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

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Howe.

There is an undeniable trend of a gradual decrease in projectile point size over time. About 1000 years ago, these points significantly change in size. Most archaeologists today posit that this sudden change has to do with the invention or adoption of the bow and arrow; however without a large sample of preserved wooden bows, arrows, or darts, there is no way to say for certain that this notion is correct. Via a controlled archery experiment, projectile point performance and function will be...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chihhua Chiang.

Wansan site is one of the late Neolithic sites in Northeastern Taiwan. In 1998, due to construction a large rescue excavation was conducted at the site and huge amounts of lithic and ceramic artifacts were uncovered. Among the lithic artifacts, most are finely ground tools, including projectile points, adzes, axes, knives, etc. This poster aims to analyze one specific tool: the projectile point. Three parts of analysis are demonstrated in this poster. First, I will introduce the projectile...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brenna Wilkerson.

This study analyzes ceramics from Virgin Branch Puebloan sites on the Shivwits Plateau and in the Moapa Valley in order to examine differences in the types of foods cooked and stored in each area. Residue analyses, by means of gas chromatography and mass spectrometry, were performed on body sherds from ceramic jars. Three types of wares were included in this research: Shivwits Plain Ware, Moapa Gray Ware, and Tusayan Sand-Tempered. The former two ceramic wares were included in a ceramic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marc TESTÉ. Cyril CASTANET. Aline GARNIER. Nicole LIMONDIN-LOZOUET. Eva LEMONNIER.

The city of Naachtun was an important maya Center in Southern Lowland (Guatemala). It was occupied from the early Classic (250 AD) to the end of Late Classic period (950 AD). Its inhabitants developed agriculture and a water management, as attested by geo‐archaeological evidences (palaeo‐soils, terraces, water reservoirs and canal). Our study focuses on the palaeoenvironments in and around Naachtun during the last 3500 years. We develop a multi‐proxy approach based on bioindicators study to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Daniels.

The recent conflict in Syria and Iraq has upended all aspects of aspects of daily life. There are now over 250,000 dead, and millions have been displaced. Famous heritage sites embedded within the region’s cultural landscape have been damaged or destroyed. In the face of such human tragedy, what can archaeologists do? This paper discusses the efforts of the Safeguarding the Heritage of Syria and Iraq (SHOSI) Project, which are aimed at both alleviating human suffering and protecting heritage...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Reed.

The Greater Chaco Landscape of northwest New Mexico is threatened by increasing drilling activity associated with development of the Mancos Shale via fracking. Many groups and individuals have spoken up and banded together to fight this threat. Archaeology Southwest has been actively engaged in this process for a couple years. In this presentation, I summarize our work and detail the steps taken to help ensure greater protection for the irreplaceable landscape associated with Chacoan Society.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aurelien Tafani. Robert H. Tykot. Kewin Peche-Quilichini.

This paper presents the results of a study of Final Bronze Age ceramics in Corsica, which took place during summer 2015. More than three hundred sherds from six different sites were analyzed using a non-destructive technology, XRF (X-ray fluorescence), to identify trace elements. The use of a hand-held device allowed the archaeometric study in situ of collections preserved in the Sartene museum, which could not have been removed and sent for analysis otherwise, and their comparison with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Allison Bain. Sophia Perdikaris. Rebecca Boger. Amy Potter. Reginald Murphy.

The island of Barbuda was farmed by English settlers from the 1660s onwards. The Codrington family of England held the lease to the island from the 1680s-1870, and they introduced a variety of plant and animal species, some of which continue to thrive on the island. Sugar cane was never grown on this dry, low lying island and instead, lime and charcoal were produced along with other subsistence crops for export. Herding became an important part of the economy and, as a result, water management...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Terence Daltroy. Veronica Williams.

For all its standardization, Inka rule regularly accommodated regional circumstances. This paper uses NAA of 316 sherds to examine how activities carried out under state auspices were provisioned in NW Argentina, and how local societies took advantage of the Inka presence for their own interests. We address how well the organization of administrative and economic spaces coincided, and what role the region’s subject peoples played in determining the character of material assemblages used at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ruth Trocolli. Mia Carey.

A unique project in Washington, D.C. was initiated by residents when redevelopment threatened a property once owned by Yarrow Mamout. Freed in 1797, Yarrow was literate in Arabic when he was enslaved in west Africa. He purchased a Georgetown lot in 1800 and upon his death was said to be buried in his garden. While many Georgetown residents at the time were former slaves, Yarrow stands out only because his portrait was painted twice. As with most formerly enslaved property owners, he left only a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Oswaldo Chinchilla.

Recent decades have witnessed a veritable explosion in the number of museums in Guatemala. Most of the new museums are small, focused on specific collections or sites. Some emerged from governmental initiatives, but many are private endeavors. In this paper, I trace the historical development of museums, going back to earlier, nineteenth and early twentieth-century precedents. I also offer comments on modern Guatemalan museums, including questions of institutional development, funding,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Evan Giomi. Matthew Peeples.

While formal network analyses (and traditional statistical analyses) can be used to understand the network relationships between archaeological sites they can also be geared towards understanding relationships within sites, both between architectural units and between different classes of artifacts. Using these techniques on a network of general material categories (like turquoise or shell) from different room contexts within Pueblo Bonito potentially reveals different "sets" of material classes...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rodrigo Retamal. Aryel Pacheco. Francisca Santana-Sagredo. Samantha Cox. Jorge Pinares.

Presented here is a case of intentional amputation found in a 30-40 year old male (inventoryNº B0796) from the Pica 8 cemetery in Northern Chile who exhibits an antemortem loss of all his left toes. Whilst Munizaga (1974) suggested that this mutilation was caused by frostbite, our CT scan analysis suggests intentional amputation. While this intentional amputation could be the consequence of a surgical procedure, amputation as a form of punishment presents an interesting possibility to explore...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Giles Spence-Morrow. Edward Swenson. Aleksa Alaica.

The Late Moche ceremonial center of Huaca Colorada (AD 650-850) was distinguished by cycles of ritualized architectural renovation that coincided with human and animal foundation sacrifices. Detailed architectonic analysis of the construction sequence of the ceremonial core in relation to the sacrificial burials incorporated into the structure itself provides interesting insights on Moche ontologies of embodiment, space, and social change. The data strongly suggest that Moche perceived...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Omar Alcover. Thomas Garrison.

Landscape studies provide new insights into the ways communities manipulated and used their environments. Among the ancient Maya, settlements at the outskirts of important centers varied greatly in design, elevation, and function, pointing to a unique and complementary form of urbanism. Among these, hilltop groups are key to understanding some of the social and political dynamics taking place in the Maya lowlands. Serving as strategic locales in the landscape, hilltop settlements served varying...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Antonietta Catanzariti.

The Qara Dagh Valley, located 41 km south from the city of Sulaymaniyah in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, is the subject of study of the Qara Dagh Regional Archaeological Project (QDRAP). This project aims to investigate the Qara Dagh Valley’s archaeological history. The valley is generally known for the presence of the Darban-i-Graw relief, which represents a late third millennium king subduing his enemies. Indeed, textual and visual evidence suggest that this region was exposed to frequent...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Short.

Macrobotanicals, usually in the form of identifiable charcoal, have formed the basis of our archaeological evidence of what was cooked in earth ovens, and microbotanicals such as phytoliths, pollen, and starch grains are expanding that knowledge. There are, however, still limitations: for example, inulin does not have a microbotanical proxy. Inulin is the primary carbohydrate for many important plant foods such as onion, camas, agave and sotol. Raman spectroscopy, a type of vibrational...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Olivia Navarro-Farr. Michelle Rich. Stanley Guenter.

Recent research has shed tremendous light on the impact of two generations of royal women of Kaanul on the classic Maya city of El Peru-Waka’. Lady Ikoom and Lady K’abel facilitated royal bonds through marriages to Waka’ rulers, and reigned there during the Early Late and Mid-Late Classic periods, respectively. In this paper, we address the wide ranging sources of evidence from Waka’ that speak to these linkages, including monuments with preserved texts, and royal burials from three of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chelsea Blackmore.

This paper explores the impact of queer theory in destabilizing heteronormative and other fixed discourses in archaeological method, practice, and interpretation. By challenging the very idea of what constitutes “normal’ in archaeology, queer theory provides new ways of thinking about and engaging with change, process, and difference. These discussions become important and necessary interventions in political debates around modern queer identities as well as social diversity at a much larger...

DOCUMENT Citation Only T. L. Thurston.

Can we understand the connections between the state, farming economies, and the lived experience of smallholders in past societies? Using archaeological examples from the smallest smallholdings – crofts on marginal lands in northern Europe – the view of land as a rare, precious, and highly managed resource is examined. Despite the still-pervasive materialist notion that smallholders are passive mechanisms with shortsighted, self-defeating land management strategies, anthropologists have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Whitcher Kansa. Eric C. Kansa.

The scholarly community is giving data increasing attention in recent years, and solutions for data management are emerging. However, seeing data management primarily as a matter of compliance means that we face continued data loss, as many datasets enter repositories without adequate description to enable their reuse. Furthermore, because many researchers have little experience reuse of public data, they lack understanding and incentives to consider changes in their own research practices to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Veronica Ortiz. Thomas Lynch.

In 1964 excavations at Quishqui Punku, Lynch described a diverse lithic industry, including small blades and elongated flakes, which I re-analyzed in 2014-15. Lynch did not take samples for radiocarbon dating because of severe mixing and contamination by later agriculturalists. Nevertheless, in this study of the blades and debitage, I recognized two fragments of Fishtail points. Typological considerations suggest occupation from the Terminal Pleistocene through the Early and Middle Holocene...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Geraldine Huertas Sánchez.

Según los relatos etnohistóricos, los incas tras una ardua lucha de 4 años aproximadamente, dominaron al fuerte señorío Huarco, consolidando su poder con la construcción de una fortaleza. Otras fuentes hablan de Huarco como un señorío menos independiente, que integraba una confederación política conformada por los diversos grupos de la costa central que fueron conquistados. En el presente trabajo, analizaremos la cerámica recuperada por el Proyecto Qhapaq Ñan, en el sitio conocido como "El...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Danny Gilmour. Thomas Brown. Paul Solimano. Kenneth Ames.

The Western Stemmed Tradition (WST) is an early cultural phase on the Columbia Plateau of Western North America. Much of the seminal work establishing the timeframe of WST is now decades old and suffers from imprecise dating. In this poster, we review previously compiled data, update stratigraphic interpretations, and model existing radiocarbon assays within a Bayesian framework. Preliminary results indicate that WST on the Columbia Plateau is at least coeval with Clovis and spanned at least...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Geoff Clarke. Aaron Camens. Simon Haberle. Atholl Anderson.

Human impacts to Madagascar, through the introduction of non-native species, habitat modification and species extinctions, are thought to have begun in the prehistoric period. Understanding of these anthropogenic modifications to Madagascar’s ecosystems is, however, impossible without solid chronologies for human settlement and expansion across the island, which are currently lacking. Estimates of the period in which people first colonized Madagascar have varied considerably, and never more so...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jim Railey.

There are now well over 1,000 radiocarbon dates from the BLM’s Carlsbad Field Office region, and local variation in long-term patterns is becoming increasingly evident. In the Mescalero Plain, and most local areas within it, radiocarbon dates exhibit a prominent frequency spike in the 7th and 8th centuries A.D., followed by a precipitous plunge in the number of dates. But some local areas within the Mescalero Plain the numbers of dates remain comparatively high in the Late Formative period (A.D....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Schmidt. Eliseo Padilla.

Recent dates from two sites in the Chilapa area of the Montaña Baja of Guerrero state, Baño Negro and Cerro Quiotepec-Oxtotitlan, throw light on the Formative horizon temporality in the area, including the Oxtotitlan rock shelter. Baño Negro ceramics indicate continuous Early through Late Formative occupation, and the radiocarbon dates confirm Early Formative occupation, perhaps earlier than previously thought.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Bracken.

The ongoing project at Muralla de León is investigating the relationship between defensibility, water control, and emergent social complexity in the Petén Lakes Region. Located on the shores of Lake Macanché, recent excavations at the site have zeroed in on the imposing rampart which encircles it, providing evidence for the chronology, as well as the nature, of its construction. Mapping of the site has turned up strong indications of hydraulic architecture both within and outside of the rampart....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Britt Lonneville. Cornelis Stal. Edy Barrios. Antolin Velasquez Lopez. Philippe De Maeyer.

The position of an archaeological site in a transport network is a critical parameter for its prosperity. Large collections of alien relics were excavated on various sites of the Copán region, indicating the importance of inter-site relations and trading. The importance of a particular site accordingly influenced the political, social and religious life of its surrounding sites. In order to evaluate the theoretical rate of prosperity in comparison with other sites in a region, a reconstruction...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ian Armit. Graeme Swindles. Katharina Becker. Gill Plunkett. Maarten Blaauw.

The accumulation of large 14C data-sets over recent decades provides archaeologists with a substantial resource which has only recently begun to be systematically explored. Such data-sets offer the potential to explore temporal variations in the intensity of past human activity at a range of geographical scales, although the ‘reading’ of such data is far from unproblematic. One area of clear potential is the relationship between patterning evident in 14C and palaeoclimate data-sets. In this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Thacker.

Flaked stone artifact assemblages from stratified contexts in central North Carolina reveal a significant shift in lithic technological organization during the Middle Archaic period. Important changes in raw material provisioning, biface production strategies, resharpening techniques, and stone tool discard behaviors broadly correlate with regional environmental shifts attributed to the mid-Holocene Optimum. Technological and site organizational changes may arise out of an emerging strategy of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wen Yin (Elaine) Cheng.

Bronze vessels of the Shang and Zhou dynasties were extensively studied artefacts but how were they related to the ancient geographical landscape? By understanding how extensive the industry was and how far it had impacted the landscape we could further our knowledge on the ancient Shang and Zhou bronze casters as well as society. Bronze vessels required a variety of raw materials for its production. By looking at the ancient mines to produce bronze and the clay resources for the bronze moulds,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John F. Cherry. Thomas Leppard.

In 1981 one of us (Cherry) first attempted to tease out spatial and temporal patterning in the colonization of the Mediterranean islands by human communities. Since the 1980s, slowly accumulating evidence has suggested that the Mediterranean islands were sporadically exploited by hunter-gatherer-fishers (HGF) during the Epipalaeolithic and Mesolithic. Here, adapting principles from island biogeography, we seek to establish whether or not these patchy data exhibit patterning. We suggest that the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dale Croes. Ed Carriere.

I often invited Ed Carriere, Suquamish Master Basketmaker and Elder, to help us recover 700 year old cedar bough pack baskets while excavating the Qwu?gwes wet/waterlogged site, Olympia, Washington. He is the last known Salish Sea weaver still making these cedar clam baskets. While preparing to analyze 2,000 year old Biderbost wet site pack baskets at the U.W. Burke Museum in Seattle, I called Ed and suggested he try to replicate these baskets, fully 100 generations back through his line of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Natalie Abell. Myrto Georgakopoulou.

Metallurgy is considered key in understanding the prominence of Ayia Irini during the Bronze Age in the Aegean Sea. Over the course of the Bronze Age, metal production and circulation flourish, with Attica and the western Cyclades considered primary ore sources, with their importance fluctuating within this period. The role of Ayia Irini, located in the center of this metal-bearing zone and with extensive evidence for local metallurgical activities, remains to be clarified. A new project by the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Cremonte. Clarisa Otero. Catriel Greco.

In recent years, the scenario of Inka conquest in the Quebrada de Humahuaca includes different social landscapes that can’t be explained by traditional positions. These new perspectives have been improved by contributions from other regions of Northwestern Argentina and Collasuyu. In the case of Quebrada de Humahuaca, a region with a lack in early historical sources, the archaeological visibility of processes of social dynamics and handcraft production requires constant methodological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paige Hawthorne. Lori Phillips.

Cougar Quest is an academic summer camp for students on the Washington State University campus and is designed to meet the educational and social needs of college-bound students entering grades 7-13. By attending three workshops of their choosing, students are immersed in a variety of fields and subjects that are taught by WSU professors and graduate students. This past summer, a workshop focused on archaeology was conducted by graduate students to show students the processes of archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Pluckhahn. Neill Wallis.

Archaeologists have turned increasingly to Social Network Analysis (SNA) to visualize and understand the structure of regional social networks, but their analyses frequently sacrifice context and process for synchronic, macro-scale patterning. We compare SNA with a more contextual and processual network approach to the case of Swift Creek Complicated Stamped pottery, a ubiquitous class of material culture In the Deep South of the American Southeast during the Middle and Late Woodland periods...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Scholnick. Ryan Nichols.

The eighteenth century was a dynamic period of religious change, particularly in New England, as the Calvinistic influence of the Puritan settlers waned and new denominations emerged. This was also a time of rapidly changing funerary ritual, when the inscriptions on grave markers shifted from emphases on marking the remains of the decedent to commemorating them, and gravestone motifs became more diverse. This study examines the ways that religious attitudes towards death change, using a database...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dario Guiducci.

The ability of Anatomically Modern Humans (AMH) to successfully navigate complex topographies and variable environments is hypothesized to have been a key adaptation for the long term success of our species, in comparison to other hominid groups. Additionally, the structure of the environment through which human dispersals occurred is arguably important to our understanding of the speed and scale at which population movements occurred. This paper demonstrates a new methodology for quantifying...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Werner.

This paper examines a small network of amateur naturalists who were among the first to document archaeological remains in central Veracruz, Mexico. Carl Christian Sartorius (1796-1872), Karl Hermann Berendt (1817 - 1878), and Hugo Finck (ca. 1824 - 1895) shared backgrounds as German expatriates living and working as professional farmers and physicians in Veracruz. Their detailed knowledge of the peoples and landscapes of Veracruz, as well as their frequent trips to the field, enabled their...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nina Coonerty. Susan Kuzminsky. Lars Fehren-Schmitz.

Recent studies of South American populations have played an integral role in elucidating the timing, origin and migration routes of the first Americans. Much attention has centered on the cranial shape of these prehistoric populations, which some researchers have described as having two distinct head forms. The cranial shape of early Holocene Paleoamericans has been categorized as dolichocephalic (long-headed), while later populations have been generally described as brachycephalic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dominique Rissolo.

Like the subterranean construction and use of ancient Maya shrines and altars, the presence of incense burners in caves provides unequivocal evidence of ritual practice. Effigy censers, particularly those of the Chen Mul Modeled ceramic type, were locally produced and widely used across the northern lowlands and have been reported in contexts within architectural precincts at a number of Postclassic Maya centers. The use of such censers in ceremonies involving deity veneration was most likely,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kit Nelson. Paul Reed.

Like many areas of the American Southwest, the Greater Taos region has a long history of research, spanning over 100 years. The majority of investigations have focused on either end of the research spectrum. Some being very narrowly centered on specific issues or sites usually resulting from the particular interests of a researcher, while others are very generally focused on data collection resulting from CRM research. This dichotomy of data collection/research has resulted in a highly variable...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Yaquinto. Sarah MacDonald.

To date Gilbert Wenger's 1956 thesis remains one of the most comprehensive studies completed on Fremont culture within the Colorado Bureau of Land Management, White River Field Office (WRFO). WRFO archaeologists have focused Section 110 program efforts over the course of the last four field seasons on Fremont sites documented by Wenger and others and also to identify new Fremont sites through archaeological field survey. This poster presentation provides a synthesis of inventory results...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Duff. Ashenafi Zena. Addisalem Melesse. John Wolff.

This presentation discusses a new research effort to identify, document, date and better understand the numerous megalithic stele sites of the Gedeo Zone in the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples’ Regional State (SNNPRS) of southern Ethiopia. The Gedeo Zone is home to numerous stele, features that occur as isolates, in small groups, and as localities with numerous stele. Stele range from 1 meter to over 5 meters in length, and though some remain standing, most have collapsed. Stele are...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Sarah Herr. J. Scott Wood.

Hundreds of Western Apache roasting pits have been documented by archaeological surveys in Central Arizona, but prior to A.D. 2000 few had been excavated. These large, visible, accumulations of fire-cracked rock and dark soil are essentially the only enduring Western Apache modifications of the physical landscape and the best candidates for planned research on past Western Apache experience, as pre-reservation sites and features in the region are often far more subtle. Two large roasting pits,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kirsten Verostick.

With advancing technologies in recent years, numerous methodologies are used to identify disease and causes of infection in human skeletal remains. Use of ancient DNA (aDNA) and scanning electron microscopy aid in pinpointing diseases. In particular, ancient tuberculosis and treponemal disease are at the forefront of identification with these new techniques. Recent evaluation shows some of these methods still require refinement, such as the recent discovery of aDNA markers used to identified...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Spears. Berenika Byszewski.

What responsibility do archaeologists have in presenting Indigenous perspectives through their interpretations? What would this presentation look like, and what bridges must be built to accommodate differing knowledge sets and perspectives? Using Thornton Ranch Open Space as a case study, we consider the constraints and possibilities of working with/for the interests of descendant communities within the context of contemporary cultural resource management in order to respect various connections...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeffrey Vadala.

Caches have been recovered in the Maya area dating to every period since the Middle Preclassic (c. 700 BC) and are among the most common assemblage type recovered from Maya architecture. In the past, most scholars have treated caches as a normative Maya custom, failing to identify significant spatial and temporal variation within cache assemblages. Additionally, many studies have isolated cache contents from their larger contexts, especially the context of the rituals of which they were a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ginessa Mahar.

The term “mass-capture” is widely used in archaeological and zooarchaeological discourse to connote any form of capture that results in the simultaneous collection of multiple organisms. However, mass-capture as an umbrella term obscures critical variation among diverse techniques that have implications for anthropological interpretation. Nowhere does this limitation have more of an impact than in coastal settings, where fishes and shellfishes constitute the majority of subsistence prey items. ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Brady. Yoav Me-Bar. Fred ValdeZ.

Dos Hombres, a Maya site in the Programme for Belize (PfB) conservation area of northern Belize, consists of three large architectural groups aligned in a north-south direction along a series of knolls. Where the southern end of Group C meets the surrounding bajo, a depression in small knoll protruding from the bajo yielded evidence of Maya utilization from the Late Preclassic through the Late Classic. The underlying bedrock was modified to create an amphitheater shape focused on a small cave at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zachary Chase. Zach Chase.

Over the last several decades Andean archaeology of the late prehispanic through early Spanish colonial periods has grown to the point that critical reassessments of ethnohistorical materials and the anthropological models constructed from them are not only possible but necessary. Taking as a premise that language and material culture are primary transmissions of cultural life through time, this presentation summarizes recent archaeological research in Cuzco, Huamachuco, Pachacamac, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lucas Proctor. Hannah Lau.

Inhabitants of the Middle Bronze Age in the Southern Caucasus (c. 2400–1500 BC ) are thought to be highly mobile communities, heavily reliant on pastoral resources. Few settlements have been recovered archaeologically, and fewer still excavated. New work from the Middle Bronze Age settlements and kurgans at Qızqala on the Şerur Plain in the Autonomous Republic of Naxçıvan, Azerbaijan therefore fills an important lacuna in our understanding of the lifeways of Middle Bronze Age peoples. We report...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Perez. Jon Carroll.

Reconstructing the history of archaeological research at Tel Lachish, an archaeological site in southern Israel, has proven to be a challenging task. The need to synthesize large volumes of data produced over decades of research has resulted in the creation of a spatial database using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology. This paper touches on the data collection of the previous three expeditions to Tel Lachish, but primarily discusses current data collection methods, as well as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Vida Kusmartono.

Previous archaeological discoveries by Soejono (1977) and Chazine (2010) at Nanga Balang and Diang Kaung in the deep interior of Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) have documented human occupation there at c. 3000 BP. But sites closer to the coastline of Borneo, especially the Niah Caves in Sarawak, have yielded chronologies indicating a much greater span of late Pleistocene (50 Kya onwards) to Holocene occupation. So, did hunter-gatherer populations also exist in the deep interior of Borneo...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jaime Vera. Nelly M. Robles.

Esta presentación es respecto a los recientes recorridos de superficie en sitios arqueológicos de la región de la cañada oaxaqueña. La dinámica de esta región de Oaxaca muestra una constante ocupación. Desde épocas prehistóricas grupos nómadas ocuparon abrigos en una región tan rico y variado en ecosistemas que permitió el establecimiento de sociedades prehispánicas complejas las cuales se asentaron a lo largo de las zonas de playas de los ríos Grande, salado o el río las vueltas como algunos...

DOCUMENT Citation Only T. Manahan. Emily O'Brien.

Human trophy skulls have a long history in Mesoamerica. Excavation of Structure 9M-136, an elite household in the center of the ancient Maya center of Xuenkal revealed a trophy skull in situ from funerary context, where it was found placed on the chest of an elite individual within a complex burial deposit. The primary individual was interred with a bifacial flint lance, a carved bone pendant, and the trophy skull resting on his chest. The skull had been extensively modified in preparation for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leslie Cecil. Tom Dillehay. Michael Glascock.

The Purén-Lumaco Project conducted an archaeological survey of the Purén and Lumaco Valley in Chile (approximately 30 km) from 1994-2004. During the survey, Dillehay and colleagues noted 300+ prehistoric and historic localities that ranged from agricultural features to multifunctional mounds. Those archaeological features represent an Araucanian polity dating to the Early Prehistoric (AD 500-1550) and early Hispanic (AD 1550-1700) periods. The chiefdom-level polity was strong politically and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jaclyn Nadeau.

This paper is the result of an ongoing research project into the technological and social changes occurring in northeastern North America from the Late Archaic to the Late Woodland. This dynamic period in the region’s prehistory is traditionally marked as the boundary between mobile hunter-gatherer-fishers and ceramic-producing horticulturalists. The overall effect of these changes on regional populations is still, however, unclear. I argue that to better understand this period we must couple...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Collin Gillenwater.

The domestic archaeology of Early Colonial period Yucatán, Mexico is well regarded as a melting pot of imported and local technologies, goods, and systems of belief. Evaluating domestic access to goods during the Early Colonial period is usually done by comparing the frequency between locally produced and imported wares. This type of comparison allows for preliminary insight into cultural breaks, and or, cultural continuity during the first few generations after European Contact. Although much...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dennis Jenkins. Joshua Ziegler.

The Connley Caves are a series of rockshelters and caves eroded into a south-facing ridge of Miocene welded tuff, rhyolite and fine-grained basalt in the Fort Rock Basin of Oregon. Initially excavated by Stephen Bedwell in 1967-68, their deeply stratified late Pleistocene-early Holocene deposits produced rich lithic and faunal assemblages potentially associated with earliest radiocarbon ages of 10,600±190 and 11,200±200. The Connley Caves data played a major role in the development of Bedwell’s...

DOCUMENT Citation Only E. Cory Sills. J. Jefferson MacKinnon.

The Placencia Salt Works in southern Belize are re-evaluated based on 2015 field work, building on previous research by J. Jefferson MacKinnon. Comparisons are made with the Paynes Creek Salt Works based on a similar salt-water lagoon environment, salt-production artifacts (briquetage), the presence of earthen mounds, and the absence of preserved wooden architecture at the Placencia Salt Works. Study of the briquetage indicates a similar process of evaporating brine in pots over fires to make...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Lobiondo. John Dysart. Matthew LoBiondo. Richard Veit.

Pipe stems are a staple in Historical Archaeology. Their study can provide considerable insight into the lives of the people who used them. In addition to the cultural importance of pipe stems, these artifacts are frequently used to date historic sites. Working with a collection of over 2,000, 17th and 18th century pipe stems from the Clark-Watson site in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, we reexamine the notion of a communal tavern pipe through experimental archaeology techniques. In addition, we will...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Poncelet.

One of the benefits of anthropology’s four-field approach is that it invites reflecting on and applying insights, perspectives, and learnings from one field to another. Such was my experience with Carole Crumley. Although Carole was an archeologist and I was a cultural anthropologist, I asked her to serve as my faculty advisor at UNC-Chapel Hill primarily because she deeply believed in the importance of my research interest. I wanted to study multistakeholder environmental collaboration in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Scharf. Melinda Leach.

In this presentation, we present several of the means that we have used to collect data on student learning and the student experience in our introductory archaeology classes. Standardized institutional student evaluation forms, learning-response surveys, instructor-generated evaluation forms, hands-on lab activities, assignments, pre- and post-semester surveys (the "knowledge surveyor"), and evaluation of student products with rubrics will be described and discussed, along with their roles in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lucero Aristizabal Losada. Melanie Miller.

En esta presentación, queremos enfocarnos en la relación entre alimentación y otras dimensiones sociales de la sociedad Muisca asentada en una aldea del sur de la Sabana de Bogotá del periodo muisca tardío, como es el caso de status y género. Tradicionalmente, se ha asumido la existencia de un grupo de élite que tuvo ciertos privilegios y beneficios por encima del resto de individuos; sin embargo, la información de la dieta a través del análisis isotópico de una muestra de 250 individuos...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Keith Stephenson. Karen Smith.

Middle Woodland sites of the Deptford period on the Atlantic Coastal Plain first received archaeological attention during the Great Depression. Aspects of Deptford settlement organization and its socio-political economies have been debated ever since. Models developed for interior-riverine sites in the Coastal Plain indicate that occupation differed between floodplain sites and those of the upland, inter-fluvial areas. Two extensive blocks with Deptford components were excavated at the Savannah...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Francisco Romano. Sergio Castro. Sergio González.

This paper deals with population dynamics and changes in ancient pre-Hispanic societies settled in the regions of Villa de Leiva, Fuquene and Funza from the Cundinamarca and Boyacá basin, Colombia, South America. Based on these three different regional datasets, this research wants to contribute to analytical modeling development in order to understand population dynamics. Since a comparative perspective among nearby regions we accounting for substantial variability in demographic past behavior...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Seibert.

In August 2015, the Southeast Archeological Center undertook a large-scale systematic survey of the core battlefield and surrounding environs of Cowpens National Battlefield. The survey covered over 50 acres using Federal and State archaeologists in conjunction with volunteers from throughout the southeastern United States. The project nearly doubled the footprint of the battle, in addition to uncovering several artifacts that are key to interpreting troop movements and actions across the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Kroot.

Winney’s Rift, located along Fish Creek in Saratoga County, New York, has been the focus of several systematic and publicly reported excavations, as well as countless disturbances by looters, collectors, and amateur archaeologists. This paper reviews the history of material recovery and interpretation by these various parties before reexamining the anthropological significance of the site. Reported artifacts show occupations at the site ranging from two Clovis points through to present-day...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Sandweiss. Fred Andrus.

For the last thirty years, zooarchaeological data from coastal Peru have provided groundbreaking insight into the Holocene history of El Niño, the interannual climatic phenomenon that affects global climate and human societies. Elizabeth J. Reitz has authored important studies with both of us on El Niño and faunal biogeography, and she served as a mentor to one of us in developing biochemical proxies for El Niño. In this paper, we review the history of faunal studies of El Niño and analyze...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Darryl Wilkinson.

The use of “relational” approaches in archaeology seems much more prevalent in some contexts as compared to others. Particularly, it is most often invoked with respect to prehistoric hunter-foragers – that is, societies that are “politically non-complex” to use the classic archaeological terms. Perhaps as a result, violence is seldom discussed in the literature on relationality, unless to point out the contrasting violence of modernity itself. Yet for those of us who deal with indigenous...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erica Hill.

New approaches to animal geography have rapidly emerged over the last twenty years and have challenged accepted views of human–animal relations in a variety of contexts. While archaeologists studying past relational ontologies have explored the spatial components of human interactions with animals, so far archaeology has not explicitly engaged with animal geography. This paper investigates how the “new” or “third wave” animal geography (Urbanik 2012) might inform our understanding of the human...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mike Cannon. Lisa Krussow.

Marked variability in subsistence strategies has been noted throughout the Fremont archaeological culture. Previously, we have explored such variability by using data on baseline environmental productivity, zooarchaeological evidence for resource depression, and archaeological measures of the importance of agriculture to test the hypothesis that agricultural investment among the Fremont varied inversely with local environmental productivity. Data from throughout the Fremont region are consistent...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah MacIntosh. Levent Atici. Sachihiro Omura.

Textiles are rarely found in Near Eastern archaeological contexts due to the rarity of suitable environmental conditions for their preservation. Cuneiform texts and limited artifactual evidence have therefore often been the main sources informing archaeologists of the technological processes involved in textile production. Yet, scanty data exist specifically on textile-manufacturing tools made from bone, a readily available raw material, and the smallholders who crafted these tools. This paper...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanuel Beyin.

The Red Sea basin is emerging as an important region for testing current hypotheses concerning early human dispersal routes out of Africa. However, the immediate peripheries of the basin, especially the African side had seen little prior Paleolithic research, hindering well informed assessment of the temporal and cultural contexts of hominin adaptation along the Red Sea. Owing to its strategic geographic position along the African side of the Red Sea, Eritrea (with ~1300 km of coastline)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam Stack. Matt Liebmann.

The religious conversion of Native North Americans was a fundamental goal of European colonizers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Native experiences of missionization have often been framed within a concept of religious conversion as ontological transformation that descends from Christian doctrine. Many Native ‘converts’ doubtless eluded encounters with the transcendent leading to fundamental inner change, and archaeologists have often been frustrated in the search for convincing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cameron Gokee. Matthew Kroot.

The 16-19th centuries in West Africa marked a period of dramatic social and cultural change fueled, in part, by the opening of Atlantic markets and the rise of predatory states. The responses of societies peripheral to these political economic processes often involved strategic shifts in the production of space—including relocation to highland refuge areas, aggregation into larger villages, increases in residential mobility, and fortification of elite houses and/or entire settlements. In this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mats Söderström. Christian Isendahl.

Brazilian and Swedish archaeologists and soil scientists collaborated in the multidisciplinary research project Cultivated Wilderness (CW) to investigate Amazonian Dark Earth (ADE) locations in the Santarém‐Belterra region of the Brazilian Amazon. One of the goals of the project was to investigate the potential of rapid geophysical data collection to assess the properties and spatial distribution of ADE. About 300 reference soil samples were collected at different ADE locations. A range of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aaron Coons. Kisha Supernant. Terry Gibson.

The Buffalo Lake Métis Wintering Site (FdPe-1), located in central Alberta, Canada, presents one of the most extensively studied examples of overwintering practices amongst the Fur Trade-era Métis. With historical records accounting for approximately four hundred cabins being present at the site in 1876, this site has the potential to have been the largest settlement west of the Red River at the time of its occupation. However, surficial evidence of these cabins is now scarce as a result of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alesha Marcum-Heiman. Leland Bement. Kristen Carlson. Brian Carter.

Early archaeological investigations in the Black Mesa area of Oklahoma were geared toward the discovery of additional evidence of "Early Man" in North America. The 1926 discovery of the Folsom type site encouraged E.B. Renaud to explore caves along the Dry Cimarron just 50 kilometers downstream. Rather than discovering additional Paleoindian sites, the University of Denver’s surveys documented numerous post-Folsom occupations. Despite the early documentation of these sites, systematic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Hollinger. Edwell John Jr.. Robert Starbard.

Smithsonian repatriation efforts have resulted in close consultation and collaboration with tribes and Alaskan Native communities that have enabled exploration of museum resources and shared interests taking the communities and the Institution far beyond what was envisioned by most when the repatriation legislation was first enacted. In particular, the Tlingit Dakhl'aweidi clan and the Hoonah Indian Association have worked with the National Museum of Natural History to pilot collaborations using...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacqueline Cook.

The Ancient One’s 8,400 year old remains were claimed by Native American Tribes as their ancestor after eroding from the banks of the Columbia River in 1996. What began as an Inadvertent Discovery, defined in the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), turned into a 20 year challenge to the Act, tribal culture, oral traditions and religious beliefs. In 2004, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court ruling allowing scientific study of the Ancient One; the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Billeck.

Despite numerous books and historical accounts of the 1890 death of Sitting Bull, only one obscure 1893 magazine article mentions that a U.S. Army surgeon cut off a lock of Sitting Bull’s hair and took leggings from his body. These items were loaned to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History back in 1896 and were recently evaluated for repatriation and were returned to Sitting Bull’s family. This poster reviews the research that determined which descendants had the highest standing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Danielle Macdonald. Adrian Evans. Robert Harman.

The use of surface metrology microscopes and analytical processes is proliferating for the analysis of archaeology materials. Data collected from these microscopes allows for reliable and reproducible measurements of surface texture. However, archaeological materials provide some unique challenges for microscopic analysis; at times objects cannot be directly examined, whether these materials cannot leave a museum or are too large to observe under a microscope. Because of these challenges, many...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anne Jensen.

The North Slope of Alaska is home to many coastal sites with spectacular preservation, due to frozen conditions. Long considered relatively stable, these sites are now vanishing. Erosion rates have increased exponentially, due to warming permafrost, sea ice retreat and longer ice-free seasons. Coastal erosion reveals structures and features, but they are often destroyed by storms before anything significant can be done. A single recent storm removed over 30 meters of one site. North Slope...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aribidesi Usman.

This paper will report the recent excavation at Okete-Kakini site near the king’s (Attah) palace in Idah. Okete-Kakini was the residential area of Attah’s eunuchs (amonoji), one of the two major palace officials who carried out various functions for the Attah. The aim of the investigation is to identify the activities of the palatine elites through an examination of their material culture found in archaeological excavations. It is thought that the members of the palatine groups, like the formal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chantal Huckert.

Con base a la cerámica que resguarda el Museo de Antropología de Xalapa, correspondiente a las culturas del Golfo en el Clásico Tardío, se propone una lectura iconográfica sobre la representación de la muerte asociada al sacrificio. La muestra de piezas se caracteriza por estar constituida por cuerpos completos y fragmentados, además de cabezas que son una unidad en sí, y tuvieron probablemente la función de cabeza trofeo. Se reconocen dos complejos iconográficos que configuran una narrativa...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angela Rajagopalan.

As the influence of the Spanish Inquisition increased in the decades following the Spanish conquest of Mexico, it became increasingly common for indigenous artist-scribes, or tlacuiloque, to substitute pictographic images of pre-Hispanic deities with iconography related to the Christian devil. Drawing on examples from Mesoamerican painted manuscripts and murals produced in the sixteenth-century, this paper explores the nature of those representations. Distinctions occur between representations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Prouty.

The colonial efforts by the Spanish and subsequent generations resulted in the formation of cultural networks that were based on the reliance and access to key ecological resources. Ultimately these networks influenced the development of social stratification of the San Diego River watershed and the surrounding region. Incorporating the analysis of archaeological, anthropological, and historical data, and utilizing geographic information systems, a series of maps depicting site densities, a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carolyn Rock. Meggan Blessing. Nicole Cannarozzi. Arlene Fradkin. Michelle LeFebvre.

This poster discusses patterns of prehistoric consumption in light of results from recent archaeological investigations at black earth middens in the interior of southern Florida. The amount of faunal remains recovered from these sites may represent the largest single zooarchaeological project ever conducted for this region. More than 350,000 animal bones were identified from six sites, whose occupation dates ranged from the Archaic to Historic periods. Identified fauna revealed the overwhelming...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Willeke Wendrich. Rachel Moy. Hans Barnard.

The combination of gold and archaeology is never a good one. The site of Mai Adrasha is under imminent threat of total destruction because of large scale panning of natural gold traces by the local population living near to the largest Axumite site West of Axum. In December 2015 a team from UCLA started a community project to work with the local population in safeguarding and excavating this important site. The research focus of the work is to establish the lay-out, development and function of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Moore.

The Virginia Museum of Natural History (VMNH) is an AAM accredited museum that serves as the state repository for natural history collections and occupies a purpose-built structure completed in 2007. As the state museum under the Secretary of Natural Resources, VMNH curates over 10 million archaeological, biological, paleontological, and geological specimens in trust for the citizens of the Commonwealth. The archaeology department currently curates over one million specimens. While the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Costello. Patricia Capone. Meredith Vasta. Diana Zlatanovski.

Founded in 1866, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University is one of the oldest museums in the world devoted to anthropology. It is dedicated to the care, study and long-term preservation of one of the largest and finest collections of cultural history found anywhere. A primary tenet of the Peabody Museum’s mission is to support the study and interpretation of its 1.2 million objects and archival collections in the service of research, teaching, publication,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Douglas Stephens.

Since the establishment of the US Forest Service in 1905 academic partnerships have been essential to the management and understanding of the cultural resources the agency oversees. After the National Historic Preservation Act was passed in 1966 the Forest Service gradually began developing its own program to manage cultural resources changing the relationship between the agency and researchers. This paper explores the changing ways academic research has influenced the Forest Service and how...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michele Koons. Stephen Nash. Deborah Huntley.

The Reserve Area Archaeological Project (RAAP) is a collaborative effort between the Denver Museum of Nature & Science (DMNS) and the United States Forest Service. Centered in the Reserve/ Pine Lawn region of the Gila National Forest in New Mexico, this project brings together many extant datasets, such as existing collections in the Field Museum from the 1940s/50s, GIS data from the Forest Service, paleoclimate data, and new research that to date has focused on non-invasive methods. Project...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karim Alizadeh.

There are some important differences between modern and ancient urban centers in terms of contextual variables and some social dynamics, however, theoretical frameworks derived from studies on social composition of modern urban centers can provide useful insights into the organizational dynamics of complex societies in the past. Hence, current understanding of the dynamics of residential segregations may enable us to address anthropological and archaeological questions. Our surveys and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Hunt. Jon Russ. Stephen Carmody.

Chemical analyses of organic residues from smoking pipes excavated from archaeological sites in the southeastern United States provide insight into ritualistic smoking traditions of indigenous peoples. This study examined residues scraped from pipes and pipe sherds in collections at the Fernbank Museum of Natural History in Atlanta, Georgia, and the McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture in Knoxville, Tennessee. One of the primary goals was to determine whether nicotine was present in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justine Shaw.

Resilience theory has typically been applied to living people by sociologists or psychologists or to components of the natural world by ecologists. Whatever its application, its scale is that of a community or system, with the focus is often on why particular components are able to persist when the system is inevitably disturbed, transformed, or reorganized, while others fare less well. Such systems move between stability and transformation in an adaptive cycle, with both environmental changes...