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

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kyle Freund. Craig Alexander. Robert Tykot. Keri Brown. Italo Muntoni.

The Tavoliere has one of the densest concentrations of Neolithic settlement in Europe and is known for its wide repertoire of pottery styles. Using network analysis techniques, this study explores Neolithic pottery production in the region by integrating typological analysis with petrography and elemental characterization using portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) spectrometry. In doing so, we reveal sets of choices made at multiple stages of the production processes and in turn shed light on the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wendy Cegielski.

Certain social systems do not become more complex. They remain stable for considerable periods of time despite constant environmental and cultural change, a fact that remains a puzzle in archaeology. Research by Iberian archaeologists indicates that the Valencian Bronze Age in Mediterranean Spain may be such a case where material homogeneity represents a social system lasting with little change for nearly 700 years (BC 2200-1500). This trend stands in stark contrast to the complex social changes...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nuria Sugrañes. María José Ots. Michael D. Glascock.

In Mendoza, the first record of pottery has been dated ca. 2000 years BP. The technology used varies in terms of manufacture and decoration. Differences in cultural, social and economic organization were also present in the area. The Atuel and Diamante river basins are in a transition zone, where different kinds of social organization, farmers and pastoralists in the north and hunter-gatherers in the south were present. This variability enhances a debate about analytical ways to approach ceramic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Jane Murray. Keith Ashley.

Shields Mound is one of two large burial mounds that compose the Mill Cove Complex, an early Mississippian period site located near the mouth of the St. Johns River in Northeast Florida. First excavated by C. B. Moore in the 1890s, the sand mound held hundreds of burials as well as exotic goods such as copper, galena, mica and two ground stone spatulate celts. More recently, the University of North Florida has investigated nearby components of the complex, including several habitation middens...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joaquin Arroyo-Cabrales. Ismael Ferrusquía-Villafranca. Víctor Adrián Pérez-Crespo.

The Mexican Quaternary Mammal Database (MQMD) data are focused on published mammal occurrences in paleontological localities and archaeological sites in México, covering the last 2.6 million years and up to the early Holocene, although some unpublished data from museum collections are included, as well as “grey” literature. More than 15,000 records have been secured from 876 documents. That large database includes records for more than 800 localities and 250 mammal species pertaining to 12...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Loa Traxler.

Mindful stewardship of cultural heritage is a collaborative and holistic effort, often carried out in changing social contexts and facing steep challenges. As archaeologists, we communicate our understanding of the past and the broad implications of archaeological research to the diverse publics that we serve. Drawing from recent work to organize and present the "Maya 2012: Lords of Time" exhibition, this presentation will highlight approaches taken to contextualize pre-Columbian Maya cultural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elodie Dupey. Jamie Forde.

In this paper, we discuss the life history and pre-Hispanic modification of the understudied Codex Vaticanus B, commonly attributed to the Borgia group codices. Seven of the manuscript’s 96 pages were covered over with a new white background, composed of different materials than the original, and repainted with several chromatic palettes, likely by different artists. While the manuscript’s structure largely follows that of other Borgia group divinatory almanacs attributed to Nahua peoples from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabriela LHeureux. Juan Bautista Belardi. Flavia Carballo Marina.

Cabo Virgenes 24 (CV 24) is an archaeological site located at the Southeastern end of continental Patagonia, Argentina. The site rests on an erotional beach which formation started in the Middle Holocene. The archaeological background shows that inland hunter-gatherers populations began to use this coastal space since 2000 years BP. The faunal record of CV 24 exposes a low density and high richness of marine and coastal faunal species. There is an emphasis on pinnipeds exploitation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melissa Holst. Jonathan Haws.

Few Paleolithic sites in Portugal possess enough data to provide for a comprehensive analysis of Upper Paleolithic site function. However, Lapa do Picareiro, a cave site in the Estremadura region of Portugal, is exceptional in that it possesses continuous chronology and is continuing to produce high resolution data sets pertaining to site function, lithic technological organization, and subsistence. This poster compares and contrasts old and new lithic data sets from the late Magdalenian at Lapa...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Pugh.

Gridded settlements are rare in the Americas and previously unknown in the Maya world until the Spanish conquest. Recent work has documented a modular orthogonal grid at Nixtun-Ch’ich’, Petén, Guatemala. The grid appears to have been imposed upon much of the site around 400-200 BCE. In other parts of the world, planned orthogonal grids are frequently associated with powerful central authority. If this were the case at Nixtun-Ch’ich’ then then this act of power is correlated with the emergence of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Briece Edwards.

Tribe’s perspective and understanding of practice, place and context is as unique and diverse as Tribes themselves. The roles of Tribal Historic Preservation Offices (THPOs) are equally diverse between Tribes but all have one consistent thread – they, like states, are charged with the identification, recordation, and protection of cultural resources. Tribes are integral to the ‘Section 106’ process and are often required to reacquaint individuals with the state and federal laws and procedures...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Lothrop. Arthur Spiess.

The New England-Maritimes (NEM) region in northeastern North America is noted for clear environmental signals of the Younger Dryas climatic reversal (circa 12,900-11,600 Cal BP), followed by an abrupt transition to a warmer and more dry early Holocene climate. In this paper, we first review evidence for changes in paleoenvironments and animal populations that accompanied these climatic transitions in the NEM. We then examine archaeological evidence for early human occupations in the region,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only R. Stanley Kerr. Hannah Mattson. Christina Chavez. Toni Goar.

Recent archaeological excavation of an early Developmental period village within the Albuquerque city limits has revealed the earliest evidence for ceramics in the Middle and Northern Rio Grande Valley to date. A roasting pit at LA 138927, located immediately adjacent to Montaño Pueblo, contained Alma Plain jar sherds associated with charcoal dated to the early AD 400s. The identification of pottery in fifth century deposits in the Albuquerque area is significant, as pottery first appeared in...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Brian Redmond. Nigel Brush. Haskel Greenfield. P. Nick Kardulias. Jeffrey Dilyard.

A growing body of archaeological data now points to the likely exploitation of American Mastodon (Mammut americanum) by late Pleistocene hunters in North America. The recent discovery of a partial mastodon skeleton at the Cedar Fork site in Morrow County, Ohio provides additional evidence in the form of at least one possibly cut marked bone. The skeletal remains are those of a large male and were disturbed post-mortem by animal scavenging and more recent geological processes including debris...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Devio. M. Kathryn Brown.

At Xunantunich, Belize, thousands of worked chert bladelets were found in Late to Terminal classic deposits near residences in Groups D and E. Initially, these implements were thought to represent tools used in craft production of slate or other materials. However, little crafting debris or debitage was encountered within deposits where the tools were recovered. Edge-wear analysis suggests the tools were used on organic material, either hardwood or softer materials like tubers. Starch grain...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katelyn McDonough. Dennis Jenkins.

The Connley Caves are composed of eight rockshelters eroded into a south-facing ridge of welded tuff, rhyolite and fine-grained basalt in the Fort Rock Basin of central Oregon. The caves contain deeply buried and well-stratified sediments dating to the late Pleistocene-early Holocene. Excavations directed by Stephen Bedwell in the late 1960s recovered many lithic artifacts and intriguing radiocarbon dates of 10,600±190 14C yr B.P. and 11,200±200 14C yr B.P. Bedwell’s interpretations of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brigitte Kovacevich. Michael Callaghan. Karla Cardona. Whitney Goodwin. Katelyn Bishop.

The site of Holtun is located in the department of the Peten at about 12 km south of the site of Yaxha and 35 km from Tikal. Holtun is considered a civic-ceremonial center and is part of a Group of Preclassic epicenters located south of Yaxha Lake. This paper will summarize the results of the field and lab seasons from 2012-2015. We will also discuss the preliminary results of the analysis of radiocarbon, fauna, lithics, ceramics, and soils. The analyses suggest that Holtun was a Preclassic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maeve Skidmore. Sarah Kennedy.

The Middle Horizon (AD 600-1000) brought dramatic changes to the Cusco region, particularly to valleys where Wari colonists settled in this period. Despite debate and research on the issue, our understanding of how Wari people altered local agropastoral arrangements in this zone remains limited. A prior study by the authors suggested that Wari populations maintained camelid flocks in a manner similar to that described for the Inca. Specifically it concluded that animals lived to maturity,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Felipe Gonzalez-Macqueen. Giles Spence-Morrow. Peter Bikoulis. Willy Yépez Álvarez. Justin Jennings.

Throughout the 20th century, archaeologists have used aerial photography to record and study geoglyphs and other large features. This method, however, has its limitations like expense, flying time, and image resolution. With the addition of satellite imagery and drone photography into the archaeological toolbox, we can now obtain higher resolution images of variable landscapes. We conducted a preliminary survey of a section of the Sihuas Valley, Peru, in order to better understand the landscape...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rosicler Silva. Julio Rubin de Rubin. Daniel Santos Correa. Sergia Meire da Silva. Jordana Batista Barbosa.

Research conducted in the 1980s in the area of the GO-CP-04 litho-ceramic archaeological site identified drawings, engravings and a burial ground. The shelter measurements averaged 40m in length by 4m in width. The radio carbonic dates vary between 4,455+/-115 years B.P and 1,020+/-40 years B.P. With the resumption of investigations, a reassessment of the characteristics of the shelter is presented. It is considered that the site area may be more than 50m long and the slope would be more distant...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jorge Garcia.

Colombian archaeologists continue to be criticized for instituting nationalistic agendas and ignoring the demands of local communities interested in participating in the research and stewardship of archaeological remains. This criticism of Colombian archaeology has a strong foundation, but it does not generate alternatives on how to mitigate the lack of cooperation between archaeologists and communities. It is necessary to assess processes in which communities have worked along with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joshua Englehardt. Michael Carrasco. Mary Pohl.

The rich visual culture of the Formative period Gulf Coast Olmec has long been recognized as playing a foundational role in the origins and development of subsequent Mesoamerican writing systems and artistic traditions. Nonetheless, Formative period visual cultures remain relatively understudied, as does their role in and impact on the emergence of regional script systems, the developmental dynamics of which continue to elude adequate explanation. To advance the field’s understanding of script...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Sinclair.

This paper explores the quotidian use of figurines by the inhabitants of the village of Ak’awillay in the Cusco region. Most scholars have defined figurines as political tools used to support state ideologies. This research expands on this effort and focuses on the use of figurines in domestic contexts among non-state societies. The study of figurines from Ak’awillay and comparative data from archaeological and ethnographic contexts suggest that figurines had multiple uses and included ancestor...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Philippe De Smedt. Marc Van Meirvenne.

While electromagnetic induction (EM) instruments have been used for archaeological prospection since the 1960's, until recently their implementation remained rare. Only during the past decade EM sensors, which allow capturing both magnetic and electrical properties of the subsurface, have become a more standard part of the archaeo-geophysical toolbox. Weighing heavily on applications in soil science, EM surveys are now proving their worth in discerning both human and natural variations. Through...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniela Hernandez Sarinana. Gina Buckley. Doug Kennett. Brendan Culleton. David Carballo.

The Proyecto Arqueológico Tlajinga Teotihuacan (PATT) undertook two excavation seasons in the southern district of the city known as Tlajinga. These have provided new information concerning the growth of the city southward and life in residential apartment complexes. Tlajinga comprises a group of residential neighborhoods where commoners lived and engaged in both local and city-wide interactions. Analysis of ceramics from the project provides an understanding of the temporality of household...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rick Schulting. Jörg Orschiedt. Dani Hofmann. Gisela Grupe.

Since their discovery in the early twentieth century, there has been controversy over the chronology of the two ‘skull nests’ found within Ofnet cave in southwest Germany. Initially the focus was on whether they dated to the Palaeolithic, Mesolithic or Neolithic. The first radiocarbon dates at least resolved this issue in favour of the Mesolithic, but the considerable range obtained fueled a second debate: were the skulls deposited in a single event, which, together with the peri-mortem injuries...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Myrtle Shock.

The expansion of archaeological research in the Amazon Basin, from the margins of major tributaries to small rivers and headwaters is populating empty portions of our maps. In the region of Presidente Figueiredo, Amazonas State, Brazil, occupation of the interfluvial zone was neither ephemeral nor short lived with sites every two kilometers, on average. One extensively excavated site, Claudio Cutião, was occupied for over 1000 years beginning around 1600 BP. The formation of anthropic dark earth...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meredith Hardy. David Morgan.

Sharing a birth year with the National Historic Preservation Act, the National Park Service’s Southeast Archeological Center has served as steward to the cultural resources and archeological heritage for the national park units across the southeastern United States. For 50 years SEAC has overseen and conducted the majority of NHPA-related activities in these parks, provided training and education to both NPS staff and the public. This paper examines the roles SEAC has played in resource...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Arnhold. Frederic Sellet.

Prehistoric groups were able to anticipate the use of redundantly visited landscapes by constructing niches with toolkits, called caches. The small size of caches and frequent absence of diagnostic tools limited the information available from studying individual caches. It was hypothesized that caches were examples of anticipated mobility to provision predictable ecological niches with tools for the presence or absence of resources in potential activity areas. Sixty-two caches from the Central...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Larry Steinbrenner.

In the mid-20th century, Doris Stone described Las Vegas Polychrome, a brightly coloured ceramic ware found at sites in Honduras’ eastern highlands and the Comayagua Valley, as being “strongly reminiscent of western Nicaragua and the Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica.” Meanwhile, contemporary archaeologists were happily classifying near-identical ceramics from eastern El Salvador as “Nicoya Polychromes”. More than a half century later, Las Vegas Polychrome remains only nominally defined, examples...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anthony Aveni.

Effects of the sudden, dramatic inversion of day and night experienced during a total eclipse of the sun have been reported in cultures the world over. How to find meaning in the extraordinary shading, the odd color tones in the landscape produced by the sun’s corona, and the changes in animal behavior, not to mention the appearance of stars and planets flanking the black disk that accompanies darkness in the middle of the day? After a brief cross-cultural survey of where eclipse myths find...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Flannery Surette.

In the iconography of the north coast of Peru, Moon Animals are otherworldly quadrupedal predators which consistently have prominent eyes, teeth, tongues and claws, long curling tails and large head crests. They can resemble felines or foxes while other depictions appear more reptilian or amphibian. The name originates from the association with lunar and astral motifs in Moche art during the Early Intermediate Period (200 BC-AD 800). These Moche examples have come to define in the literature...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Kamp. John Whittaker.

Archaeology has paid scant attention to the differences between diurnal and nocturnal landscapes, and the differences in meaning and use implied and constrained by the change from day to night. We also neglect the multi-sensoral nature of the landscape. Vision is emphasized almost to the exclusion of hearing, smell, and touch. Humans are diurnal animals emphasizing vision, and modern archaeologists are further biased by our brightly lit world of electricity, neon, and LED screens in which a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexei Vranich.

Popular understanding of the relationship between the rise of early civilization and astronomy emphasizes the observance of particular moments in the cycle of the sun. This pattern is particularly strong at the Bolivian highland Andean site of of Tiwanaku (AD 500-950), a megalithic site known for its “Temple of the Sun”, “Gateway of the Sun”, and solstice festival that attracts thousands. Recent research throughout the Titicaca Basin documents a wide range of celebrated astronomical observations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lori Lee.

This paper uses historical and archaeological evidence to which consumer goods were available to enslaved men and women in nineteenth century Virginia. At the scale of local markets and stores, supply and variable adherence to laws constrained which goods were available to slaves who were able to purchase or trade for them. By comparing purchases of enslaved African Americans with purchases of whites at the same store, I assess which goods were accessible to each group. I use archaeological data...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Pool.

Ethnographic and ethnohistoric information are significant sources of data for archaeologists in developing various models. It is a widely held belief among archaeologists that the Chiricahua Apache subsistence was based only on food foraging and raiding. This interpretation originates with Opler, the primary ethnographer for the Chiricahua Apache ,who stated that "no attempt was made to cultivate crops until very recent times" and "By the time the Eastern Chiricahua became seriously interested...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Compton. Carol E. Colaninno.

Elizabeth Reitz has had a distinguished career partially built on her efforts to document exchanges in foodways as groups came together to form multiethnic communities. Her research investigating animal remains recovered from multiethnic communities in colonial Spanish Florida exemplify this work. She has shown that as Native Americans and Spaniards interacted, they blended their established food traditions. Part of this blending was the introduction of novel subsistence strategies (in both...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sierra Bow. Jan Simek. Alan Cressler.

Analytic methods for prehistoric pigment analyses, especially for rock art, have seen important enhancements over the past decade. In particular, the development of non-destructive, field-portable instrumentation has been transformational. Painted Bluff in Alabama is one of the richest rock art localities in the Southeastern US. Initial SEM-EDS analyses there yielded results consistent with prehistoric technology, but this method is destructive and only a limited number of pictographs were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gilliane Monnier. Kele Missal. Ellery Frahm.

Lithic residue analysis is undergoing a methodological shift as analysts introduce new methods designed to improve the objectivity of residue identifications. Fourier-Transform Infrared (FTIR) microspectroscopy has been shown to have tremendous potential in this regard. This method is nondestructive, can provide precise identifications of molecular compounds and minerals, and can be carried out in situ – directly on the residues - without removing them from the stone tools. However, the optical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Pepe.

North Woodlawn Cemetery served Fort Lauderdale’s African American community during the period of legislated racial segregation. In the 1960s, a portion of the cemetery was purchased by the State of Florida and incorporated into the new Right-of-Way (ROW) for Interstate 95. In 2012, Janus Research began working with the Florida Department of Transportation on possible improvements in the vicinity of North Woodlawn. A major part of this research involved ascertaining if unmarked graves are present...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Lena Jones.

While Pleistocene-Holocene archaeofaunas from the Iberian peninsula are relatively well-documented, these data are often considered in isolation from the larger Atlantic context. In this paper, I consider archaeofaunas from Eastern Iberia - Portugal and the Galicia region of Spain - in comparison with what we know about animal exploitation in Atlantic Morocco and the East Coast of North America. I assess the nature and completeness of the archaeofaunal record in these regions and explore...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Willis.

Throughout the summer of 2015, graduate students at the University of Nevada Las Vegas began the data mining of over 20 years of archaeological site forms pertaining to the prehistoric occupation of the southern portion of the Shivwits Plateau in Northern Arizona. This data, as collected by the National Park Service, was organized and placed into a geodatabase, allowing for the first time a thorough spatial investigation of artifact distributions associated with the upland Virgin Branch...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Travis Williams.

Historical archaeologists, to varying degrees, have long been interested in researching the lives of people from the past who left little (and about whom little was left) in the form of textual documentation. In North America and beyond, such interests most often take the form of archaeology of slavery and bondage. Unfortunately, the forces that conspired to prevent the voices of enslaved peoples from entering the historical record (i.e., colonialism, racialization, ethnocentrism, capitalism)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katrina Kosyk.

Typically ephemeral aspects of material culture, such as musical gestures and sound, are often overlooked in the reconstruction of Greater Nicoya culture history. Musical instruments offer clues to our understanding of cultural practices and the kinds of interactions between groups of individuals. Developing from recent research based on both archaeological and museum collections, my research examines—from a music archaeology perspective—a variety of highly decorated and culturally imbued...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Craig Cipolla.

In 1762 Ezra Stiles—ethnohistoric observer and future president of Yale University—puzzled over the significance of brush and stone heaps constructed by indigenous people of New England. He found the label “sacrifice rocks” unfit for such features because indigenous people never killed animals or offered lives of any kind there. I begin this paper by addressing some of the challenges involved in interpreting eighteenth- and nineteenth-century indigenous spirituality and religion. I contextualize...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bruce Kaiser. Jennifer DeGraffenried. Nathan Nelson.

Development of a Unique Sourcing and Artifact Analysis Technique and Database for Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah, USA. Using the Tracer III SD xrf laboratory system as a key component, a very precise and detailed methodology was developed for the elemental measurement, material type identification, and geological source location of artifacts found on Dugway Proving Grounds.Following 8 steps led to a very precise and accurate elemental analysis of the Dugway basalt and obsidian artifacts and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Teresa Moyer.

Over the past 100 years, a range of outreach and education activities have helped the National Park Service to meet its mission while engaging the public's interest in the mystery, fun, and dirt of archeology. From field trips to public digs to web sites, the NPS has aimed to remain engaged and relevant in multigenerational learning. This paper will outline the changing approaches to outreach and education by archeologists in the NPS.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marcy Rockman. Marissa Morgan.

The US National Park Service (NPS) is actively preparing for climate change and its current and potential effects across all of the cultural resources for which it has responsibility for management and guidance. These include archeological resources, cultural landscape, ethnographic resources, museum objects, and structures and buildings. However, the agency currently lacks data detailing how cultural resources will be affected by changing climates. To address this gap in knowledge, the NPS...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elena Phipps.

Andean textile artists transformed fibers and dyes from nature to create complex color palettes attuned to the aesthetic of their time and place. Creating unique qualities not only of value and hue, qualities of color—in nuance shades, degree of sheen and brilliance-- Andean dyers, spinners and weavers built a vocabulary of color that contributed to the meaning and value of textiles in their social, political and creative context. From Chavin religious and supernatural figures created through...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marcel Kornfeld. Bob Dawe.

The first peopling of the Americas is characterized by either a coastal route or an ice free corridor during the late Wisconsin glaciation, when continental ice still covered the north half of the continent. While the pendulum has swung somewhat towards the coastal route, no smoking gun exists that will deliver a champion in this controversy. With this paper we would like to present a third option – the “Icy Corridor.” We argue that a corridor is an unnecessary feature for Clovis predecessors...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Yacubic.

Lithic artifacts represent a major aspect of the archaeological record, and they are found in a wide variety of cultural settings. For the Maya lowlands, lithic analysis is particularly insightful for studying relationships between economics and society because stone was the dominant raw material used to produce tools at differing levels of social organization. The purpose of this presentation is to examine community connections at Tayasal using an interactionalist perspective. Through this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kenneth Hirth. Mark Dennison. Sean Carr. Sarah Imfeld. Casana Popp.

In 1986 John Clark published a seminal article that questioned the scale of obsidian craft production at Teotihuacan as reconstructed by the Teotihuacan Mapping Project (TMP). Clark argued that many of the areas identified as obsidian workshops from surface materials were concentrations of production refuse deposited as fill and eroding out of residential and public architecture. Excavations by the Projecto Arqueologico Teotihuacan-Tlajinga (PATT) in 2013 explored the stratigraphic relationships...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mostafa Fayek. Brooke Milne. Ryan Sharpe. Rachel ten Bruggencate. Lawrence Anovitz.

Obsidian hydration dating (OHD) is based on the premise that when an obsidian artifact is manufactured, the fresh surface exposed immediately begins to hydrate. A state-of-the-art obsidian hydration dating technique utilizes secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) to measure H diffusion profiles in obsidian artifacts and the depths of the resulting sputter pits by a stylus-type profilometer. The pit depths are matched with the SIMS H diffusion profiles, which are compared to diffusion profiles of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Lekson. Catherine Cameron.

Payson Sheets has often been on the cutting/bleeding edge of obsidian research. We review current obsidian studies in the Southwest, as a proxy for social/economic interaction. We comment on confirmed or tentative sightings of Mexican obsidian in and around the region, also as a proxy for social/economic interaction.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeffrey Ferguson. Barbara Roth. Katelynn DiBenedetto.

The Harris Site is a large pithouse village in the Mimbres Valley of southwestern New Mexico. Many of the twenty structures (recently excavated) are organized into five discrete clusters that have been interpreted as the remains of extended family corporate groups. Some of these groups apparently had more wealth and social power, and these differences may be tied to both land tenure and ritual sponsorship. We use obsidian provenance data to explore differences in obsidian procurement strategies...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Speakman. Sergey Slobodin. Jeffrey Rasic.

Chemical sourcing of obsidian artifacts serves an important role in understanding prehistoric patterns of mobility, trade, exchange, resource exploitation, and cultural interaction. In Alaska and adjacent areas of Canada, more than 8,000 obsidian artifacts and geologic source samples have been analyzed by various analytical techniques resulting in the identification of more than 50 chemically discrete obsidian groups throughout this vast area. In contrast to Alaska, comparatively little...

DOCUMENT Citation Only M. Elizabeth Grávalos. Patrick Ryan Williams. Lauren Monz. Erell Hubert.

Here we present a preliminary chaîne opératoire analysis of obsidian stone tools and associated debitage recovered from a single architectural compound at the site of Cerro Baúl. As the only known direct interaction sphere of the prehispanic Wari and Tiwanaku empires, research at Cerro Baúl in the Moquegua Valley, Peru offers a rare perspective of colonial encounters and intertwined political economies. During the 2015 excavation season we exposed a dense midden context consisting of various...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bonnie Etter.

It is my goal to use Geographic Information Systems (GIS) applications to map and analyze the distribution of material created by the use life of the Gault site, in order to better understand the ways in which the site was re-used. By attempting to understand the scatter of material culture as a site is continually utilized over a period of centuries, I hope to better understand the reasons that the site was being occupied, including what sorts of activities were taking place, and how previous...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Roberto Rosado Ramirez. Jessica Harrison.

In this poster we present the results of archaeological research at three currently submerged Classic period Maya saltworks in Paynes Creek National Park, Southern Belize. Through the study of marine sediment columns, we document environmental and anthropogenic changes over time at these locations. By conducting macroscopic analysis, loss-on ignition, and microscopic characterization of marine sediment samples, we were able to identify the effects of human activities as well as sea level rise on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James McGrath.

Ochre becomes ubiquitous across Southern African archaeological sites beginning in the Middle Stone Age and continuing throughout the Later Stone Age. For the last decade, ochre research has focused upon the utilization of ochre, cognitive implications of its use, and of the ochre assemblages themselves. Recently, a growing number of ochre studies have attempted to source ochre through a variety of analytic techniques. This study attempts to differentiate ochre raw material sources with a novel...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Williams. Nancy Velchoff Littlefield.

The careful preparation of Clovis striking platforms is considered characteristic of the technology. Platform preparation is regarded as a critical component of many lithic reduction strategies but very few studies have specifically focused on individual platform traits. General observations regarding Clovis platforms on bifaces suggest that these platforms are well-prepared and utilize five traits; faceting, reducing, releasing, isolating, and grinding. Platform preparation in a blade...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mini Sharma Ogle.

Environmental regulations, spatial planning, and striving for consistency in managing cultural resources within the electric utility industry will be discussed using Portland General Electric’s (PGE) projects. Poster will address issues from the perspective of project development and prioritizing resources ranging from salmon to archaeological sites. Specifically, the issue of managing cultural resources in situations where FERC compliance or Section 106 is not the driving force is explored. PGE...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nigel Goring-Morris. Anna Belfer-Cohen.

While there is a huge difference in every aspect of existence between simple human societies, i.e. hunter-gatherers and complex ones, i.e. industrial groups, the head is always considered as the residing place of the essential part of what defines ‘us’ as rational human beings at the individual level. One may thus assume that this was the case also in prehistoric times, which at least partially explains the special treatment of heads that one can observe through millennia, from the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Flavia Morello Repetto. Jimena Torres. Victor Sierpe. Manuel San Roman.

The results of Offing 2 Locus 2 archaeological excavation are presented and used to discuss broader implications for Patagonia hunter-gatherer contexts of the Late Holocene. The site is located near Dawson Island, within a strategic geographical position between Fueguian-Patagonian archipelagos, South American. Radiocarbon dating states occupation around 800 years BP. Evidence is characteristic of shellmidden deposits and chronological evidence indicates a short occupational sequence. Lithic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michelle De Saint Pierre.

The southern cone of South America has been an important source of information regarding the early peopling of America. The discovery of Monte Verde archeological site meant a revolution, leading to the idea and eventual acceptance of the Coastal route, also named Pre-Clovis hypothesis. Notwithstanding the fact that many pre-Clovis sites has been discover throughout America and this hypothesis is already accepted, the debate of the real age of the first migration still continues. Probably...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Lowman.

As development in Silicon Valley fills what appears to be empty land, it is crucial to question how land became "empty." In the absence of memorials, other physical traces must be considered as legacies. This is the case with the Chinese employees who lived and worked at what became Stanford University, itself made possible by Chinese workers on the Transcontinental Railroad. Living on the campus at the turn of the twentieth century, the Chinese employees impacted the development of agriculture,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only C. Hemmings. J. M. Adovasio. A. E. Marjenin. F. J. Vento. A. Vega.

Recent work near Sellards's 1916 excavation demonstrates that the 8IR009 stratigraphy is more complex, and better preserved, than previously described. The modern excavations in 2014 and 2015 have recovered thermally altered bone and sediments along with charcoal from anthropogenic surfaces that range 14,000–11,100 cal yr BP in age. To date, 50 m2 have been excavated to mid-Holocene-age horizons, and Pleistocene-age thermally modified materials have been recovered in a ca. 28 m2 area adjacent to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Luke Pecoraro.

Daniel Gookin Jr. is perhaps one of the better-known figures in colonial Massachusetts history, as an important civil servant and military leader. The third son of an English planter from Kent who settled in County Cork during the second phase of the Munster Plantation in 1611, Gookin Jr. was born in Ireland, and became involved in his father's plantation projects in Virginia, migrating to North America in 1625. This paper will outline the archaeological biography of Daniel Gookin Jr. and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Valeria Bellomia. Ricardo Higelin Ponce de León. Alex Elvis Badillo.

How can changes in production and use of a single class of ancient artifact allow us to understand changes in their meaning through time and space? We address the reasons behind the cultural practice of making the Omichicahuaztli, or notched human bones, in Mesoamerica, studying the unique histories of each object in correlation with the geographic area in which they were found and the social group that produced them. We studied over 100 Omichicahuaztlis from Central, Southern, and Western...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Roscoe.

Although commonly thought of as a land of horticulturalists, contact-era New Guinea was home to a number of ‘simple’ hunter-gatherer and complex fisher-forager groups. This paper surveys what we know of how these communities treated the human head in mortuary and other rituals and the cosmological contexts in which these rites were embedded. The fisher-forager cases are of special interest because at contact they were all head-hunters, an activity that generated elaborate ritual complexes...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Maureece Levin. Molly Shelton. William Ayres.

Agroforestry, or the growing of tree crops, is a long-standing and key food production practice throughout much of the world. As with all systems of food production, the way that humans manage agroforests has a profound impact on their composition as well as their sustainability. For over 2,000 years, eastern Micronesians have relied largely on tree crop production, vegeculture, and fishing for subsistence. In this study, we focus on late prehistoric manipulation of floral environments on the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shane Montgomery.

Wetland agricultural techniques have been successfully employed in a variety of environmentally and climatically diverse landscapes throughout prehistory. Within the larger Maya region, these features figure prominently in the region comprised of Northern Belize and Southern Quintana Roo. Along the banks of the Hondo and New Rivers, the ancient Maya effectively utilized wetland agricultural practices from the Middle Preclassic to the Terminal Classic periods. A number of past archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Gould.

Public engagement by archaeologists has become well-entrenched in the ethics codes and practice of the profession. Specialized journals now present reports on public and community archaeology projects, usually in the form of individual case studies. However, the growing number of public archaeology projects been accompanied neither by the development of standard practice methodologies nor by a tradition of assessment of project outcomes against defined objectives. As a result, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Gonzalez Lauck.

For over half a century, the ancient city located in La Venta, Tabasco has served as a standard in defining what is commonly referred to as Olmec in the time period between ca. 1000-400 BC. This paper will examine the architectural and sculptural vestiges in sites that have been defined as Olmec outside the Gulf Coast heartland, in order to define the component(s) that define it as “Olmec”, as well as to explain the differences observed.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fredrik Hallgren.

This paper discuss the ritual display and deposition of human skulls among hunter-gatherers in Scandinavia during the Mesolithic. The discussion focus on the recently excavated site Kanaljorden, at Motala, Sweden, where select human bones – mostly skulls – from a dozen individuals have been deposited on a stone-packing on the bottom of a small lake. Two of the skulls were mounted on wooden stakes still embedded in the crania. Beside human bones, the finds also include artefacts of bone, antler,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lane Richens. Richard Talbot. Scott Ure.

Prehistoric travel routes were conduits of knowledge, goods, and people. Within regional systems they facilitated social integration and identity maintenance. This was true for Late Fremont period groups, who primarily occupied the rich river valleys of the northern Colorado Plateau and eastern Great Basin but who also spread across this vast region in smaller settlements. This paper focuses on identifying possible travel routes within the Late Fremont regional system. We consider how these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only André Delpuech.

From the first contacts with the Amerindians, conquerors, voyagers, missionaries and so on have brought back to Europe numerous attributes of the New World: natural curiosities as well as manufactured objects. Various historical sources attest to the presence in France of seventeenth and eighteenth century Amerindian objects from the Lesser Antilles in some cabinets of curiosities. Today, paradoxically, not a single object in contemporary collections is attributed to the Calinago or so called...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jaime R. Pagan-Jimenez. Jaime Pagan-Jimenez.

Indigenous people initiated their dispersal toward the Caribbean isles at sometime around 8000 to 7800 years before present. This time framework coincides with the consolidation/aggregation and eventual transference of new dietary suites (domestic plants) to long distances, having been this process one that initiated at least in two different and mutually distant regions of continental America. This presentation explores the feasibility of the ideal free distribution (IFD) and diet breadth (DB)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gregory Waselkov.

Ever since Irving Hallowell's classic 1926 study of the special mythic status of bears in the Subarctic, anthropologists are generally aware that many peoples throughout the world have treated bears as something more than a straight forward subsistence resource. Hallowell attributed that special relationship between Subarctic humans and bears to some striking parallels between bear and human behaviors and physiologies. If that were indeed the case, then one would expect to see similar...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stacia Yoakam. Kathyrn Marklein.

Oymaağaç Höyűk, the putative Hittite religious center of Nerik, was occupied as early as the second millennium B.C.E. .Nearly three thousand years later, the site was reclaimed as a burial ground for the local populace. Within the upper stratigraphic, tile (tegula) graves and the associated burials, relatively and radiocarbon dated to the Byzantine (i.e., Late Roman) period (A.D. 250-450), provide an informative look into the lives of the rural population. Employing archaeological context in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacob Gold.

This essay uses a comparative approach to investigate the practice of "state hedging" deployed by various peoples moving in and out of the margins of large-scale historical states. Among these peoples are the Kuy ethnic group whose communities in north-central Cambodia have invited me to study them as their traditional forests rapidly disappear. Kuy methods of "state hedging" and the outcomes of pursuing this practice will be compared with the use of similar tactics by peoples in Africa and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sophia Perdikaris. Allison Bain. Sandrine Grouard. Naomi Sykes. Stephan Noel.

Barbuda, the small sister island to Antigua, provides a unique geographically bound island context for the study of human-environmental interactions over the last 6000 years. Today, Barbuda’s national animal is the fallow deer, Dama dama dama, a species that is native to a small area of Anatolia but that has been transported around the world by people. According to historical accounts, fallow deer were imported to Barbuda, from England, by the Codrington family, the island’s primary leaseholders...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Ankele. Meghan J. Dudley.

Many Archaic projectile points from the Rocky Mountains and the Great Plains are poorly defined stylistically and chronologically, particularly in contrast to those from the earlier Paleoindian Period. As a result, we suspect that projectile points are often classified as different types based solely on geographic location and not necessarily on variation in the point style or technological characteristics. Stemmed points in the Middle Archaic are called Duncan or Hanna in the north and Pinto in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Veronica Parsell. James Greene. Cathy Draeger-Williams. Paul Leffler. George Strack.

When completing the Section 106 process, the parties involved often have differing opinions and goals regarding the consideration of cultural resources. Recent completion of a Phase III data recovery of a prehistoric site in northwest Indiana highlights the Section 106 process as a successful tool for communication between the federal agency, project applicant, SHPO, Native American tribes, and the CRM contractor regarding the consideration of significant cultural resources. While each of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Milan.

Located 31 km from the Pacific, Malpaso is the most inland of 8 U-shaped temples in the Lurín Valley. This form of monumental architecture is associated with the Manchay culture that dominated the central coast of Peru during the Initial Period. Malpaso is also one of only a few U-shaped temples located in the chaupiyunga, a climatic zone that serves as an intermediary between the Pacific coast and the Andean highlands. Consequently, Malpaso shows ties not only to the U-shaped temples of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bruce Mannheim.

The “ontological turn” ties several core anthropological questions about cultural variability in human interaction with the world, all of which can best be summarized by Sapir’s dictum—from the 1920s— that “the worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.” Drawing on evidence—ethnographic, grammatical, cognitive, material, and visual—from the central Andes (principally from Southern Quechua and their Inka ancestors), I...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Weismantel.

The power of water is all-important in the long history of Peru’s North Coast: the arid environment, the transformative effects of irrigation, and the devastating force of the ENSO (El Niño) ecological phenomenon. Archaeological theorizing about North Coast societies has often focused on the shaping force of water; this paper suggests bringing emergent thinking about the human/nonhuman relationship to bear on this topic. Twentieth century Western science saw water as something to control through...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Luis Muro. Elsa Tomasto Cagigao.

En las últimas cuatro décadas decenas de tumbas de élite Moche (200-900 AD) han sido descubiertas a lo largo de la costa norte del Perú, develado importante información sobre la vida física, la identidad y el status de los antiguos Moche. Sin embargo, y paradójicamente, la gran cantidad de datos recuperados contrasta con los pocos intentos de teorizar cómo el cuerpo pudo haber sido construido y conceptualizado por esta sociedad. Integrando la fenomenología de Merleau-Ponty y el perspectivismo...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Valeria Boi.

Open Access (OA) data publication can widen the quantity of data available to researchers and scholars and thus can increase possibilities for cross-cultural comparisons. Low cost and ease of access to data can make possible a “democratization of knowledge”. This paper examines the archaeological community in Italy from the perspective of OA data publication in archaeology. OA data publication in Italian archaeology is not widespread and it currently lacks standards on data sharing that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Rendu. Lionel Gourichon. Stephan Naji.

Various methodological approaches have been developed in zooarchaeology to discuss how past population coped with seasonal constraints. Among them, the analysis of tooth cementum incremental structures (cementochronology) is often used for discussing seasonality in archaeological contexts. However, several issues have been raised about the method, such as the absence of a standardized protocol, the lack of data for specific species, variability between geographical populations and destruction of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Brunson. Zhipeng Li. Rowan Flad.

Oracle bones—animal bones used for pyro-osteomantic divination rituals in East Asia—are one of the most important types of bone artifacts in Chinese Neolithic and Bronze Age archaeological sites and the source of inscriptions containing the earliest writing in ancient China. In the Oracle Bone Project, we are creating a database of Chinese oracle bones in order to study the origins of oracle bone divination rituals, their spread across Asia during the Neolithic, the types of animal bones used to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alex Lima Hooven. Jon Russ. David Dye.

Analysis of organic residues in ceramic vessels obtained from archaeological excavations has the potential to identify the substances Native Americans stored in ceramic pots of various shapes, sizes and designs. In this study we analyzed residues extracted from a particular type of vessel that has unique designs covering the outer surface. It was recently proposed that these noded pots were used specifically to process Datura for religious ceremonies. Datura contains tropane alkaloids that have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julia Byrd.

This paper presents results of spatial analysis on Florida’s 400 dugout canoes recorded in the Florida Bureau of Archaeological Research’s canoe database. Patterned concentrations of canoes located at the edges of basins suggest that prehistoric people had a system of drop-off points, where canoes were left for later use. Such a system is consistent with ethnographically recorded canoe-use practices among indigenous peoples in Florida and beyond. Drop-off points represent important places on the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristin Hoffmeister. Lori Wright.

The lithics production center of Colha in northern Belize provides skeletal evidence relevant to ongoing debates about the role of violence among the Maya of Central America. The Colha Skull Pit (Op. 2011) dates to the Terminal Classic period and consists of thirty individuals, represented only by cranial remains. The skeletal remains include both males and females and range in age from children to old adults. Cranial and dental modifications are prevalent in this feature and many of the skulls...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bradley Vierra.

The transition from foraging to farming is certainly one of the most dramatic processes in human history. The use of domesticated plants spread widely across Western Europe from the Near East, and across the American Southwest from Mexico. Research in Western Europe has traditionally focused on the movement of farming communities across the region which displaced or subsumed local foragers. Recently various aspects of this process have been discussed including climate change, the expansion of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gil Stein.

Although much scholarship has focused on the emergence of towns and cities in southern Mesopotamia, archaeologists still know very little about comparable developments in northern Mesopotamia and especially Iraqi Kurdistan, due to the rarity of archaeological fieldwork in those regions until recently. The excavation project based at Surezha on the Erbil plain aims to contribute to our understanding of Chalcolithic northern Mesopotamia and illuminate the development of social complexity in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jamie Henry.

Destruction of ancient sites along the Euphrates River in Northern Syria due to the construction of the Tabqa Dam and the formation of Lake Assad led to salvage excavations conducted between 1974 and 1978 by the Milwaukee Public Museum (MPM) at the site of Tell Hadidi, Syria, under the direction of Dr. Rudolph Dornemann. The 300,000 artifacts collected by the project are now housed at the MPM but this material has never been completely published. In 1991, with the retirement of Dr. Dornemann,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Agata Kostrzewa. László Paja.

Generalized stress indicators are non-specific anomalies produced by the body as an adaptive response to biological stressors such as malnutrition, disease or trauma. The prevalence of these lesions may be related to daily activity, lifestyle or differential access to resources. Based on archeological analyses, the Hungarian Bronze Age is associated with significant socio-economic changes, including population increases, agricultural intensification, and the emergence of social inequality. In...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gregory Lattanzi.

Since 2001, the Bureau of Archaeology & Ethnography began accepting interns and opened its collections to scholars and professionals conducting research. Numerous undergraduate and graduate students have completed both senior honor theses, MAs and PhDs working with the over 2.5 million objects in our collections. Numerous professionals have utilized the collections for their ongoing research interests. The Bureau itself has had to build this program from the gound up along side these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathleen Morrison.

Some scholars take the label 'archaeology of the present' to refer to the study of very recent archaeological records and material remains, but here I use it to refer to the ways in which even ancient human action has ongoing significance for the present and the future. One of the many arenas of the contemporary significance of the 'archaeological' past is the legacy of past land use, including that of irrigated agriculture, on regional and global vegetation, landforms, and even climate. I...