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

DOCUMENT Citation Only Francis Allard.

The archaeological record of Lingnan (Guangxi and Guangdong) during the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods includes many non-utilitarian objects buried singly or in small groups, in non-funerary contexts that suggest widely shared ritual beliefs. Examples include the so-called "stone shovels", the majority of which have been found in southern Guangxi, as well as a number of later bronze vessels and bells which appear to have originated in central and northern China. Importantly, many of these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Hill.

This paper examines the final decades of the Terminal Classic and the beginning of the Postclassic in the Bolonchén district of the Puuc region of the northern Maya lowlands. Archaeological evidence for the decline and abandonment of the Bolonchén district at the close of the Terminal Classic period is presented. Particular attention is given to the material remains of a late Terminal Classic population at Huntichmul, an example of a Puuc center in decline and most likely abandoned by the close...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Morgan Welch. Patrick Mullins. Brian Billman.

Through increased study of the rural hinterlands surrounding the Chimu capital at Chan Chan, a broader understanding of state structured domestic and administrative sites--so as to control labor, land, and water--has emerged. Located in the Moche Valley of Peru, the Chimú sites of Cerro la Virgen and Milagro de San Jose have the potential to provide valuable data related to urban-rural relationships, but run the risk of being destroyed by modern human activity. Using previous research and more...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Kwan. Leping Jiang.

This paper will outline diachronic trends in pottery technology and subsistence practices of the early Holocene Shangshan culture (11,400 to 8400 cal. BP) in the lower Yangtze Valley, China. It is hypothesized that Shangshan peoples engaged in low-level production of rice and began the process of bringing this crucial cereal under domestication. Early Shangshan pottery was tempered with rice leaves, stems and chaff, and is the earliest known Chinese pottery tempered with dry organic material and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Burnett. Armando Abeyta. Jessica Mauck. Amber Fankhauser.

Fort Irwin is a United States Army installation located approximately 37 miles northeast of Barstow, California, in the central Mojave Desert. Totaling 1,193 square miles in size, this installation has a wide variety of archaeological resources including at least four sites with recorded Clovis/Great Basin Concave Base projectile points and several isolated finds identified as Clovis points. The goal of this study, conducted by Redhorse Corporation on behalf of the Fort Irwin Cultural Resources...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Watson. Heather McKillop.

Three partially submerged earthen mounds at Witz Naab and Killer Bee are currently the only known remaining above ground evidence of a once-thriving salt industry in Punta Ycacos Lagoon, a large salt-water system in Paynes Creek National Park, Belize. During 2012, field season, excavations were conducted at two of the mounds. This poster will present findings concerning the stratigraphic development of these mounds. Understanding the stratigraphy of the mounds will aid in interpreting features...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Jenkins.

Subsistence intensification among small-scale societies results from myriad circumstances, some of which involve demands that go beyond the scale of household production and consumption. The creation and use of ritual facilities, for instance, often entail large gatherings of persons that require provisioning. On the northern Gulf Coast of Florida, civic-ceremonial centers with elaborate mortuary facilities were established at about A.D. 200. A well-established subsistence economy of fish,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bryan Just.

Although no physical examples of paper books are known from the Late Classic period Maya, scholarly considerations of Maya art have consistently considered this form of painting primary: as the inspiration of—if not the direct source for—representations in other media such as murals, finely slipped pottery, or relief-carved stelae. Due to fundamental differences in scale, form, and content, however, these media more likely played rather distinct social roles. Indeed, existing materials indicate...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Gilstrap. Vassilis Kilikoglou. Peter Day.

The end of the Bronze Age in the Saronic Gulf boasts at least three pottery production centers, at Kontopigado, Attica, on the north part of the island of Aegina and in northeast Corinthia. All three produce a similar range of goods and although each has a different set of production practices, certain technological information was shared. Focusing on the painted fineware pottery it is evident that all three centers decorated pots with dark-on-light motifs using either red or black paint....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Francisca Santana Sagredo. Rick Schulting. Julia Lee-Thorp. Carolina Agüero. Mauricio Uribe.

Pica 8 is an inland cemetery of the Late Intermediate Period (AD 900-1450) in northern Chile. Previous stable isotope studies indicate highly variable dietary contributions of marine and terrestrial foods. However, it is unclear whether this variability is related to change over time or to the presence of groups with different origins. In order to evaluate whether these differences are diachronic or synchronic, radiocarbon dates were carried out on 23 samples. Given the high marine consumption...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Xochitl Leon Estrada.

En esta ponencia se presentan datos e interpretaciones derivados del Proyecto Arqueológico Paisaje Cultural en Los Tuxtlas Veracruz, llevado a cabo entre el 2013 y el 2015, en el cual se examinaron sitios arqueológicos ubicados en la Sierra de Los Tuxtlas, Veracruz. La información recabada permitió hacer ajustes en la cronología de la región, un registro detallado de algunos sitios anteriormente analizados y una mayor comprensión de la relación de los asentamientos humanos con el paisaje...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mariela Viridiana Madrid González.

El paisaje dentro de los ámbitos de la arqueología, advierten en primera instancia que el paisaje en sí, no es un sinónimo del medio ambiente. Los paisajes son sintéticos; los sistemas culturales estructuran y organizan las interacciones entre la gente y su medio ambiente; según Cosgrove (1985). En este sentido el paisaje es el escenario para todas las actividades de una comunidad, como consecuencia de esto tenemos que el mismo se encuentra en constante cambio. En un contexto cultural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Xiao Chen. Steffan Gordon. Zhuo Sun.

The courtyard building, enclosed by walls or corridors, was a typical architectural pattern in ancient East Asia. According to archaeological excavations, such as in the Yanshi and Huanbei Shang city sites, and the Zhouyuan Zhou capital site, this pattern emerged early in China, before the emergence of Qin-Han Empires (ca. 221 B.C.E. to 200 C.E.), and then was used widely in high-class buildings such as palaces and ancestral temples. Comparison of the high-class courtyard buildings of the Shang...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elijah Hermitt. Kirk French.

The Palenque Pool Project began excavations of the largest pool of the Picota Group in the Classic Maya site of Palenque in 2014. This group is located one kilometer from the Palace on the western edge of the site. Although the function of the pool is still unknown, its placement adjacent to one of Palenque's two stelae and its similarity to modern Maya examples, suggests ceremonial use. As a part of the 2015 field season samples were taken from two regions that appear to have been limestone...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Nicholson.

Obstacles to our understanding of Neanderthal (Homo neanderthalensis) land-use patterns during the Last Interglacial (130kya-116kya, Marine Isotope Stage 5e) include not only the scarcity of sites in Europe but also a lack of knowing what the landscape may have looked like during this time. This research explores the influence of climate and seasonal variability on Neanderthal land-use. Recently developed global climate models are capable of simulating past climate variables (e.g., precipitation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Morgan. Loukas Barton. Bayarsaikhan Jamsranjav.

New paleoenvironmental proxy data indicate a series of changes in hydrology and environment from the terminal Pleistocene through middle Holocene in Uvs Province, Mongolia. Recent archaeological surveys, excavations and GIS-based analyses suggest these changes may correlate with alterations in technology and land use that are arguably consistent with the temporal span thought to represent the adoption and/or in situ development of pastoralist economies across the region. These correlations are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Jennings. Ashley Smallwood. Charlotte Pevny.

Throughout much of the last Ice Age, the Mississippi River, along with its tributaries, served as a key outflow conduit for glacial meltwater, funneling and depositing vast amounts of sediments south towards and into the Gulf of Mexico. During and after the Younger Dryas, this geomorphic system underwent significant changes caused by meltwater drainage fluctuations and sea level oscillations. In this paper, we review how paleoenvironmental changes associated with the Younger Dryas affected the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Molly Carney.

Paleoethnobotanical studies of hunter-gatherer archaeological assemblages on the Columbia Plateau in the Pacific Northwest are exceedingly rare and often poorly reported. The Flying Goose Site (45PO435), located along the Pend Oreille River in northeastern Washington offers an opportunity to examine a Plateau culture area archaeobotanical assemblage in greater detail. Summer excavations in 2014 and 2015 indicate that this late Prehistoric site appears to have been some form of small structure,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jordan Karsten. Ryan Schmidt. Takashi Gakuhari. Hiromi Matsumae. Hiroki Oota.

In this presentation, we make use of high-resolution paleogenetic data to better understand the peoples of the agropastoral Tripolye Culture. Verteba Cave is the only known site with associated Trypillian human remains. Here, we explore population origins and the Tripolye people’s relationship with local populations from the greater Carpathian and Dnieper regions, as well as possible connections to peoples from the Near East. Our motivation for this study derives from several unknowns....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lars Fehren-Schmitz.

The peopling of the high altitude Andes marks an important episode in South American population history, eventually leading to the formation of the most complex societies of the late pre-Columbian period, namely Wari, Tiwanaku, and Inca. Little is known about how population dynamic processes and genetic adaptation to physical stressors like hypoxia shaped the genetic diversity of the Andean highland populations over the ~10,000 years of human presence in high altitude leading to the emergence of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Rankin. R. Michael Stewart.

The Snyder Site Complex consists of multicomponent prehistoric localities situated on landscapes adjacent to the Delaware River in the river basin's mid-section. Over 30 fluted Paleoindian projectile points or bifaces have been reported from plowed/surface and stratified contexts. This number of diagnostic artifacts is relatively unusual in the context of what is known about other Paleoindian sites in the Delaware River Basin. The Snyder Complex is among the approximately 110 Paleoindian sites...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jason LaBelle.

Colorado is well known for the dense concentrations of Paleoindian sites found within its eastern plains as well as several high altitude basins (Middle Park, Gunnison Basin, and San Luis Valley) to the west. Prominent mountain ranges separate these clusters, with the sinuous Continental Divide forming the headwaters of the Colorado, Rio Grande, and Platte River valleys. These mountains, with elevations routinely topping 3000-4000 m, would have presented both challenges and opportunities for the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zachary Singer. Brian Jones.

Multiple Paleoindian sites have been identified during the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center’s (MPMRC) long-term study of Paleoindian occupations around the Mashantucket Pequot Reservation. The recovery of multiple Paleoindian sites affords the opportunity to study Paleoindian lifeways around the Great Cedar Swamp at Mashantucket. This paper provides an overview of the Paleoindian research conducted by the MPMRC and attempts to reconstruct Paleoindian land use of the Mashantucket...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jay Ciccone.

The Middle and Late Paleoindian Periods had formerly been close to absent from the literature of known Hudson Valley Paleoindian sites. This led some researchers to suggest that these cultures might have, to a larger degree, stayed away from this region as a whole. However, recent findings from the Aldrich Island Site demonstrate that the Hudson Valley of New York State was indeed inhabited and utilized by these cultures, and perhaps much more extensively than once previously thought. A wide...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Albert Goodyear. I. Randolph Daniel, Jr.. Christopher Moore. David Anderson.

The onset of the Younger Dryas stadial is thought to have occurred during the Clovis period. The cause of the Younger Dryas and the near simultaneous disappearance of the Clovis techno-culture in North America continues to be a set of events that are not well understood. Debates exist regarding the cause of the Younger Dryas and its possible affects on climate, plants and animals as well as humans. The archaeological record stands apart from these disciplines as an independent source of data and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jess Robinson. John Crock. Wetherbee Dorshow.

This paper explores the Paleoindian uses of the Champlain Sea (an inland arm of the Atlantic Ocean) over the course of the Paleoindian period. Environmental Changes that may have precipitated changes in subsistence and settlement patterns will also be discussed. Finally, scant but intriguing information from the Atlantic Continental shelf in the Far Northeastern region will be used as a proxy to explore and evaluate the settlement patterns demonstrated farther inland.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Goodmaster. Erin Helton.

The Lower Pecos River valley in southwestern Texas provides an ideal location for the development of a three-dimensional landscape reconstruction using modern geospatial methods, including LiDAR and digital photogrammetry. The goal of this project is to create a scientifically accurate, high resolution prehistoric landscape model of a portion of the Lower Pecos valley, an archaeologically-rich region that has experienced widespread modifications to the natural landscape during the historic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nathan Acebo.

The Santa Ana mountain landscape of contemporary Orange County, CA has been dichotomously characterized as “a wild colonial borderland” and “a prehistoric indigenous space” where the material and social histories of indigenous communities are ossified while legacies of Spanish, Mexican and American colonial society are both solidified and continued. Within this landscape, the Black Star Canyon village (CA-ORA-132) objectifies this historical disjunction in that the site constitutes a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arturo Rivera Infante.

This paper explores the ideologies involved in the process of building structures utilized by people of elite and non-elite statuses. The 2015 excavations of compounds at Panquilma revealed a range of domestic and ritual activities. The data recorded suggest that local craft production was embedded in particular religious meanings and/or status paraphernalia related to specific pre-Columbian Late Intermediate Period societies. The association of destruction and regeneration of materials, seen in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Kaulicke.

During the first millenium B. C. the southern coast experiments deep changes in social processes form small household formations to complex societies with central places within interaction networks of short, small and long distance. Thus, Paracas suggests a non-existent homogeneity. Since the Middle Formative, contacts with the North Coast lead to a fusion of local and regional features. During Late Paracas regional traditions, dominate spheres characterized by larger sites linked to smaller...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Hamilton-Brehm. Lidia Hristova. Susan Edwards. Jeffrey Wedding. Duane Moser.

Ancient DNA research is revealing unprecedented information about past human migrations and residency. During the late Holocene people exploited food and material resources near Mule Spring Rockshelter in the Spring Mountains of Southern Nevada. In the 1960s hundreds of chewed plant remains (quids) were recovered from the shelter deposits. To better constrain patterns of human residency, mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) was extracted and partially sequenced from twenty representative quids that have...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Jeremy Pye.

Parasites have had a significant impact on the course of human history. Parasites have caused the deaths of countless individuals, have resulted in the abandonment of settlements, and have even affected the outcome of wars. Parasitologists, biologists, and even medical anthropologists have conducted extensive research on how parasites affect the human body, including how they lead to malabsorption of nutrients, bowel obstruction, internal bleeding, blindness, physical disability and deformation,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bianca Gentil.

By bringing together theoretical frameworks utilized by scholars to describe the Classic Maya political economy, this work evaluates their applications in the case of the site of La Milpa. Located in Northwestern Belize, La Milpa experienced a demographic rise during the Late Classic/Terminal Classic periods, followed by a rapid decline shortly thereafter. This poster explores Maya political economy mechanisms as defined by Kenneth Hirth in his 1996 piece, specifically focusing on aspects of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steven Brandt. Huw Groucutt. Yonatan Sahle.

The Late Pleistocene dispersal of Homo sapiens and “modern human behaviour” through and out of Africa has become a key issue in human evolutionary studies, largely as a result of intensive archaeological research in southern, and to a lesser extent east and northern Africa. In spite of its remarkably diverse environments, earliest Homo sapiens fossils and strategic location straddling the postulated “Northern” and “Southern” dispersal routes, the Horn of Africa...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelly Swarts. Lewis Borck. Lynda Prim. Andrea Stanley. Edward Buckler.

Domesticates are uniquely both biological organisms but also cultural artifacts. As organisms, domesticates are shaped by the natural history of the progenitor and adaptation to diverse environments. As artifacts, domesticates record the cultivation practices, migration histories, cultural interactions and values of associated human groups. Using a population of maize landrace hybrids from the Greater Southwest (US and Mexico) that have been phenotyped for flowering time, we test how much of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Phillip Neusius. Ben Ford. Bill Chadwick. Sarah Neusius.

Since its inception in 1987 as an applied research center at Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP), Archaeological Services has had a mission of providing educational opportunities for IUP students and service for private and public entities in cultural resource management. As a state university, IUP has been in a position to create unique partnerships with local, state and federal agencies. These have ranged from co-operative agreements with county and city governments to memoranda of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Velicia Bergstrom.

We are not unique in this agency called USDA Forest Service. Kisatchie National Forest’s Heritage Program does not get handed tons of money to perform archaeological survey to insure that the NHPA is accorded due process before the vegetation is managed and wildlife ponds are built. And sure, some of our colleagues still ask, why do we spend money on archaeology! As a manager, we look for least expensive, as archaeologists we look for great quality, and as tribal liaison we look to work with our...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tamara Bray.

New understandings of matter and materiality are being driven by recent theoretical developments in the realm of science, particularly physics and ecology. These evolving orientations are, in turn, contributing to new philosophical thinking on the nature of being and reality. The trickle-down effects of these developments are, in part, responsible for what has been termed “the ontological turn,” a trend that is clearly visible in recent archaeological discourse. The new materialist ontology, in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Reed.

The Intermountain Region of the Forest Service manages 34 million acres of public land in Utah, Nevada, Idaho, Wyoming, California, and Colorado. As yet, more than 30,000 sites have been recorded in the Region. From inventory to excavation, to curation and interpretation, and stabilization, the Intermountain Region has fielded a well rounded Heritage program. This presentation will review a multitude of management challenges and successes accomplished with minimal funding and plenty of help from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jan Biella.

In 2002 the New Mexico Historic Preservation Division (SHPO) established a statewide site stewardship program, New Mexico SiteWatch, that works with federal and state agencies to help preserve archaeological sites. The program is organized into local chapters and has integrated two established programs--one for the Santa Fe National Forest and the Bureau of Land Management in northwest New Mexico. The USFS has been a partner from the beginning. In addition to monitoring threatened sites,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edward Zegarra.

This paper will discuss preliminary research related to the complex, contemporary archaeological identities built around the site of Huari, capital of the first Andean Empire, where archaeological remains are of national value and yet contemporary native identities retain a negative connotation in the national imaginary. The project applies an ethnographic method referred to as ‘community-based participatory research’ (Sonya Atalay 2012), which has an initial goal of revealing local campesino...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eraina Nossa. William MacNeill.

The Mark Twain National Forest manages slightly less than 1.5 million acres, accounting for approximately 5% of the landmass in the state of Missouri. As a variety of factors continue to influence, and sometimes complicate, the Forest’s land management practices, it has become increasingly important to work with other agencies and organizations in order to accomplish the shared goals of identifying, protecting and interpreting the significant cultural resources held in the public trust. As the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa Fontes.

El Mirón cave, a major Upper Paleolithic residential site in Cantabria, Spain, has been the subject of long-term excavations led in part by Lawrence Straus. This presentation focuses on Level 17, a significant Lower Magdalenian deposit excavated in the cave’s outer vestibule. Level 17, which is a total of 33cm thick, was divided into 13 sublevels that were created using correlations made between depth measurements taken during the excavation in each square meter of the 9.5 square meter area....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tom Dillehay.

Two nighttime rituals, one archaeological and the other ethnographic, are presented for the Andean region of South America. The archaeological case is the 7500-4000 year old littoral mound site of Huaca Prieta on the north coast of Peru where a very dense accumulation of charcoal resulting from fires and rituals formed the site. Recovered at the site were reed torches suggesting nighttime rituals. Today, shamans or curanderos from the north coast still occasionally use the site at night under a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephanie Sterling. Heather Richards-Rissetto. Rene Viel.

The archaeological site of Copán—a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Honduras—was a primary center for cultural and economic exchange in the Maya world from the fifth to ninth centuries. Our research investigates the sociopolitical climate of the city immediately preceding this collapse. This poster presents the results of a pilot study intended to evaluate the potential of using a combination of digital technologies and legacy data to reanalyze a subset of diagnostic ceramics from select sites...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Juliana Machado. Nivaldo Peroni.

The Laklãnõ Xokleng Indigenous people occupy a tropical forest area of the Southern valley of Brazil, in Santa Catarina. Historically, they were documented as a hunter-gatherer population with high mobility system who occupied and managed an extended and diverse territory, including high plateaus, forested valleys and coastal areas. Archaeologically it is still difficult to affirm if this documented mobility pattern is an (in)direct result of European contact and reorganization of indigenous...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nancy Peniche May. Jaime Awe.

The elucidation of how permanent settlements and social complexity evolved in the Maya lowlands has been a long-standing question among Mayanists. Recently, it has been proposed that the first permanent architecture in the Pasion River region (i.e., Ceibal) emerged as ritual complexes around 1000 B.C. rather than villages with permanent households (i.e., Inomata and colleagues 2013). Nevertheless, Middle Preclassic evidence from the Belize Valley (i.e., Cahal Pech) has depicted a different...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jordan Jacobs.

In 2010, the promulgation of new regulations under 1990’s Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) threatened to upset the hard-won balance that had developed between the legitimate interests of descendant communities and the scientific and museum communities over the previous twenty years. Because the 10.11 rule broadly mandates the disposition of culturally unidentifiable human remains, many parties—including the Society for American Archaeology—reacted negatively,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Velasco.

Cranial trauma studies of Late Intermediate Period populations (LIP, A.D. 1000-1450) suggest that conflict and social stress were endemic across the south-central Andes, although the nature of interpersonal violence was strongly mediated by local political and social structures. This study explores how individuals buried in elaborate cliffside tombs from the Colca valley of southern Peru experienced violence across the 400-year period preceding Inka imperialism. Cranial trauma rates show high...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tracy Prowse.

Archaeological and historical evidence indicates that the end of the Iron Age in southern Italy was characterized by political and social upheaval associated with a series of battles between the Roman Republic, indigenous Italian groups, Greece, and Carthage. The outcome for many local populations in southern Italy after the Samnite, Pyrrhic, and Punic wars was the subjugation of local populations, a decline in settlement size and density, and the confiscation of land by the expanding Roman...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jaime Awe.

More than 20 years of investigations at Cahal Pech have served to establish that the site has one of the longest sequence of occupation in the Maya lowlands. First settled at the end of the Early Preclassic period, the settlement gradually grew in size and affluence during the Middle and Late Preclassic periods, and eventually became one of the primary Classic period centers of the upper Belize River Valley. Cahal Pech’s rise to prominence, however, was not a product of Classic period...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Troy Ferone.

The US Forest Service-Eastern Region includes 16 National Forests and one Tallgrass Prairie in 20 states across the Great Lakes, New England, Mid Atlantic and Midwest. Over 40% of the U.S. population lives within the boundaries of the Region. The proximity of these Forests to urban centers, as well as to rural and tribal communities, provides bountiful opportunities for collaboration, partnerships and volunteer-based heritage stewardship. This short presentation touches on a variety of partner...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather McKillop. Karen McKee. Harry Roberts. Terrance Winemiller. John Jones.

The unexpected discovery of wooden buildings preserved in the mangrove peat sediment below the sea floor in Paynes Creek National Park, southern Belize, provided an opportunity to re-evaluate the nature of salt production in the ancient Maya economy and the nature of ancient Maya wooden architecture. Innovative techniques based on shallow underwater survey elsewhere were used to systematically search in a salt-water lagoon system for wooden structures and associated briquetage—the pottery used...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jena Gray.

In recent years, alternative subsistence strategies have been explored by archaeoethnobotanists and others to describe ways in which the ancient Maya managed their land. Through a contextualized analysis of contemporary Maya interaction with their environment, ethnobotanists hope to gain insight into the past. Forest gardening, a sustainable, agroforestry system similar to permaculture practices, offers a glance into how the Maya cooperate with the land. This paper seeks not to provide an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sukanya Sharma.

The megaliths of Cherrapunjee, are part of a prehistoric cultural tradition which is intricately woven with the socio-cultural life of the Khasis and Jaintias. But material changes in the nature of society and the economy in the latter half of the twentieth century have resulted in new identity formations in Cherrapunjee and this has undermined some of the presumed certainties of cultural identity. This study documented local community attitudes regarding the megaliths and how the community...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hugo Yacobaccio.

The goal of this presentation is to review the current evidence in order to model the early peopling of the highlands of Northwestern Argentina. Paleoenvironmental evidence of the late Pleistocene and early Holocene is thoroughly reviewed in order to set the scenario of the process of human settlement at the Puna region of Argentina. I will analyze chronological evidence and the archaeological record –especially the archaeofaunas- of early hunter-gatherer occupations dated between 10,500 to the...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Adam Rabinowitz. Ryan Shaw. Patrick Golden. Sarah Buchanan. Eric Kansa.

The digital files with this record include a text of the presentation and a pdf copy of the PowerPoint slides from the presentation. The PeriodO project seeks to solve a problem in the harmonization of heritage data described according to chronological periods rather than computer-readable calendar dates. It does so using a Linked Open Data approach. Such approaches, in which records in databases are associated with common points of reference, rather than described according to unified metadata...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marion Coe.

Bonneville Estates Rockshelter (26EK3682) in Elko County, Nevada, is a stratified multi-component site on the western edge of the Bonneville Basin excavated between 2000-2009. The shelter has produced hundreds of perishable artifacts spanning from the early Archaic to historic periods, and it provides an excellent opportunity to examine perishable technology diachronically throughout the Holocene in the eastern Great Basin. This poster presents the results of a complete analysis of all...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gary Beiter. Monica Oyola-Coeur.

A Phase I survey was conducted in Perry Pines, Taylor County, Florida for an expansion of limestone mining of the area. The research aimed at locating and assessing potential archaeological and historical resources within the project area. Six archaeological resources were identified: a habitational site, a camp site, a bridge site and three quarry sites for stone tool making. Located in the North Peninsula Gulf Coast archaeological region, the Perry Pines sites appear to have been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brandi Lee MacDonald.

Elemental characterization of ochre sources and artifacts from southern and central British Columbia has demonstrated the potential for, and the limitations of, ochre provenance studies in this region. Using a combination of neutron activation analysis (NAA) and x-ray fluorescence (XRF), comparative elemental analyses of ochre artifacts from archaeological sites and five geologic sources identified evidence of variability in ochre acquisition over space and time. While the majority of ochre...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Norman Yoffee.

Over the years, Vern Scarborough has considered how water management systems have been created, altered, and in some cases abandoned, especially in response to the evolution of political systems. For a Mesopotamianist, Vern's work obviously resonates with that of Robert McC. Adams. In this paper I review some of the lasting contributions of Adams to the study of water management systems in Mesopotamia. I review especially a series of essays that Adams wrote after his retirement from the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rick Cantryll.

In 1982, Pohl and Feldman questioned whether the ancient Maya had been in the process of domesticating white-tail deer. The possibility that the Maya actively managed deer populations in proximity to human settlements deserves detailed consideration. Although white-tail deer remains are abundant in zooarchaeological assemblages, comprehensive size and demographic studies have not yet been undertaken to help establish which motives might inspired efforts toward herd management. A lack of metrical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Bissonnette.

The Pequot War (1636-1637) destroyed infrastructure, resources and production, mobility, lines of communication and social networks that comprised a complex preventative health system for both native and colonial peoples. The destruction and change in physical and social environments and the disproportionate burden of conflict, for the purposes of this paper, is defined as colonial trauma. Physical and social stressors exacerbated disease that changed the course of colonial battles and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paulina Poot. Javier Rivas Romero. William J. Folan.

The 1980’s construction of the road to the archaeological site of Calakmul, Campeche made it necessary to record 86 sites on and alongside its trajectory and in the area around the Chumpich Lagoon down to Uxul on the Guatemalan border. The systematic location and mapping of each site and their associated cultural elements as well as flora, geology and paleoclimatology have permitted us to identify a variation in their architecture as well as settlement patterns and access to resources. In this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maxwell Forton.

East Tank Mesa is a prominent landform located within the new expansion lands of Petrified Forest National Park: harboring a high concentration of Pueblo II-Pueblo III petroglyph panels and one of the region’s few possible Chacoan outliers. This possible outlier is the Mac Stod site: a seven-room pueblo possessing some of the hallmarks of Chacoan architecture (core veneer masonry, large rooms, long straight walls, and well constructed rectangular doorways). The nature of Mac Stod, and whether it...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Andrea Torvinen.

The hilltop center of La Quemada in the Malpaso Valley of Zacatecas, Mexico, was the focal point of one of several polities that developed along the northern frontier of Mesoamerica during the Epiclassic period (A.D. 500-900). Northern frontier polities are known to have interacted due to their shared material culture (i.e., patio-banquette complexes, colonnaded halls, and the exchange of obsidian and shell products), but the mechanism(s) of this interaction are not fully understood. Ceramic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wade Campbell.

Unlike many other ceramic types in the American Southwest, Jemez Black-on-white is commonly regarded as a distinctive locally-made type that remained both stylistically and compositionally unchanged for three centuries. This generally accepted status of Jemez Black-on-white, however, has meant that until recently, little additional work has been done to better understand its origins and development. Here, I present the results of a petrographic analysis of 15 Jemez Black-on-white sherds taken...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ammie Mitchell.

As part of her ongoing dissertation research, the author conducted a series of experimental tests to examine the physical properties of coarse crystalline rocks. Common coarse crystalline rocks in the Northeast include granite, granodiorite, and gabbro. Earlier petrographic studies by the author identified these rocks as common tempering agents in early ceramic vessels in New York. The author hypothesized that these rocks were intentionally collected by potters from glacial land formations and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emiliano Gallaga. victor ortega. Tobias García.

In this paper, we will present the preliminary results of the first field season of the El Peñón del Diablo, Janos, Chihuahua Project, focused on an interesting rock art site on the chihuahuan prairie. We like to emphasize, that this archaeological project was created under the Janos community initiative, which wanted to know more about the site for its protection and for tourist development in the area. Thanks to the close collaboration between the Janos municipality, the Centro INAH Chihuahua,...

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

Native Amerindian groups who inhabited the southern Lesser Antilles of the Caribbean likely used local materials for temper in the manufacturing of pottery, but may have transported pottery once it was produced. To identify potential sources of temper and possible movement of these resources and/or pottery, we conducted petrographic analysis of Pre-Columbian ceramics found on various islands, including Barbados, Mustique, Carriacou, and Union. Each island exhibits distinct geology with sand...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tanya Chiykowski.

Late prehistoric Sonora, Mexico was a dynamic landscape of warfare, mass migration and trade networks spanning modern international borders. At around AD1300 archaeologists have clear evidence of Hohokam populations moving from southern Arizona and displacing indigenous Trincheras populations in the Altar River Valley of Sonora. With a ceramic type called Sells Plain, Hohokam potters introduce a new ceramic manufacturing technology –paddle-and-anvil ceramics- to the region. In response to this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan Drennan.

Labor investment studies, based on the notion that the energy of people is quantifiable, give an invaluable and unique insight into the architectural pursuits of past societies. This labor study of ancient Egypt provides a better understanding of authority among Egyptian pharaohs as represented by their legacy of monumental architecture. A site of profound importance to Egyptian society was the Karnak Temple Complex, specifically the precinct of Amun, which was aggrandized by pharaonic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Peresolak. Joe Baker.

Since 2010, Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP) and the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) have cooperated in the implementation of the PHAST program. PHAST is both a small, in-house transportation archaeology program and a professional development-apprenticeship program. The team is supervised by a PennDOT staff archaeologist and is composed of a graduate student Field Director and student intern field technicians. PHAST is deployed on small to mid-sized highway...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jade Robison. Olivia Navarro-Farr. P. Nick Kardulias.

The arrival of the Bronze Age (2300-1000 BC) ushered in many changes in the Mediterranean, including the emergence of the Nuragic culture on the island of Sardinia (Italy). The Nuragic culture takes its name from the nuraghi, the more than 7,000 dry-stone towers that dominate the landscape. The Nuragic population engaged in an extensive trade network within the Mediterranean throughout the Middle and Late Bronze Age (1700-1000 BC), trading with Mycenae, Cyprus, and mainland Italy. Contact with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brandon Zinsious. Jonathan Haws.

Archaeology as a practice is destructive thus once a site is excavated it is gone forever. Accurate and precise recording of spatial data is critical to preserving information. Higher resolution data collection may lead to better spatial analysis of the site. This endeavor improves with the continuing development of technology and methods of recording spatial data. Photogrammetry is a technology that has allowed researchers to accurately record spatial data on excavation, stratigraphy, features,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karly Law. Ben Chiewphasa. Lorena Craig.

The present study examines rock art and its ritual landscapes as the physical remnants of evolving cultural traditions. By incorporating an evolutionary framework in rock art studies, we can determine if rock art traditions evolved via descent with modification versus blending and borrowing of ideas. This project focuses on Fremont and Ceremonial Style shield-bearing warrior motifs associated with ritual contexts and spaces (animal medicine, cosmology, and shamanism). Drawing upon several...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristen Wroth.

Phytolith analysis at Roc de Marsal, a Middle Paleolithic cave site, SW France, is used to investigate both environmental change and hominin behavior. Specifically, the aims include correlating phytolith types with the microenvironmental context of the site, and how these conditions changed diachronically. We also explore the pyrotechnological skills of Neanderthals at the site, broad patterns of plant acquisition and use, and spatial differentiation. Preliminary analysis of phytolith samples...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jorge Mateus. Rita Scheel-Ybert.

Phytoliths are an important evidence for archaeology to address the behavior of ancient human societies, specifically their relation with botanical contexts. As with any other archaeological material, it is important to assess the preservation of these silica structures, understanding the process of degradation and dissolution that affects them. One of the factors cited in the literature as responsible for the degradation of phytoliths is the alkaline condition of sediments. Humid tropical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brittany Jackson. Jacob Bongers. Susanna Seidensticker. Terrah Jones.

This poster presents a bioarchaeological analysis of a cist tomb in the mid-Chincha Valley, Peru dating to the Late Intermediate Period (c. AD 1100-1450). Though the tomb was partially looted prior to excavation, we successfully reconstructed associations between elements from multiple individuals to gain important data regarding health status and the life course during this dynamic period in late prehistory. The analysis revealed the presence of at least 7 individuals buried in the single cist...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Shearin.

Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican murals are cultural representations of numerous civilizations, often mirroring the lifestyles, beliefs, rituals, and traditions of various peoples such as the Olmec, Maya, Toltec, and Aztecs. The pigments used to create these murals are highly susceptible to degradation. Degradation not only affects the appearance of the murals, but can result in the breakdown of the chemical structure of pigments causing flaking, powdering, and foundation issues. This project aims to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Martin Gallivan. Jeffrey Hantman.

In this paper we consider ritual practices at indigenous places in the Chesapeake that are traditionally described as ‘abandoned.’ Our study involves four sites in Virginia regarded as sacred by past and contemporary Monacan and Powhatan people. From a strictly non-indigenous perspective each of these places has been viewed as abandoned at or just past the moment of European colonization. Instead, we find evidence that these locations remained active as part of indigenous homelands. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tracy Martens. Jack Fenner. Judith Cameron. Hilary Stuart-Williams. Charles Hocart.

This pilot study details the application and results of three dye extraction methods, High Performance Liquid Chromatography with Diode Array Detection (HPLC-DAD), Liquid Chromatography Mass Spectrometry (LCMS) and Isotope Ratio Mass Spectrometry (IRMS) on camelid fibres extracted from archaeological textiles from Chile and Peru. Dye analysis comprised correlating compounds identified by LCMS to data recorded on HPLC-DAD and finding known natural dye components which matched our results....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Walker. William Marquardt. Lee Newsom. Merald Clark.

South Florida is internationally known for its waterlogged sites, Key Marco and Fort Center being perhaps the best known. In 1990, the Florida Museum of Natural History was given a marvelous carved wooden bird figurehead, 27.4 cm in length, later interpreted as part of a mechanical waterbird figurehead (ca. A.D. 865-985). It had been found in 1971 in a spoil pile adjacent to a mosquito-control ditch at the southern boundary of the Pineland complex. That such an important but normally perishable...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Frederick Lange.

Three years after the Triumph of the Sandinista Revolution in 1979, this author was invited by the Council of National Reconstruction to assist Nicaraguan cultural authorities in developing an archaeological research program for the Pacific side of the country. The revolutionary government had made a conscious decision to prioritize the protection and investigation of the cultural heritage. I had conducted extensive research in northwestern Costa Rica, known to be similar to southern Pacific...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lauren OBrien.

Pithouse occupations in the Northern Rio Grande, specifically the Taos Valley, occurred late in time and at high elevations. There is little evidence of a transitional period from a mobile to sedentary lifeway in this area. Pithouse occupations also occurred during a time when, as little as 30 miles away, multistory pueblo communities were thriving. This change has raised questions and sparked many archaeological investigations over the years. Why do we see this transition from hunter-gatherer...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emilio Santiago. R. J. Sinensky.

Petrified Forest National Park is in the third and final year of its Boundary Expansion Survey, which has nearly doubled the park’s size to 221,552 acres. Over the last three years researchers have identified and recorded over 300 archaeological sites in a variety of ecological zones. Our survey focuses on a 640-acre parcel that encompasses flat grasslands, dune-covered Triassic ridges, washes, and mesa tops. Site types range from large Basketmaker II habitation sites, to Pueblo II and Pueblo...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Richards. Richard Kubicek.

Effigy Mound is an archaeological taxon that references Late Woodland societies present in the western Great Lakes of North America from about A.D. 800 to A.D. 1050. Effigy Mound builders are known primarily by an estimated 15,000 – 20,000 mounds built in the shape of animals, supernatural beings and conical and linear forms. The end of the Effigy Mound period coincides with the adoption of maize horticulture by many Late Woodland groups as well as the appearance of new pottery traditions marked...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Denis Waudby.

Here I review ethnographic studies of hunter-gatherer groups from North America, Siberia, and Scandinavia to examine plant-fibre material cultural heritage and natural husbandry practiced by these societies. This study considers plant-fibre textiles and their diagnostic differential typology to aid understanding of plant fibre processing and utilization and attendant diagnostic features. The poor preservation of European plant-fibre directs diagnostic trials to modern reference material and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Delle.

The archaeology of the enslaved experience on Caribbean plantations has traditionally focused on life in the plantation village. These spaces, often crowded and providing little privacy, were but one place on the plantation landscape inhabited by enslaved workers. As has long been known, in the British West Indies under slavery, workers were required to grow their own food to supplement the mostly meager rations provided sporadically by plantation managers. The small farms tended by the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Natasha Fernandez-Perez. Isabel Rivera-Collazo.

Archaeological studies have demonstrated that the dynamics between plants and people in the Neotropics are central for the understanding of both forests and human societies. However, in the archaeological literature of the Caribbean there is no single analysis listing the range of plants used and for what purposes. Upon this situation, we have undergone the task of reviewing the existing paleobotanical literature from a Pan-Caribbean perspective, and assembling a database. It includes each plant...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marijke Stoll.

In the politically dynamic Postclassic period (AD 1000-1521), multiple ballcourts were built in different communities throughout the Nejapa region of Oaxaca during a time of significant settlement shifts and pressure from expanding Zapotec and Aztec empires. As a specially marked category of public architecture, ballcourts would have distinguished communities from each other while also serving as socially-integrative locations through hosting games and other important ritual activities. Given...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nawa Sugiyama. Saburo Sugiyama. Verónica Ortega Cabrera. William L. Fash.

Summer 2015, the Plaza of the Columns Project began a multi-year collaborative investigation of two large residential/ceremonial complexes that remained unexplored at Teotihuacan’s ceremonial core: Plaza of the Columns and its symmetric counterpart called Plaza North of the Sun Pyramid. The former comprises the largest three-temple complex with the fourth highest pyramid, a main plaza (11,408 m2) larger than the Sun Pyramid plaza, and deep occupational layers that could provide information about...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nezahualcoyotl Xiuhtecutli. Aurelio Lopez Corral.

Excavated lithic material from plazas at the Postclassic site of Tepeticpac, in the central Mexican state of Tlaxcala, suggests that obsidian production took place in these open spaces that may have served as marketplaces in the Late Postclassic polity of Tlaxcallan. Moreover, although green obsidian is present in Late Postclassic contexts, a decline in its presence is evident from earlier periods. In spite of ethnohistoric sources’ claims that Tlaxcallan was cut off from trade by Tenochtitlan,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lawrence Straus.

Decades of research involving new excavations, chronometric dating, artifact and faunal analyses, site distribution studies and isotopic analyses have refined our understanding of the transitions from Upper Magdalenian to Azilian and then to a variety of Mesolithic cultural traditions in the period between the Allerod and Boreal climatic phases in the classic region of Cantabrian Spain. There are indicators of both continuity in some aspects of settlement, subsistence and technology at some...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chris Webster. Tristan Boyle.

Podcasts have been around for over 10 years now and only in the last couple years, since the release of the popular This American Life spin-off, Serial, has the American public been interested. Until Serial, it seemed that you were either a podcast listener or you weren't. Now, people are incorporating them into their lives as trusted sources of information and entertainment. The Archaeology Podcast Network was founded as the first season of Serial came to a close and our downloads quickly hit...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gibránn Becerra.

En este trabajo se intenta reconocer los fundamentos, las condiciones y los posibles componentes del poder político vigentes en el último periodo de ocupación prehispánica (Clásico Tardío, 600-1000 DC) de la zona costera de la sierra de Santa Marta, Los Tuxtlas, Veracruz. Con base en el análisis del espacio, la arquitectura y la variabilidad de los restos materiales de las actividades humanas se evalúan dos asentamientos prehispánicos: Piedra Labrada y La Perla del Golfo, con el objetivo de dar...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Debra Martin. Anna Ostenholtz.

The bioarchaeological record in the ancient Southwest has an abundance of evidence of disarticulated remains to suggest a long history of body (corpse) processing and fragmentation. From AD 800 to the 1500s, various assemblages of processed human remains have been recovered. Published studies of these have argued for a wide range of motivations that could account for such assemblages including anthropophagy/cannibalism, massacres, torture, witch executions, ritualized violence, warfare, raiding...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Hoskins.

Archaeological sites in the Desert West are primarily open-air lithic scatters lacking organic preservation. Often, the only way these sites can be dated is via typological cross-dating using projectile points. This method of dating assumes that morphological types represent discrete and uniform time periods across large geographic areas; these time periods are based on the ages of point types at a handful of well-dated sites. Although typological cross-dating remains common, research has shown...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Sanger.

Native American conceptions of place have only recently been drawn into archaeological interpretations of landscapes and have yet to make a meaningful impact on the study of built environments, particularly the creation of “monuments.” Drawing on American Indian philosophers and writers, this paper aims to remedy this shortcoming by (re)examining the creation of some of the oldest human constructions in the American Southeast – Late Archaic shell rings formed by hunter-gatherers more than 3,000...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Juan Gonzalez. James Hinthorne.

Highly polished edge stone tools occur in large numbers all along the Gulf of Morrosquillo’s coastal plain on the Caribbean Coast of Colombia. Despite the remarkably large quantities of stone tools and the impressive craftsmanship they display, they have gone unnoticed by archaeological surveys. In an area where the geology is dominated by a thick sequence of marine sedimentary rocks, the presence of stone tools made from high grade metamorphic and igneous rocks suggest that these were likely...