical reorganization as the Zapotec state centered at nearby Monte Albán weakened and its regional power declined during the Classic to Postclassic transition. Comparing and contrasting zooarchaeological assemblages from a commoner household, an elite residence, and a ceremonial complex at Cerro Danush provides new insights into differential patterns of meat...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katrina Eichner.

The 19th century U.S. army encampment at Fort Davis is commonly remembered for its association with the enlisted men and officers who served the U.S. government. However, the fort also employed and rationed a group of Hispanic and black female laundresses, who too often are made invisible in modern interpretations of the site. Using an assemblage of domestic materials collected during the summers of 2013 and 2015, this paper aims to highlight the work – including physical labor, cultural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alyssa Scott.

In 1979, a trunk of artifacts was discovered concealed within a Sacramento house. The artifacts, photographs, and documents pertain primarily to the life of May Woolsey, who died in 1879 at age twelve. This paper seeks to investigate the assemblage and explore how interpretations involving memory can contribute towards an understanding of identity, childhood, and biography. The association of the artifacts in the assemblage, the curation of the artifacts, and the context of the trunk all have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marin Pilloud. Scott D. Haddow. Chistopher J. Knüsel. Clark Spencer Larsen.

Social memory has been argued to be a key component in the formation of the large Neolithic village site of Çatalhöyük, Turkey. This assertion has focused on daily practice centered within the house (Hodder and Cessford 2004), and may have extended to more architecturally elaborate houses as a central repository for memory and symbolism (Hodder and Pels 2010). Surrounding this discussion of social memory, there has been less focus on human burials; particularly on the treatment of human remains...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Leppard. Scott Fitzpatrick.

The appearance of megaliths, monumental architecture, large-scale earthworks, and sculpture in many prehistoric island societies in the Pacific and Mediterranean is conspicuously absent from the insular Caribbean. From the latte stones, columnar basalt complexes, artificial islands, Yapese stone money, Easter Island moai, marae, and earthworks found across Micronesia and Polynesia to the talayots, taulas, sesi, and Maltese ‘temples’ of the Mediterranean, small and sometimes remote islands...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Viola Koenig.

The Ethnologisches Museum Berlin, Germany will move into a new building called Humboldt Forum in the center of Berlin. The opening is scheduled 2019. The concept and planning for the new exhibition of the collections from Meosamerica will be presented and discussed.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Phil Geib.

Curved sticks with longitudinal facial grooves were dredged from the Sacred Cenote at Chichén Itzá at the start of the 1900s. They are also depicted in art there and at other sites such as Tula. These artifacts are similar to specimens recovered from various sites throughout the North American Southwest, where one suggested function was for defense against atlatl darts. Accepting this speculative account, Mesoamerican archaeologists have identified these artifacts as fending sticks. Starting in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Isabel Medina-González. Manuel E. Espinosa-Pesqueira. Gregory Pereira.

Silver is fairly uncommon in Mesoamerican archaeology, if compared with copper and gold, both of them materials that have been widely studied particularly in relation to the development of Western Mexican Pre-columbian cultures. Henceforth, material and technological aspects regarded Mesoamerican silver metal-work are still widely unknown. This paper presents the initial results on a interdisciplinary research based on state of the art analytical techniques (XRD, SEM-EDX-XRF) on a couple of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Grant McCall.

During the late 1950s, the avocational archaeologist Gwendoline Stacpoole collected a sizable assemblage of stone tools from farm fields along Ireland's east coast near the town of Kenure, Rush, County Dublin. Stacpoole worked in collaboration with G.F. Mitchell at Trinity College, Dublin, and the assemblage from Kenure was ultimately donated to the National Museum of Ireland. In the summer of 2014, I analyzed a considerable sample of Stacpoole's collection from Kenure and this paper presents...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nathaniel Erb-Satullo.

One of the challenges facing the study of technological change and craft production during the Late Bronze and Early Iron Age in the Near East is a lack of information about the spatial and social contexts in which metal production occurred. A new program of survey and excavation aims to explore these issues in an ore-rich transitional zone between lowland and highland areas of the South Caucasus. Fortified hilltop settlements dot lowland valleys as they narrow and rise towards the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meagan Clark. Scott M. Fitzpatrick. Christina M. Giovas. Frances White.

The accelerated pace of Pre-Columbian archaeological research in the Caribbean over the last 20 years has afforded great opportunity to better understand past human-ecosystem relationships in the region and how these have been shaped by natural and cultural processes. In keeping with this research agenda, we report the results from a robust analysis of 18,500+ marine and terrestrial vertebrate remains recovered from a dense midden deposit at the Late Ceramic Age (AD 760-1440) site of Coconut...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mónica Alonso Eguíluz. Rosa María Albert. Javier Fernández Eraso.

Fumier deposits are important sources of information to better understand past livestock practices. The Neolithic site of Los Husos II (Álava, Spain), in the upper Ebro Basin, is the oldest Basque Country site where livestock practices were detected dating to 6990-6760 cal B.P. Hence, the site offers a unique opportunity to study the adaptation of early livestock practices and their expansion to the western Pyreness, as the Ebro Basin is the main route by which the new economic system...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ximena Villagran. Andre Strauss. Christopher Miller.

The site of Lapa do Santo (state of Minas Gerais, Brazil) is a key location to understand the mundane and ritual activities of early South Americans. Radiocarbon dating placed its occupation between 7.9 and 12.7 cal kyBP. Rock art from the Pleistocene/Holocene boundary was found beneath 4 meters of sediment, and 26 human burials revealed unique mortuary practices involving mutilation, defleshing and decapitation. In this work, we focus on the stratigraphic sequence from the early Holocene, where...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carl Knappett. Jill Hilditch. Duncan Pirrie.

As instrumentation and software packages become increasingly sophisticated, the microscopic world of material culture comes ever more clearly into focus. In doing so, however, we run the risk of privileging the mineral and the elemental above the human, those complex makers and users of ancient artefacts. It would seem, then, that the importance of bridging analytical scales remains as pertinent now as when David Peacock first critiqued the use of mineralogical and chemical techniques for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jammi Ladwig.

The very word “archaeology” conjures interest by the public generally. Finding meaningful ways to engage that interest, however, is less straight-forward for practitioners, educators, and researchers. Sitting within any given repository of archaeological materials are collections in need of additional documentation and analysis, some of which may have not been handled since the time of their initial excavation and curation. Additionally, while much can be learned through microbotanical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Panagiotis Karkanas.

Alepotrypa cave is one of the few examples of deep caves being intensively occupied throughout its extension during the Neolithic of Greece. The study of the microstructure and the microstratigraphy of the sediment revealed that the front entrance chambers consist of occupational deposits characterized by constructed clay surfaces and occupational debris. In addition to the several burials, frequent reorganization of the space in the form or fillings, leveling and resurfacing has resulted to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Randolph Donahue. Daniela Burroni. Anders Fischer.

It has been shown that the amount of rounding of a dorsal ridge of an unused flake is a good proxy measure for the amount of post-depositional modification by sediment movement. The technique has been applied often by the Lithic Microwear Research Laboratory to assess the suitability of an assemblage for study of tool use. Here, we report on the application of the technique to a unique problem. Orehoved is a port located in southern Denmark. The repositioning of a bridge carrying traffic between...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Martindale. Kenneth Ames. Bryn Letham. Kevan Edinborough. Sarah Wilson.

The monumentality of the anthropogenic landscape of the Prince Rupert Harbour region on north coastal British Columbia has long been recognized for the number, density, and size of the shell midden terraces containing villages dating to the last 5000 years. The scale of the region’s archaeological record makes regional assessments of the mode and tempo of shell-bearing site construction difficult. We report on a program of regional and site-specific percussion coring combined with 14C dating to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hayley Singleton.

This paper presents the faunal composition of a platform mound and adjacent village midden as a means of understanding subsistence, feasting, and ceremony at the pre-Columbian Garden Patch site, a Middle Woodland (ca. AD 100 to 500) multi-mound center located on the northwest gulf coast of Florida. The vertebrate faunal remains from the dense midden of Area X are compared to those of adjacent Mound II, a platform mound constructed of alternating lenses of shell midden and sand. The results of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeffrey Shanks.

Recent investigations of Swift Creek and Weeden Island mound-midden complexes at Byrd Hammock in Wakulla County, Florida, and on Tyndall Air Force Base in Bay County, Florida, and show that there were direct and/or indirect interactions among these Woodland sites. Geophysical surveys of village plazas, comparisons of ceramic stamped patterns, and other data show the presence of a intraregional social network with shared expressions of ideology and settlement patterning that underwent similar...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bruno Moraes.

Remarkable marks of an intense occupation in pre-Columbian times, the Amazonian Dark Earths are spread ubiquitously over a large area in the Amazon River basin. Despite being products of human interaction with the landscape, the differences between each one of them can be significant in terms of its physical and chemical properties, probably reflecting a diversity of both cultural and natural processes which they were exposed. As the increasing studies in Amazonian Archaeology the processes of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Myles Miller. Timothy B. Graves.

A contextual analysis of 3,989 radiocarbon dates provides unprecedented insights into 8,000 years of prehistoric adaptions and social evolution in the northern Chihuahuan Desert of southern New Mexico and Trans-Pecos Texas. The chronology is particularly robust between 4500 BP and historic times, allowing for distinctive subsistence, technological, and social developments to be isolated throughout the terminal Middle Holocene and Late Holocene and corresponding Middle Archaic, Late Archaic, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Pope.

The important archaeological sequence of La Cotte de St. Brelade, known for both abundant lithic and faunal material recording human activity and environmental conditions over the last 200,000 years, is an exception in this key region making the site unique. La Cotte is also famous for the discovery of late Middle Pleistocene concentrations of mammoth and rhinoceros bone remains, known as ’bone-heaps’ (Scott 1986). Different hypotheses have been proposed to explain the formation of these bone...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Annemieke Milks. Matt Pope.

Hunting lesions provide indirect evidence of humans using weapons for subsistence. Potential examples of hunting lesions from the European Middle Pleistocene are limited, having been proposed for one scapula each from the British sites of Boxgrove and Swanscombe. These scapulae, both bearing semi-circular damaged edges, have been suggested to have been impacted by untipped wooden spears, similar to those from the Middle Pleistocene sites of Schöningen and Clacton-on-Sea. Plain wooden spears from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ian Buvit. Karisa Terry. Steven Hackenberger. Irina Razgildeeva. Masami Izuho.

The Last Glacial Maximum (LGM, 26-20 kya) was a time of reduced global temperatures. Southern Siberia, where decades of Paleolithic research have demonstrated a keen link between environment and middle Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherer behavior, offers a unique testing ground to examine various ecologically sound models about whether human populations declined or disappeared during the height of the last ice age. Other unanswered questions have to do with the origin and dispersal of microliths...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Smiti Nathan.

Since the Early Bronze Age in Oman (ca. 3100 BCE to 2000 BCE), oasis agricultural communities have held social and economic importance in Southern Arabia. Throughout the Arabian Peninsula there are varying microclimates. This paper focuses on northeastern Oman, where an arid landscape is a defining environmental characteristic. In order to successfully maintain an agrarian lifestyle in these environs, strategic decision-making was key. This paper brings together previous work on agricultural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nan Gonlin. Christine Dixon.

After the sun went down, the world of ancient Mesoamerica was transformed into a dark landscape. Some sought sleep while others came alive for nocturnal naughtiness. Ancient Mesoamericans simultaneously embraced and respected the dark. Are nightly practices destined to remain obscured from our view, or can we illuminate such dark doings by expanding our focus from daily practices to include those of the night? A fundamental question explored in this paper is the extent to which there is material...