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

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Rodning. Jayur Mehta.

Within the field of ecology, resilience is the capacity of an ecosystem to withstand change and to regenerate itself after disturbance. Adapted to the archaeological study of past cultural systems, the concept of resilience refers to the capacity of a cultural system or a cultural landscape to endure change. Archaeologists have primarily recognized resiliency in cultural systems of regions characterized by arid conditions, either permanently or periodically. This paper considers prehistoric...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicola Sharratt.

Cross-cultural literature highlights the importance of differentiating between political, societal, and ‘cultural’ collapse. Focusing largely on the short-term aftermath of collapse, this scholarship demonstrates that even in the clearest examples of political fragmentation, considerable stability in other components of past societies is often archaeologically visible. Less attention has been paid to longer-term impacts and responses. Taking the disintegration of the Tiwanaku state in the south...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristina Douglass.

This paper discusses resource exploitation patterns at coastal archaeological sites located in the Velondriake Marine Protected Area in southwest Madagascar. In particular, it assesses the selective reliance of coastal communities on a variety of local habitats and taxa. The data are derived from regional survey and the excavation of five archaeological sites, including small rock shelters and open-air sites, ranging in date from ca. AD 800 to 1900. The data describe multiple narratives of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert DiNapoli. Terry Hunt. Alex Morrison. Brian Lane. Carl Lipo.

East Polynesian populations are closely related both culturally and genetically, yet their islands are environmentally diverse. The common ancestry and strong environmental differences make East Polynesia uniquely suited to the study of divergent sociocultural evolution. Following human colonization, populations diverged in subsistence practices, settlement patterns, ritual architecture, intensity of competition, and social organization. Here we explore differences in the intensity of conflict...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brandon Ritchison.

Communities are social fulcrums, situated within multiple scales of interactivity. Understanding the discursive relationship between regions and households through the lens of the community can allow for a better understanding of social transformations. In the decades preceding 1400 C.E., chiefdoms in the Savannah River Valley collapsed and the region became depopulated. Settlement evidence suggests large scale population movements from the valley to the Georgia Coast, with significant social...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anne Pyburn.

Decisions about site preservation and public presentation are where archaeologists can bring collaboration with local and descendant communities to bear on policy decisions about heritage management and tourist development. The fact that these are decisions with direct political and sometimes economic import does not absolve archaeologists from engagement. In fact, it is in exactly this arena that engagement of archaeologists with the local communities and a suite of heritage stakeholders is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emma Britton.

Whereas past studies have suggested that some Casas Grandes polychrome types are more common in some geographic areas than others (see Brand 1935; De Atley 1980; Findlow and DeAtley 1982; Kelley et al. 1999; Larkin et al. 2004 for more complete discussions), these studies have been challenged as they assume polychromes recovered are made locally, rather than imported from other sites (Douglas 1995; Minnis 1984, 1989). As a result, recent studies refocus on polychrome production (Carpenter 2002,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andres Garzon-Oechsle. Valentina L. Martínez.

This poster presents information on the Manteño occupation (1500 BP – 1532) of the cloud forest within the Chongón-Colonche Mountains of coastal Ecuador. Survey and data recovered from eight archaeological sites containing stone structures located alongside Las Tusas River drainage suggest a specific mode of adaptation and settlement pattern that left a particular landscape signature. The survey was conducted by the Florida Atlantic University Archaeological Fieldschool in Ecuador during the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elise Alonzi.

In 2015, the Society for American Archaeology conducted a survey on members’ opinions on repatriation and the SAA’s Statement Concerning the Treatment of Human Remains. Among other things, this survey was intended to gauge support for changing the SAA’s statement to privilege the wishes of Native American communities, to emphasize scientific values, or to more strongly recognize interests of multiple stakeholders. The majority of the 1,905 respondents to the survey believe that the SAA’s...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mariela Declet-Perez.

This work presents and discusses the finals results of an investigation focused in the strategies for the acquisition and transportation of coral by indigenous societies, analyzing the material obtained from the Tibes Ceremonial Center, Puerto Rico. This study was focused on the “chaîne operatoire”, to demonstrate the utility of this type of material in archaeological studies in the Caribbean. With this approach we were able to identify the collection areas and methods, the manufacture and use...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maureen Meyers.

In the Fall of 2014, the Southeastern Archaeological Conference sponsored a sexual harassment survey of its membership. Goals of the survey were to identify frequency and types of sexual harassment in field situations and identify consequences of such incidences for perpetrators and victims. The survey was also designed to identify if victims of sexual harassment had suffered adverse effects to their career, and to collect longitudinal data on changes in sexual harassment over time. The poster...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rosemary Joyce.

In Central America, recent research crosses national boundaries that once divided archaeological analyses, including by identifying historically related ceramics with regionalized names. This paper argues for using contemporary concepts that do not tie us to the culture historical approach, with its equivalences of a people, a material culture, a language, and an identity, to fully understand emerging data. Culture history worked as a preliminary step to clarify relations in areas like...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Whitley.

More than 25 years since Allen et al. (1990), GIS has become a tool used almost as ubiquitously in archaeology as the trowel and the total station. But is it a “paradigm-shifter?” One fundamental distinction between archaeology and other scientific pursuits is the lack of a formal experimental procedure for testing large-scale hypotheses. We can work with recreated material culture or anything else on a 1:1 scale. However, ideas about larger mechanisms, particularly those that encompass wide...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Allison.

The dating of Fremont sites is based almost entirely on radiocarbon dates. A large number of dates exist from the region as a whole, but many of the largest Fremont sites are poorly dated. Most of the important sites excavated prior to the 1980s have at best a few dates, and many of the dates that do exist are on charcoal from structural wood. In some cases the only available dates are clearly centuries too early for the sites and structures they purport to date. In addition to problems with the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Catherine Smith. Clifford T. Brown.

The Belle Glade prehistoric culture of central peninsular Florida is very poorly known. Through standard osteological analyses of 78 individuals from Belle Glade Mound (8PB41), type site for the culture, estimates for age, sex, and stature were calculated and observations of dental and skeletal pathologies were noted. Sex could be estimated for 26 males and 25 females. Age distributions varied stratigraphically but were dominated by young adults aged 20-35 and middle adults aged 35-50. The age...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mara Mulrooney. Mark D. McCoy. Thegn N. Ladefoged.

Hawai‘i Island’s Kona Field System is the largest dryland field system in the Hawaiian Islands. The chronology for the development of this system has been addressed through several major studies, including the landmark volume ‘Gardens of Lono’ which described intensive survey and excavations on the grounds of the Amy Greenwell Ethnobotanical Garden in Kealakekua. Since its publication, radiocarbon dates from this and most other excavations in Kona have been rejected due to a lack of control for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kylie Quave.

Recent research at the Logan Museum of Anthropology combines student and faculty expertise with archaeometric methods to reveal new information about coastal pre-Columbian Andean collections brought to the museum in the early- to mid-twentieth century. With student collaborators we scanned a possible “bird mummy” with computed tomography to reveal that there was no avian body but rather a complex suite of offerings within its cloth wrapping. They included maize cobs, shell, and other materials....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Sload.

Reverential termination is hypothesized for the human-made cave beneath the Sun Pyramid. While the idea of a mid-third century A.D. termination is not new and is based on radiocarbon dating and construction of blockages in the rear section of the cave and use of concrete, qualifying the termination as reverential is a refinement. The most direct information comes from examination of blockage construction, which is supported by two other lines of evidence. One also lays within the cave and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Ness.

In 1492, Spain “discovered” the Americas and proceeded to lay claim to as much of the New World and its natural resources as it could. The colonization and territorial expansion that followed has been fodder for clergy, scholars, historians, and archaeologists throughout the intervening centuries. The majority of these discussions, however, address the impact of Spain’s imperial activities in the Americas, specifically during the “Golden Age” of the 16th and 17th centuries. In this paper, I...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Donald Gaylord.

Many of us at institutions with long-standing archaeology programs benefit greatly from the collections we inherit. However, these also present certain challenges. One such example is a stratified random sample done by Washington and Lee Archaeology in the 1970s on its 18th-century Liberty Hall Campus. Exceptional in historical archaeology at a time when many archaeologists were still stripping the plowzone from sites, a stratified random sample provides the statistical benefits of randomness,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Burger.

Chavin de Huantar continues to play a central role in our understanding of the Central Andes during the Initial Period and Early Horizon and thus an understanding of it chronological position remains crucial. This talk will present a critique of the contribution of recent work at Chavin to this theme, including a consideration of both ceramic and radiocarbon sequences. A new set of radiocarbon measurements based on the analysis of animal bone from the residential sector will be presented and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ana Carito Tavera Medina. SARAH MARTINI.

Revisiting the pre-Moche - Moche transition on the El Brujo geological terrace; A spatially significant ceramic analysis. Understanding the social relationships represented by Salinar, Gallinazo, and early Moche ceramics remains one of the important, disputed issues in archaeology on the north coast of Peru. All three ceramic styles are present in material collected during excavations of architectural nuclei around the El Brujo geologic terrace in the Chicama valley over the last 25 years. Here...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Bollwerk. Leslie Cooper.

Previous analyses (Cooper and Smith 2007, Smith and Cooper 2011) of Colonoware from 33 sites occupied during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by enslaved peoples in South Carolina and Virginia have revealed significant inter-regional variation in vessel abundance over time. Additionally, analyses of attributes such as soot residue and vessel thickness identified intra-regional homogeneity and heterogeneity in use and manufacturing techniques. This study tests whether these trends continue...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Britta Spaulding.

In recent years, industrial archaeology has come to be more associated with historical archaeology when it comes to creating perspectives from which to analyze the evidence of economic industries of all sorts. Farm sites and others that make up rural economic activities—mills, mines, etc.—are all sites of industry, and they should be studied together for a larger view of these industries from different economic and social scales, particularly in the regional sense. In southern Sweden from the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Taylor.

Despite almost 100 years of scientific research, the archaeological record of Central Africa remains stubbornly peripheral to ongoing debates centering on the origins of rainforest hunting and gathering. Currently available chronological, palaeobiogeographical and technological data converges to indicate that the initial settlement of the central African rainforest belt may have been first undertaken c.300 ka BP by archaic Homo sapiens. The appearance of new tools suitable for hafting as stone...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia McAnany. Maia Dedrick.

Land and labor are particularly integral to agrarian economies. The extent to which either is exchanged, sold, inherited, or privatized can shape the dynamics of hierarchy, habitation, and migration as well as exchange. The diverse perspectives on Yucatec possession of land—from assertions of private property to denial of property as a relevant concept—are reviewed for both pre-Conquest and Colonial times. Relevant data include land plot demarcations, historical documentation of land struggles,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cameron McNeil. Edy Barrios. Alexandre Tokovinine. Walter Burgos.

Situated along the frontier between Maya and non-Maya lands, Rio Amarillo reflects mixed allegiances in its architecture and artifacts, although its Late Classic ceremonial core is most strongly associated with Copan. While politically autonomous during the Early Classic, an inscription on an altar at the site demonstrates that this pre-Columbian town came under Copan’s power during the time of Ruler 12. The construction of an elaborately sculpted building during the reign of Ruler 16 suggests...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Vint. Fred L. Nials.

Late Archaic forager-farmers in the Sonoran Desert lived in a resource-rich but water-poor environment. Rivers that flowed through major valleys supported lush riparian habitat, creating linear oases bounded by foothills covered by desertscrub vegetation and “sky island” mountain ranges. Hunting and foraging in these diverse ecosystems supported small but stable populations throughout the region, and by 4000 BP low-level maize agriculture was incorporated into the subsistence diet....

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Jerrems.

Few topics have been more profound than the subject of climate change at the end of the Pleistocene and early Holocene in the Great Basin of North America and the influence that such change may have had on the earliest human inhabitants. Rapidly shifting climate is exemplified by the filling and waning of internally drained pluvial lake basins. Two very large lakes intermittently occupied a huge part of the northern Great Basin throughout the Pleistocene. Lake Lahontan and Lake Bonneville...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jordan Downey.

The Salinar Period (400 - 200 B.C.) has long been considered a time of extensive warfare on the north coast of Peru. In the Virú Valley, fortifications and defensible settlements were common during this period, and warfare is thought to decline in the subsequent Virú Period (200 BC - AD 600). While Virú Period settlements were commonly built in open and undefensible locations, a new type of monumental fortification, the Castillo, first appeared during this time. These structures clearly served a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephanie Selover.

The end of the Early Bronze Age (ca. 2000 BCE) saw the collapse or the decline of a number of civilizations and settlements throughout the ancient Near East, and is an oft discussed topic in the study of the archaeology and history of the region. This paper takes a micro look at this phenomenon within Central and Southeastern Anatolia, using the creation, upkeep and collapse of complex fortification systems as a proxy for violence and the preparedness for violence in the region. Before the Early...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine Dixon.

On the side of a road in El Salvador in 1978, the life of Payson Sheets and the remains of the Classic Period Maya settlement of Cerén fatefully intersected. When Sheets first understood the actual antiquity of the site buried by volcanic ash to be 1,400 years old, what could not have been known was the decades of research that would ensue, nor the wide-ranging impacts that such findings would have for household archaeology, commoner studies, and archaeological method and theory. Sheets has...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ariane Burke. Masa Kageyama. Guillaume Latombe. Mathieu Vrac. Patrick James.

The extent to which climate change has affected the course of human evolution is an enduring question. The ability to maintain spatially extensive social networks and fluid social structure allow human foragers to “map onto” the landscape, mitigating the impact of resource fluctuation. Together, these adaptations confer resilience in the face of climate change – but what are the limits of this resilience and what is the role played by climate variability? We address this question by testing how...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kasey Heiser.

The Early Woodland Period In New York state is a unique time period with many changes from the preceding Late Archaic and Transitional periods. Many of the Western Finger lakes were not only used for their abundant resources, but were integral parts of the landscape used as ceremonial spaces. We know much less about the role of the Eastern Finger Lakes, but the Canadarago Lake I site can shed new light on the role they played. Excavations conducted as part of a Cultural Resource Management...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Haley Austin. Olivia Navarro-Farr.

In the Late and Terminal Classic periods (~750-900 B.C.) ancient Maya city centers in the southern lowlands changed in terms of population, political, and ritual climate. These changes resulted in marked emigration, depopulation of various city centers, and the fall of divine kingship. Across the Maya region, archaeologists have encountered heterogeneous surface deposits, many of which are associated with final occupational phases. Variously identified as problematic or terminal, I argue these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erika Brant.

As Wengrow and Graeber (2015) recently pointed out, since the 1960s anthropologists have focused on organization types—bands, tribes, chiefdoms, states and the like—that remain relatively stable over long periods of time. By contrast, this paper considers evidence from the post-collapse Colla polity of southern Peru to understand how negative perceptions of centralized authority that culminated in the collapse of the Tiwanaku state (c. A.D. 1000) both demanded, and provided the impetus for, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Travis Doering.

The settlement of El Marquesillo in Southern Veracruz was inhabited during the Mesoamerican Early Formative period, emerged as an Olmec center during the Middle Formative period, and remained occupied throughout the remainder of the pre-Columbian period. During the late Middle to early Late Formative period an Olmec monumental tabletop throne was ritually terminated and deposited. This interment was accompanied by two substantial offerings suggestive of a feasting event. More than a millennium...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meaghan Kincaid. Ryan Harrod. Aaron Woods.

A number of culturally modified human remains from three sites in Utah were reanalyzed with a biocultural approach that considered the poetics of violence and the role bodies play in cultural memory. The remains analyzed consisted of twenty-two individuals affiliated with the Fremont and Northern San Juan Puebloan cultures. The focus of this study was to transcend the surficial evidence of dismemberment and mutilation, and to view these bodies as cultural artifacts that could provide deeper...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paola Dematte. Paola Demattè.

In China, rock art is often found in areas considered peripheral to the so-called cradle of Chinese civilization. However, its patterns of landscape and space use are not remarkably different from those of established religions or political institutions whose artistic production in the landscape is generally not understood as “rock art”. Historic Taoist or Buddhist rock carvings and Confucian cliff inscriptions are also associated with travel routes (land, sea or river) or remarkable landscape...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristin Kuckelman.

Among the Ancestral Pueblo peoples of the northern San Juan, outbreaks of warfare coincided with periods of environmental deterioration and subsistence stress. The archaeological record of this region contains abundant data that reflect a final period of heightened lethal interactions in the late A.D. 1200s. The data reveal a pattern of attacks that ended the occupations of several villages just before the northern San Juan was permanently depopulated by Pueblo peoples about A.D. 1280. Evidence...

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

The presence of both Wari and Tiwanaku colonies in the Moquegua Valley (southern Peru) offers a unique opportunity to study the colonial strategies of these empires and their interactions during the first millennium AD. Here, we more specifically explore the role of ritual practices in mediating relations between the Wari and Tiwanaku empires. We focus on a Titicaca basin inspired platform and court complex located outside of the main Wari administrative sector of the site of Cerro Baúl,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edgar Carpio.

The Mejicanos archaeological site is located on the side of a hill surrounded by other hills and a volcanic complex, in addition to beach to Lake Amatitlan. This situation apparently sufficed for implementation of major religions to water and hills as evidenced by the ceramic offerings deposited in the lake during the Classic period as well as the many petroglyphs found in the rocky site sets. These consist mainly recorded in the rocks and miniature representations of temples, usually with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Witt. Kimberly Munro.

Research exploring mortuary treatments, morbidity, and trauma among juveniles has largely been left out of bioarchaeological discussions due to the difficulties subadult skeletal remains present to archaeological investigations. Despite these limitations, analysis of juvenile burials and skeletal remains has the potential to improve our understanding of the physical and social lives of children in the past. Excavations conducted by Proyecto Investigación Arqueológico Distrito del Cáceres Ancash...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yoko Nishimura.

Comma-shaped magatama beads in their 'archaic' forms and materials first appeared in the Early Jōmon period (ca. 5000 BC) in Japan, and in their 'standardized' form and material became a major component of grave goods for the elite burials that began to be constructed from the Yayoi period (ca. 400 BC) onward. The contexts in which magatama beads recently excavated at Early/Middle Jōmon sites have been found indicate that they were most likely ordinary body ornaments for everyday use. Their...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joseph Orozco. Michael D. Glascock, Ph.D. Cinthia Campos.

During the 2014 and 2015 field seasons, the California State University, Los Angeles Sacred Landscapes Archaeological Project conducted an investigation of a collapsed chultun at the ancient Maya site of La Milpa. The collapse pit had a small grotto at the northern end and excavation uncovered a plaster and rubble cored platform enclosing the feature. The platform formalized the space and suggested that it had functioned as a sacred landmark. During the excavations, a fairly dense concentration...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Reid.

Increasingly relevant to studies of geopolitical state expansion is the role of infrastructure: the networks of communication, travel, and commerce that embed local human landscapes within broader processes of imperialism. In pre-industrial communities, formal roads and highways were often the only localized presence of an overarching state, promising greater interconnectivity and shaping the colonial experience. I utilize geographic information systems (GIS) and remote sensing applications to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Franz Scaramelli. Kay Scaramelli.

The rock paintings of the Parguaza River form part of a tradition that extends back thousands of years. We can only speculate on why the paintings were made, who made them, or what their original meaning may have been. However, rock art provides an excellent index of the symbolic world of the peoples who settled the area, as manifested in different traditions. Local belief systems refer to ancestral territorial ties, and the mythical and ritual significance of mountains, caves, and rock art...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gordon Ambrosino. Antonio Curet. Jill Segard.

Located near the south-central coast of Puerto Rico, the site of Tibes is the earliest known civic-ceremonial center in the Greater Antilles. Systematic mapping, nighttime photography and 2-dimensional drawing, during the 2010 field season, revealed a total of seventeen petroglyph panels, displaying anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, geometric and abstract imagery. All of the rock art panels that remain in situ are integrated with several of the ceremonial plazas, which characterize the site. They are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Luke Stroth.

This poster explores the potential applications of using x-ray fluorescence data to assess site integrity and site formation processes. The subject of the analysis was the fire-modified rock assemblage from the University of Iowa Field School at Woodpecker Cave (13JH202), a Late-Woodland rock shelter. The assemblage was selected because of their ubiquity throughout the site, their likely sourcing from the adjacent limestone cliff face, and association with known cultural horizons. The assemblage...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Györgyi Parditka. Paul Duffy. László Paja. Ádám Balázs. Justine Tynan.

Many archaeologists argue that the emergence of a social elite in the Bronze Age of the Great Hungarian Plain is due to the parallel appearance of a specialized trade network they were able to control. This poster focuses on the burial customs at the Békés 103 site, a Bronze Age cemetery in Eastern Hungary. This area saw growth in population, the intensification of farming, and increases in metal production during the Bronze Age, but the settlements lack any evidence for social hierarchy. Do...

DOCUMENT Citation Only J. Daniel Rogers. Wendy Cegielski.

Published applications of Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) in archaeology have tripled within the last five years. However, the scope of the research topics investigated has not increased accordingly. A consensus exists among ABM practitioners, that once generally accepted in archaeology, ABM can make revolutionary advances within the overall research paradigm. Within the archaeological community unresolved concerns center on whether ABMs are sufficiently grounded in empirical data, are aligned with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Heffter. Dušan Mihailovic.

There is strong evidence for the spread of anatomically modern humans (AMH) 45,000 to 35,000 years ago in Europe using two major migration routes: a northern one along the Danube River, and a southern one leading through Bulgaria and Greece. Despite being situated between these routes and near some of the earliest AMH sites in Europe, most of Serbia and the Central Balkans seem to lack evidence of these occupations. Part of the reason for this absence of evidence may be due to limited research...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jozie Buchanan.

In this paper, through botanical analysis, I will reconstruct the environmental consumption patterns in the Lurin valley during the Late Intermediate Period. To this end we will compare botanical remains from each of the three sectors of the site. In particular, I will compare the botanical remains from ritual and domestic contexts, to seek ideas related to hierarchy, identity and power on the role of women.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Fallu. Justin Holcomb.

While human-landscape interaction has been a key question in the archaeology of early complex societies, little research has focused on the effect of occupation on the landscape post-abandonment. At Mycenae, a Late Bronze Age citadel in southern Greece, two distinct deposits, one anthropogenic and one natural, were identified as covering archaeological remains dating to the 12th century, B.C. Here, we present an integrated method combining micromorphology, Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR), and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Axel Nielsen.

I start with the premise that chullpas (architectural modules formed by a chamber which can be accessed by a narrow opening) are wak’as, persons with higher ontological status than humans, capable of acting in different ways (housing the dead, storing crops, guarding territories, defending communities, marking status differences among people, etc.) and settings (pukaras, villages, caves, or fields), as full members of altiplano society. I propose that chullpas were important actors in the Inca...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Luke Kaiser.

Feasting is a ritualistic social activity that also serves to strengthen the solidarity of a group or reinforce its hierarchical structure. Most frequently found as an intragroup activity, it also occurs at the intergroup level. In this paper, I discuss intercommunity feasting as a social, political, and economic motivator that generated interactions that flourished during the Protopalatial period. Several deposits from the Minoan site of Mochlos in Eastern Crete bridge the entire Prepalatial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Nicolas.

In 2014, the California State University, Los Angeles Sacred Landscape Archaeological Project (SLAP) began investigation of a deep pit with a small grotto at its northern end. In 2015, the pit was excavated to bedrock only to discover that the feature was a collapsed chultun. Noteworthy was a plastered platform that encircled the collapse pit. A dense concentration of artifacts was associated with the platform and pit but this dropped rapidly only a few meters from the platform indicating the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Qiang Wang. Enrique López-Hurtado.

In this paper I present a study of the role of metals at Panquilma site during the Ychsma phase (c. AD 1000-1470). Although metals were found in all three sectors at Panquilma (ceremonial, residential, and mortuary), the largest collection was from Sector 3, the burial area. Some mummy bundles were found in Sector 2, but they contain far fewer metals compared to the burial area. Similarly, very few metals were found in ritual or ceremonial contexts in Sector 1. It is widely accepted that metals...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Steele.

Examining the relationships between humans and animals during the Classic period contributes to our understanding of life in the Northern Rio Grande region and the larger Pueblo world. Utilizing ethno-historic and archaeological evidence for the use of mammalian and avian fauna, this poster demonstrates the significance of rare animals from midden, room, and kiva contexts from the ancestral Tewa site Sapa’owingeh (LA 306). Ritual fauna in the Southwest were often carnivores and birds. Species...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bonnie Pitblado.

Discussion of the prehistoric peopling of the New World is as old as North American archaeology, and peopling-related debate has only intensified through the decades. Starting with the Great Plains in the 1920s, the major physiographic regions of North America have each experienced “moments in the sun,” as archaeologists have researched Clovis and sometimes pre-Clovis sites in their midst. For reasons that make little sense in retrospect, the Rocky Mountains are the last major North American...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hilary Becker.

Pigments were used to decorate both wealthy and common houses in ancient Rome but the mechanisms by which raw pigments were collected, traded, and sold have never been studied. A network developed to facilitate the importation of pigments from across a wide expanse of the Roman empire. While the ochres present in a shop in Rome might be locally and regionally sourced, the presence of pigments like madder lake or cinnabar are the result of long chains of commercial transactions, which served to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara Voytek.

ROMANCING THE STONES: ANALYSES OF THE CHIPPED STONE FROM THE TISZA CULTURE SITE OF HÓDMEZŐVÁSÁRHELY-GORZSA, HUNGARY The chipped stone tools from the Gorzsa tell in southeast Hungary have been studied over a period of 15 years with effectively five study seasons (1999, 2000, 2001, 2011 and 2012). A total of over 3,000 chipped stone artefacts were examined in terms of raw material, technology, and microscopic evidence of use, during a study which took place at the Mora Ference Museum in Szeged....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth De Marigny.

The Civitatis of Bagunte is a fortified hilltop settlement inhabited by the Castro Culture people from the late Bronze Age to the Roman period. Ceramic artifacts from the Iron Age and Roman periods have dominated the assemblages found at Bagunte over the last five excavation seasons. My graduate research focuses on a question of broad implications for economic anthropology and social archaeology: How does colonization affect patterns of indigenous production before and after imperial expansion,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samantha Fladd.

Material deposition involves a range of social practices that enact negotiations of identity and interrelationships between people and spaces. Through the deliberate accumulation of artifacts and sediment in certain locations, these negotiations are materialized in the archaeological record. The reciprocal creation and expression of the meaning of spaces and objects can begin to be understood by analyzing the materials deposited in rooms post-occupationally. In this poster, I examine the ways...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leandro Cascon. Rui Murrieta.

In the Brazilian State of Pará, Eastern Amazon, indigenous Asurini populations living in the middle course of the Xingú River currently face the challenge of maintaining traditional lifeways in a situation of great ecological and social change, due to the construction of Belo Monte, one of the world’s largest hydroelectric dams. Amongst their practices, the cultivation of diverse varieties of manihot, sweet-potato, beans, maize and other crops is an important aspect of Asurini culture, and one...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Allison Cuneo. Michael Danti.

This talk presents the results from the third seasons of archaeological investigations conducted by the Rowanduz Archaeological Program (RAP) in Erbil Province in northeastern Iraqi Kurdistan. During the Late Bronze and early Iron Age, the project area, the modern Soran District, served as an important buffer zone between the Assyrian and Urartian Empires, and scholarly consensus locates the Hurro-Urartian buffer state of Ardini/Musasir in this rugged mountainous region, best known for its...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erik Velásquez García. Sandra Balanzario Granados.

This paper discusses data on the presence of the Kanu'l dynasty in southern Quintana Roo, Mexico, particularly at the major site of Dzibanché. The hieroglyphic inscriptions give us explicit testimony on three important Kanu'l characters during the Early Classic: Yuhkno'm Ch'e'n I, Sky Witness, and Yahx ? Yopaat. In addition, we will talk about the presence of another Kanu'l character from Late Classic, associated with the Pom Plaza from Dzibanche, together with an explanation of the associated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Roberta Boczkiewicz.

Analysis of intrasite spatial variation can improve our understanding of the dynamics of daily living of past populations. Fish remains are a special type of trash with distinctive aspects of capture, transport, preparation, and discard when compared to other fauna. This paper focuses on the analysis of fish remains from the Chimu site of Cerro La Virgen (A.D. 1000-1470) on the north coast of Peru. Cerro La Virgen is a rural town of mixed economy, including both fishing and agriculture, linked...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marilyn Masson. Carlos Peraza Lope. Timothy Hare. Bradley Russell.

This paper examines wealth and occupational diversification of rural houselots of the Terminal Classic and Postclassic northern Plains of Yucatan. Eight dwelling groups are compared that were situated in different types of rural/peripheral contexts. Ubiquitous Terminal Classic dwellings in the study area were located at the margins of a modest town (the Rank IV center of Tichac/Telchaquillo) far from cities of any size or political significance. In contrast, Postclassic houses were within one or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mauricio Cuevas.

Esta ponencia se centra en la reconstrucción de las vías de comunicación en la zona costera de la Sierra de Santa Marta al Sur del Estado de Veracruz. Presenta una nueva manera para poder reconstruir el paisaje comunicacional del área, mediante la aplicación de un esquema de comunicación combinando los estudios de arquitectura para el periodo Clásico tardío del área con el uso de programas SIG. Es presentado como un trabajo perfectible en el sentido que pudiera ser aplicado para reconstruir...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth (Liz) Moran.

This paper is about food, its depiction in Aztec art, and its ritual use in Aztec culture. Integral to a society on many levels, food is often a cultural reflection, mirroring what is significant to a particular group. The representation of food and its consumption is prevalent in the surviving artworks created in various media by the Aztecs of Central Mexico in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The symbolic use of food and consumption is also evident in Aztec ritual, another subject...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amber Anderson.

In the northern Andes of Ecuador just north of Quito lies the Pambamarca Fortress Complex. This region was one of the last to fall to the Inca in the late 1490's/1500's as they expanded their empire, and they met great resistance from the indigenous societies of Northern Ecuador. Fighting occurred for over a decade and power strategies changed to conquer this region. These struggles are apparent, best seen through the high number of Inca fortifications and enclosures throughout the landscape....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sandra Olsen.

Saudi Arabia has a rich cultural heritage that is amply represented in the extensive rock art from north to south along the western half of the Arabian Peninsula. Two petroglyph localities, Jubbah and Shuwaymis, were just awarded UNESCO World Heritage status. Representing a wide temporal range and diverse styles, it is clear that the art is concentrated adjacent to ancient lakes, along wadis, and around other sources of ephemeral pools of rainwater. This study examines the distribution of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara Fash. Jorge Ramos. Marc Wolff. William Fash.

The temples and stone monuments of Copan are replete with symbols of water and sustenance, both driving forces in the development of complex society throughout the Maya region and greater Mesoamerica. Like other urban environments, Copan harnessed the power and religious nature of water, mountains, maize, ancestors, and the divine ruler, juxtaposed to their dualistic counterparts of fire and drought, to construct their urban landscape, cosmovision and social structures. Research on ancient water...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cristina Verdugo. Lars Fehren-Schmitz. James Brady.

Skeletal data from Midnight Terror Cave (MTC) have recently been used to suggest that individuals with physical deformities would have formed a class of “social outcasts” who were preferentially selected as sacrificial victims. Close scrutiny reveals a number of flaws in the data used. The extraction and sequencing of DNA recovered from a number of the bones in question is used to clarify the situation. Considering the size of the MTC assemblage, well over 100 individuals, the authors are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edward Swenson.

Power in Moche society was fundamentally biopolitical, expressed through the violent deconstruction and reconstruction of bodies, including animate places. An examination of Moche architecture reveals that North Coast populations envisioned built environments as living organisms that were biologically dependent on human communities. The erection and renovation of Moche ceremonial architecture played an instrumental role in the generation of life and the harnessing of vital forces. Therefore,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nathalie SERRAND. Dominique BONNISSENT.

Substantial archaeomalacological assemblages have been studied from 7 pre-Columbian sites on the French part of the island of Saint-Martin (Lesser Antilles). Most of these sites were excavated through salvage archaeology procedures on large surfaces, allowing relative comprehension of their structural and functional organization, as well as the recovery of solid molluscs samples. These 7 ensembles line the complete known chronological sequence of the island's Amerindian occupation, from the 4th...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kenneth Tankersley. Jessica Thress.

In order to determine if the water management systems of ancestral Puebloans caused salt pollution during periods of climatic change and increased aridity, sediment samples were collected from ancient irrigation features and reservoirs in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. Today, these features are filled with sediments. Periods of climate change were determined with AMS radiocarbon and OSL dating. Soil salinity was measured using a conductivity cell and plotted against age in order to illustrate changes...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Murtha. Ann Cyphers. Gerardo Jiménez.

For the past decade, we have applied a series of nested geospatial techniques to better understand the development and evolution of the Olmec city of San Lorenzo and the surrounding regional landscape. Built on a foundation of more than two decades of traditional archaeological excavation, settlement survey and artifact analysis, the geospatial project expands the coverage and confirms much of what is known about San Lorenzo’s evolution and settlement ecology. The project also provides...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Frank Feeley. Lilja Pálsdóttir.

Since it's discovery in 2008, archaeologists have been performing rescue excavations at the site of Gufuskálar in Western Iceland. During the Medieval Era this site was home to one of the largest commercial fishing operations in Iceland at that time. Little is known about these early commercial ventures and most of these early fishing stations have been destroyed by later episodes of town-building. Gufuskálar is one of the best preserved examples of a medieval fishing station but, as with many...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brianna Rae.

The Sandy Hill Site (72-97) was dug on the Mashantucket Pequot Reservation over the course of several years as part of large-scale, multi-phase cultural resource management (CRM) excavations. The site, which dates to the Early Archaic, produced a dense assemblage of quartz lithic artifacts, as well as thousands of charred botanicals and calcined bone fragments. Very few bifacial tools were recovered, which has led to the argument that this site may represent a southern manifestation of the Gulf...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katharine Ellenberger. Lorna-Jane Richardson.

The only way to know if archaeological outreach and community engagement is working is to ask. We need to ask the right questions, to the right people, and incorporate that feedback into our work. Yet evaluation is a fraught pursuit. When directing our projects directly at, and working with, the public, our projects are ever more embedded in the politics of cultural heritage and reverberate throughout the communities where we work. Archaeologists and heritage workers have been struggling with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Guillermo De Anda Alaniz.

Saving our past with the technology of the future. The Yucatan Peninsula has become one of the most important areas of the world for underwater archaeology research. New discoveries go from extinct mega fauna and ancient human remains from the ice age, to bones of the ancient Maya and artifacts, all in a great state of preservation. Our team has developed a new non-intrusive survey methodology, which uses photography to document artifacts and bones. Photographs are then processed by custom made...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Lesure. Greg Schachner. Kate Bishop. Brittany Jackson. R. J. Sinensky.

This paper examines the large-scale texture and timing of demographic transitions associated with the development of settled agricultural life in the Americas. Based on previous work concerning the Neolithic Demographic Transition (NDT) worldwide, we draw on two sources of published data (skeletal remains and surface survey) to trace Formative-era population growth rates across a huge region, including the US Southwest, Mesoamerica, Central America, and the Andes. The goal is to assess the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brigitte Faugere.

As in other regions of the world, the rock art of northern Michoacan (Mexico) has to be seen within a given landscape. But the study of the El Paraiso petroglyphs (Zacapu) shows that there is in reality a complex set of intricate scales of landscapes: since a macro scale that involves the whole surrounding environment to a micro scale where the engraved blocks themselves form a sacred geography. The 3D survey realized recently highlights the subtle dialogue between the location of the blocks,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicole Rose.

A key theme in both archaeological and historical research of the Eurasian steppe has been the practice of pastoral nomadism. Researchers have particularly focused on issues of mobility within this economic strategy. Perhaps due to academic preoccupation with origins and the attractiveness of both grand-narratives and historical analogy, large scale migration has received a lot of academic and popular attention. However, pastoral nomadism as an economic strategy often only employs small-scale...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ann Stahl. Amanda Logan.

In this paper, we examine food practices in Banda, Ghana, during the tumultuous 15th to 17th centuries AD, as global scale political economic shifts collided with local economies. In Banda, significant involvement in northward-looking Niger trade began to erode as attention shifted towards emerging Atlantic networks. At the same time, paleoenvironmental records indicate a severe, multi-century drought. How did people negotiate these pressures in their everyday food practices? To address this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charles White.

Schools are a natural and potentially fruitful venue for public archaeology efforts; natural, because cultural transmission is a fundamental purpose of schooling, and potentially fruitful, given the nearly 50 million students currently enrolled in K-12 schools (National Center for Education Statistics, 2015). Schools are also a target audience of enormous importance to public archaeology, largely because the goals of heritage preservation depend on the formation of durable habits of mind and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Smyth. Christopher Carr.

Scioto Hopewell conceptions of soul-like essences in humans are evident in the systematic placements of grave goods of particular kinds at particular bodily locations of inhumations, and with insights from comparative information on historic Woodland and Plains Native Americans. Analysis of 284 burials from 11 Scioto Hopewell cemeteries indicates a recognition of one "free" journeying soul and multiple "body" souls; their bodily residences, locations of exit upon death, and likely directions...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tom Dawson.

In Scotland, there is a long tradition of archaeologists working at sites threatened by coastal erosion. Government Agency, Historic Scotland, has sponsored a series of coastal surveys in order to locate sites; and the SCAPE Trust has worked with national and local heritage bodies to prioritize action and produce an interactive ‘Sites at Risk’ map from the data. The map includes sites of all periods and site types, many of which contain a wealth of palaeoenvironmental data. The coast is a highly...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Sterner-Miller. Robert Jeske.

A sample of lithic artifacts from the Crescent Bay Hunt Club site, a 12th-14th century Oneota village at Lake Koshkonong in southeastern Wisconsin, were subjected to a multiple-method analysis to determine individual tool use. In this example, an assemblage based analysis of raw material type and quality, heat alteration and energy input into manufacturing combined with debitage analysis provides an overall understanding of the lithic economy. Triangular bifaces and unifacial tools from Crescent...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yuji Seki. Diana Alemán. Percy Santiago. Nagisa Nakagawa. Megumi Arata.

Pacopampa is one of the largest ceremonial centers in the Formative Period located at the north highlands of Peru. Almost all the ritual space was destroyed after the Formative Period, however, the square sunken court was reused by the people belonging to the Early Cajamarca Period. Some platforms and rooms were constructed at the center of the court and a series of ritual activities associated with a lot of miniature pottery could be observed. After that unusual activities the court was orderly...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Francisco Antonio Pugliese.

Mounds, ditches, roads and other kinds of earthworks are found in ever larger quantities in southwestern amazon archaeology. An increase in the quantity and quality of research carried out in this area and the more detailed data that was recently made available have changed our understanding of the kind and degree of human interaction with the environment. Today, archaeological landscape building in this region can be explored in a more regionally detailed framework, since the knowledge produced...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Laluk. Larry Ludwig. Dan McGrew. Chris Adams.

In the winter of 1861 an event took place between the U.S. military and the Chokonen band of Chiricahua Apache under the leadership of Cochise that intensified Apache-U.S. military hostilities for another 10 years. This paper presents the initial pedestrian and metal detector survey results from the Bascom Affair project. Archaeologists utilizing metal detector surveys at military sites have met with great success (e.g., Adams 2000a, 2000b, 2001; Laumbach et al. 2001; Ludwig and Stute 1993;...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Deniz Kaya. Deniz Enverova. Mark Schurr. Meredith Chesson.

The southern Leventine Early Bronze Age (EB) I-III is characterized by the development of fortification systems, intensification of agricultural and pastoral production, innovative water management, irrigation technology, population aggregation, and increasing regionalized expression of EB material culture. Due to these characteristics, various researchers have interpreted this society as the region's earliest urban culture, a chiefdom, a city state, or a secondary state. Recent scholars have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kirsten Bos. Alexander Herbig. Daniel H. Huson. Noreen Tuross. Johannes Krause.

While methodological advancements in ancient DNA research have permitted the reconstruction of ancient bacterial genomes, pathogen detection has thus far been limited to capture-based approaches that carry with them a strong ascertainment bias. Such biases are reduced when historical or archaeological contexts implicate a particular disease, but examples of this are rare in the archaeological record. Ancient DNA could serve as an important tool for elucidating the biological consequences of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michele Loger.

This paper will explore using automated Object Based Image Analysis (OBIA) to search for archaeological shell mound sites in thick mangrove forest. This is accomplished by combining available data from multiple remote sensing sources, integrating them using several software programs, and training the computer to search for a particular set of parameters - including height (LIDAR) and spectral qualities (Color Near-infrared). The newest software programs will be reviewed, as well as the source...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Milbrath.

Tlaloc, the rain god of Central Mexico, has different seasonal avatars in painted imagery. Colonial codices document these variants in veintena festivals recorded to help Spanish friars detect survivals of indigenous religion. Rainy season imagery shows Tlaloc associated with maize plants and agricultural fertility. In contrast, imagery of the dry season emphasizes Tlaloc’s mountain aspect, because the rain god withdrew into the mountains to hold back the rainfall. The priests performed mountain...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carlos Rincon Mautner.

Numerous caves in the Southern Mexican Highlands are found in remote locations far from settlements and presumably along boundaries between what were once Classic and/or Late Post-Classic period polities. These caves were recognized as unique features of the ritual landscape and differed in terms of location, difficulty of access, and entity venerated. While some caves seem to have had a more local, even domestic use, others were of inter-regional renown. Influenced by socioeconomic and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tamas Polanyi.

Elites and the deconstruction of elite-centered perspectives of past societies have long been at the focus of archaeological approaches. In European Bronze Age research there is a revitalized interest in reconnecting diverse regions and understanding them as parts of an abstract pan-European ideological system - the warrior ethos. The primary theoretical vehicle employed in this endeavor, institutional analysis of synchronic societies, draws our attention to social and political structures...