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

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chase Brad. Brad Chase. David Meiggs. P. Ajithprasad.

The region of Gujarat was the southernmost extension of the Indus Civilization (2600-1900 B.C.), South Asia’s first experiment with urban society. In this region, distinctively Indus material culture was made and used at a series of small, monumentally walled manufacturing and trading centers situated along coastal trade and travel corridors that have often been interpreted as colonies established to facilitate the exploitation of the region’s rich natural resources. With the decline of Indus...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Szymanski.

Archaeological evidence from numerous sites throughout Western Kenya show that the Iron Age was a time of considerable environmental and cultural change in this region. A short sediment core derived from lower Kingwal Swamp was collected and analyzed for its microbotanical, fungal, and charcoal content with the goal of clarifying the duration, context, and extent of these changes as visible through landscape modification. These sediments capture approximately the last 1800 years of ecological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Backhouse.

For more than forty years the Lubbock Lake Landmark Regional Research Program has provided an immersive participatory environment for students to actively engage with and understand the past. The interdisciplinary nature of the investigations and rich archaeological setting of the Landmark itself have attracted participants to the program from across the globe. From inception the program has followed an apprenticeship rather than traditional field school model. For many of the hundreds of alumni...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chelsea Fisher.

A population boom during the Late Formative period (ca. 250 BCE-250 CE) corresponded with the expansion of permanent, aggregated settlements across Mesoamerica. In central Yucatán, Yaxuná was a centralizing focus during the Formative, yet it was not the only place that attracted settlers – so did the nearby, smaller site of Tzacauil. In this dynamic time, what was the relationship between a large center like Yaxuná and its humbler neighbors like Tzacauil? Was Tzacauil an autonomous hamlet, or is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Gallant.

A striking feature of the Greek island of Andros's human landscape is the extremely large number of watermills that operated on the island in the recent past. By one estimate, there were on the island, whose territory is only 380 sq km, more than 270 watermills in operation during the last century. Today there are none and not a single ravine on the island has sufficient water flow to power even a single mill. To reconstruct the social, economic, and environmental history of mills on the island,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Debra Green.

This paper presents the results of a geoarchaeological study of the depositional history at the Ceremonial Center of Tibes in Puerto Rico. Geoarchaeological study of the sediment and soil relationship at Tibes reveals evidence of Holocene paleoflooding that occurred between AD 800 and AD 900. This flood event caused significant changes to the cultural landscape at Tibes. These site formation processes include river migration farther west and south of the paleochannel, deposition of reworked...

DOCUMENT Citation Only E. Christian Wells. Georgia L. Fox. Peter E. Siegel. Nicholas P. Dunning. Reginald Murphy.

This paper examines physical, chemical, and biological properties of soils and sediments from landforms in eastern Antigua, West Indies, to better understand the long-term consequences of plantation agriculture. Plantation farming played a central role in the history of Caribbean societies, economies, and environments since the 17th century. In Antigua, the entire island was variably dedicated to agricultural pursuits, including sugarcane and cotton, from the mid-1600s until independence from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Murray. Bettina Arnold.

In 2002, we completed the excavation of two early Iron Age burial monuments in southwestern Germany as part of the “Landscape of Ancestors” project. After more than a decade of restoration and laboratory analysis, the project is now being prepared for publication. Our research is focused on a complex mortuary landscape from 720 to 400 B.C. and our perspectives on that landscape have been substantially influenced by ideas of landscape, time, and society that we absorbed as graduate students from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Li Zhang.

In the last decade, much has been learned about the network of interactions in Bronze Age Eurasia, and the importance of the steppe pastoralists in the creation of this network. However, the mechanisms that enabled societies in ancient China (both those bordering on and distant from the steppe) to participate in the Bronze Age Eurasian arena are still poorly understood. Based on the latest archaeological discoveries in China, this article focuses on the participation of different regions of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lorena Mihok.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the English Crown competed with other European imperial powers for control over the land, labor, and materials of the Caribbean. The English Crown came to view the Caribbean as the geographical hub within which it would be able to obtain key resources and to challenge the rapidly growing power of the Spanish Empire. One of the most contentious ports in the western Caribbean was New Port Royal harbor on Roatán Island, Honduras, because of its...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Himes. Maryse Beirnat. Fikremariam Sissay. David Patterson. David Braun.

The Upper Burgi, KBS and Okote Members of the Koobi Fora Fm. in northern Kenya span the period between 2 and 1.4 million years ago and document some of the most important events in hominin evolution. Although previous archaeological and paleoecological investigations suggest hominins occupied specific niches within this ecosystem, we understand little about relationships between landscape variability and hominin adaptation. In this study, we combine stable carbon isotope data from fossil soils...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yanxi Wang.

The landscape variability was one of the most important factors influencing the regional sociopolitical organizations in the peripheral regions of Shang. In this study, we compared the regional settlement pattern of two regions--one at the broad alluvial plain of the Middle Huai River, which presents a loosely-structured, but still hierarchical regional settlement pattern; and the other at the hilly Guan River valley, which shows a dramatic retreat of human occupation. By investigating these two...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Parker VanValkenburgh.

Historians and historical anthropologists have long suggested that racial and ethnic categories in the Spanish colonial Americas were discursively produced. But it is only recently that historical archaeologists have begun to chart the roles that household practices, economic transactions, and settlement configurations played in their emergence and reproduction. Archaeological excavations and documentary research on sites in Peru’s Zaña valley provide new perspectives on how indianess and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alice Tratebas.

Early Hunting petroglyphs in a Black Hills canyon depict hunting situations and ceremonies. A loop-line motif, that is unique to this rock art tradition, signifies drive lines and trap structures. Loop-lines occur only at canyon locations that are appropriate settings for trap structures. The canyon starts on the margin of a basin that provides good grazing. Entry to the canyon is funnel-shaped like the V-shaped wings of hunting traps. Recent discovery of a cairn drive line that utilizes another...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Veronica Williams.

Within its territory, the Inka adapted their rule of such diverse spheres as political economy, ideology, and identity, among others, which explains in part the diversity and disparity seen in the empire. In Collasuyu, Inka buildings were common but it is evident that their features, dimensions, monumentality and spatial density show contrasting regional differences. New evidence regarding Inka occupation in Northwest Argentina shows different situations of Inka conquest and domination expressed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Cohen.

While burials have long been an important source of archaeological information, they have traditionally been studied mainly from a site-based perspective. This traditional view focuses on the form of the burial, the grave goods contained, and osteological evidence on the age, sex and health of the interred individual. By contrast, the landscape approach studies burials as part of a broader natural and cultural landscape that extends beyond site boundaries. This project focuses on kurgan burials...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jan Simek. Alan Cressler.

Prehistoric rock art has been relatively unknown in the American Southeast until the past few decades. In the 1970's Wellman's catalog of North American rock art contained a handful of sites east of the Mississippi River; today there are hundreds of sites recorded for Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, and areas east of the Appalachian Mountains. The great majority of these sites probably date to the Late Prehistoric period, and there are clear regional variations in how rock art was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jose Luis Punzo.

In 2012 INAH-Michoacan, started an archeological project in the south central portion of the state based on ample surveys in the region looking for the presence of sites associated to the Tarascan period, especially in relation to mining, transport, manufacture and consumption of metallic items. In that sense, with this new survey we been able to identify the existence of important archeological sites with presence of rectangular stone structures with circular extensions (yácatas) similar to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Allan Meyers.

Although Bahamian plantation archaeology has witnessed considerable growth in the last three decades, no sites of the Loyalist period (c. 1783-1838) on Cat Island have hitherto been systematically studied. An ongoing interdisciplinary project aims to address this omission, and the resulting scholarship will contribute to the island’s first heritage management plan. Since its launch, the Cat Island Heritage Project has documented six Loyalist-era sites at the island's southern end. Among these is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Randolph Widmer.

Fine screened (1 mm mesh) samples obtained from the heavy fractions of flotation samples at the recent excavations in the Tlajinga barrio of Teotihuacan have revealed evidence of extensive lapidary crafting of slate and greenstone. Sorting of the sediments from these samples results in the recovery of minute fragments of lapidary debitage as well as more typical domestic refuse. Evidence will be presented on the types of artifacts being produced, the materials being crafted, and the intensity of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joseph DeAngelis.

It has been suggested that the Early Paleoindian archaeofaunal record is biased against small mammals because larger mammals are easier to detect in the archaeological record. It has also been suggested that remains of small mammals would have been more abundant if careful excavation procedures would have been employed. For this poster, I present a quantitative analysis of the Early Paleoindian archaeofaunal record in the continental United States by testing the hypothesis that the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Szpak.

Stable isotope records from dovekie (Alle alle), ringed seal (Pusa hispida) and bowhead whale (Balaena mysticetus) bones recovered from archaeological sites in eastern North American High Arctic (northwestern Greenland and eastern Canadian Arctic) reveal little auks declined an entire trophic level in the 20th century, following stability between the 12th and early 20th centuries. Conversely, bowhead whale trophic level remained stable and ringed seal trophic level slightly increased across the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rainer Komp.

Surveyed and first published in 1848 by Squier and Davis, the mounds being excavated in early 20th century, Seip Earthworks today forms part of the Hopewell Culture National Historical Park near Chillicothe, Ohio. While the restored burial mounds are among the largest from the so-called Hopewell culture, the earthworks comprise further two miles of embankment walls forming big circles and a precise square with astronomical alignments, a typical geometric figure at a number of places, which...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brent Woodfill.

Salinas de los Nueve Cerros is a major Precolumbian Maya city that grew around the only non-coastal salt source in the Maya lowlands. Residents of the city were able to transform the neighborhoods adjacent to and atop the salt dome into a large-scale production operation with the capacity to produce over 10,000 metric tons of salt a year, which were then distributed throughout the western lowlands via the Chixoy, Pasión, and Usumacinta river networks. By the Late Classic period, the city had...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mitsuru Kurosaki.

En el sitio arqueológico La Joya, en el Centro- Sur de Veracruz se han encontrado ofrendas. En la Plataforma Este se encontraron los depósitos de terminación del período clásico medio-tardío 500-1,000 d.C. Basado en los datos de excavación, en este trabajo proponemos que hay dos tipos de ofrendas de terminación: 1) Ofrendas masivas de los materiales, en especial, vasijas y figurillas y 2) Ofrendas con presencia cerámica en pares. En primero, se asocia con los entierros sacrificados y...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thania Pérez Chávez.

De acuerdo con las investigaciones arqueozoológicas, se tiene registro de tres especies de cánidos que convivieron con el hombre prehispánico en Mesoamérica: el lobo (Canis lupus baileyi), el coyote (Canis latrans) y el perro (Canis lupus familiaris); la importancia de su convivencia se ve reflejada en diversas representaciones arqueológicas de cánidos. En la región de la costa del Golfo, particularmente en el actual estado de Veracruz, se ha registrado la presencia de representaciones de...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Martijn Van Den Bel.

Recent excavations at two archaeological sites in French Guiana (Eva 2 and Saint-Louis) presented evidence of a Late Archaic an Early Ceramic Age occupation which is comparable to other coastal sites in South America, such as the Alaka Phase in Guyana and the Mina Tradition in Pará, Brazil. These early ceramic sites represent the suite of a larger Archaic Age Littoral Tradition in which ceramics represented an innovative aspect to the Archaic way of life. Starch grain analysis showed that maize,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Creese.

The Terminal Archaic (ca. 4000-3000 cal. BP) marked an important turning point in the upper Midwest. New relationships among persons, landscapes, and material culture emerged that, in many ways, set a pattern for the next two millennia. This paper makes a preliminary effort to interpret these changes in terms of shifting ontologies of the body. Of particular interest is the emergence of clear spatial divisions between the living and the dead on the landscape. Other patterns include the elaborate...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Sheldon Skaggs. Nicaela Cartagena. Michael Lawrence. Terry Powis.

The ancient Maya site of Pacbitun is located between two major ecozones, the Belize River Valley and the Mountain Pine Ridge. Excavations from 2012 to 2015 at the Tzib group in the periphery of Pacbitun first revealed evidence of large scale mano and metate production. Excavations into a large mound, dubbed "Mano Mound" because the surface was covered with mano perform fragments, revealed that it was not only a debris pile, but also the workshop platform as well. Large granite flakes, hammer...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angelina Locker. Fred Valdez, Jr..

The Late Classic (AD 600-800) to Terminal Classic (AD 800-900) of NW Belize reveals a change in material culture, settlements, and social-political manifestations. Detailed here are some of the changes observed for the transition from the Late Classic to the Terminal Classic. Changes in material culture are described as are apparent choices in settlement locales between the two temporal phases. The interplay between material culture, settlements, and social-political organization are posited...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ted Goebel. Joshua Lynch.

New studies of ancient as well as modern human genomes suggest that the immediate ancestors of Native Americans began to disperse from greater northeast Asia to Beringia after the last glacial maximum, roughly 20,000 cal BP. These new data require us to reconsider the lengthy incubation period predicted by the Beringian standstill model as well as the place of the Yana RHS site in our understanding of the peopling of Alaska. In this paper, we review the climatic, paleoenvironmental, genomic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Blong.

The earliest evidence for human occupation of eastern Beringia comes from the Tanana and Nenana river basin lowlands 14,000-13,000 calendar years ago, linked to the spread of shrub-tundra vegetation and associated resources as climate ameliorated during the Bølling-Allerød Interstadial. The earliest evidence for human activity in the adjacent uplands of the central Alaska Range is during the Younger Dryas interval, more than a thousand years after the initial colonization of the region....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Teresa Wriston. Gary Haynes.

Archaeological sites in Hwange National Park, northwestern Zimbabwe, record how and when food production expanded into this part of southern Africa. An examined early farming village contains diagnostic comb-stamped and channeled thickware pottery and copper bangles dated to 1800 and 1200 cal BP. This earliest farming community supplemented crops with hunted local wild game, but left no evidence of direct contact with indigenous hunter‐gatherers who had repeatedly occupied rock shelters 30 km...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Rieth. J. Stephen Athens.

Carson and colleagues have argued that the settlement of the Mariana Islands ~3500 cal BP marks the first major human expansion in the Western Pacific during the late Holocene. If this settlement date is correct, it would be the initial population movement beyond the Near Oceania and Island Southeast Asia region, an area occupied by modern humans for 40,000+ years. The previous consensus gave precedence to the rapid Lapita expansion throughout Near Oceania at generally the same time, followed a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Davette Gadison. Brittany Hundman. Dan Jones. Nicola Sharratt.

In this paper we present recent fieldwork focused on Estuquiña mortuary contexts at the site of Tumilaca La Chimba in the Moquegua Valley of Peru). Estuquiña is the local expression of the Late Intermediate Period, and conventionally dated to approximately AD 1250-1470. In summer 2015, a total of eight intact circular below ground tombs were excavated at the site. This represents the largest sample of intact Estuquiña burials excavated since fieldwork was conducted by Programa Contisuyo members...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Moore. Mark Brooks. I. Randolph Daniel Jr..

As a result of the analysis of high-resolution global and regional paleoclimate records, we now know that our “stable” Holocene climate has been punctuated with periods of rapid and synchronous change, including rapid changes in temperature, available moisture, and vegetation. Far from being a period of climatic stability, recent studies suggest abrupt climate change during the Holocene including departures in temperature and precipitation with millennial-scale cyclicity that operates...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yonatan Sahle. Yonas Beyene.

Behavioral contexts across the critical period associated with the evolution and successful dispersal(s) of anatomically modern humans (AMH) within and beyond Africa are inadequately understood. Although the genetic and fossil evidence in hand largely advocates eastern Africa as the most likely source and dispersal route of AMH, the sparseness of archaeological evidence relevant to this period limits behavioral inferences from the region. As a result, evidence for behaviors considered “modern”...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Ranhorn. David Braun. Christian Tryon. Alison Brooks.

Genetic and fossil evidence suggest East Africa played a significant role in the origin and dispersal of modern humans. While studies of East African Middle Stone Age (MSA) assemblages exhibit apparent regional patterning, this is often based on industrial designations derived from presence/absence or frequency of specific forms. Regional comparisons of these assemblages are inhibited by differences in comparability, especially of raw material, reduction intensity, and inter-analyst variation....

DOCUMENT Citation Only D. Shane Miller. Jesse Tune. Ryan Parrish.

The Lower Mid-South has a rich history of archaeological research and provides a valuable dataset for exploring the relationships between climate and culture. Here, we provide an overview of the available paleo-environmental and archaeological data in this area, and argue that there were significant changes in diet, landscape use, and technological organization. The possibility that localized territories are established in the Southeast prior to the onset of the Holocene is critically evaluated....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joshua Reuther. Ben Potter. Charles Holmes. Julie Esdale. Jennifer Kielhofer.

It has been known for sometime that interior Alaskan terrestrial mammalian species diversity and biogeography changed during the Late Glacial and Holocene (16,000 years ago to present). Here we present a synthetic view of how these changes may have been manifested. Herbivores such as bison, camel, caribou, elk, mammoth, moose, horse, and saiga antelope once had widespread biogeographic distribution across Alaska. Several interrelated drivers behind the widespread mammalian shifts in diversity...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kaoru Akoshima.

The paper investigates lithic use-wear data from the viewpoint of human mobility patterns and functional inter-site variability. Microwear analysis based on controlled experiments was initiated in 1970s in Japan, and the method combined both high power and low power (that is, high magnification and low magnification) approach. Since then accumulated case studies focused on the Upper Paleolithic period of Northeastern Honshu Island of Japan (Tohoku District). Chronological sequences and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lindsey Büster. Ian Armit. Laura Castells Navarro. Jo Buckberry. Rick Schulting.

The Sculptor’s Cave in NE Scotland is known for its Late Bronze Age and Roman Iron Age human remains, which were unearthed during excavations in 1928-30 and 1979: the former suggest the curation and display of (possibly fleshed and adorned) juvenile heads, while the latter indicate the practice of decapitation of (predominantly adult) individuals inside the cave. These remains are being analysed as part of a project at the University of Bradford to reanalyse and publish the excavation archive....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam Sellen.

The “Bilbao effect,” or “Guggenheim effect” as it is also known, posits that spectacular architecture designed by star architects can help renew a city’s cultural sector and turn around a languishing economy. Many world museums in post-industrial cities have tried, with varying degrees of success, to reproduce the model implemented in Bilbao. In this talk we will explore how a focus on “wow-factor” architecture has transformed museums in Latin America, and in particular how this approach has...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Manuel Gonzalez-Morales.

As a great specialist in Palaeolithic Archaeology of the Old World, and also a superb connoisseur of the painted and engraved caves of France and Spain, Professor Straus had to deal with the problem of fitting the evidence of Palaeolithic “art” in the general adaptive framework of the processual Archaeology he was practicing along his professional career. In this presentation I want to analyze the evolution of his thinking about this topic, as a reflection on the general theoretical problems...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Pike. Jeremy J. Wilson. G. William Monaghan. Edward W. Herrmann.

Recent investigations at Lawrenz Gun Club (11Cs4), a palisaded Mississippian village and earthwork complex in the central Illinois River valley, highlight the importance of integrating landscape-scaled geophysical survey with site formation processes to develop chronologies derived from diverse archaeological and geoarchaeological investigations. A comprehensive geophysical survey of the fortified village complex and surrounding landscape revealed extensive habitation beyond the site palisade....

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Kilby.

Le Volgu consists of at least 15 exquisitely manufactured bifacial stone tools (17 were originally reported in 1874) found in Saône-et-Loire near the confluence of the Arroux and Loire Rivers, about 60 km (37 miles) west of Le Solutre, the type site for the Solutrean culture. The assemblage is interpreted as an artifact cache or ritual deposit and the artifacts themselves are considered exemplary of Solutrean bifacial technology. This paper reports the results of applying methods developed for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Virginie Renson. Hector Neff. David Cheetham. James Guthrie. Michael D. Glascock.

Recent study showed that lead isotope analysis constitutes an efficient tool to discriminate between ceramics from different origins and can be used to trace pottery provenance in the Eastern Mediterranean (Renson et al. 2011 [Archaeometry 53] 37-57, Renson et al. [Archaeometry] in press). We are now applying this approach to Olmec-style pottery from Mexico. In this study, we analyzed lead and strontium isotopes of fragments from various Olmec-style ceramic wares excavated at San Lorenzo,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Puheng Nan. Wugan Luo. Virginie Renson. Michael D. Glascock. Wei Qian.

The Jin state was one of the most important countries in the Spring and Warring Sates period (771BC~221BC). Before the middle Spring period (~576BC), it shared the bronze cultural tradition with the central dynasty (Zhou Royal family). After that, the bronze culture of Jin state was established and is characterized by different types of vessels, decorations and sometimes, manufacturing techniques. Wayaopo site is one of the typical noble family cemeteries of Jin state. In this work, 45 bronze...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brunella Santarelli. Sheila Goff. David Killick. Kari Schleher. David Gonzales.

The earliest glazes in the Southwest were produced during the Pueblo I period (ca. 700-850 CE) in the Upper San Juan region of Colorado. Lead isotope ratios of these glaze paints were collected using multi-collector ICP-MS in an attempt to identify the source of the lead used by the potters in the production of the glaze paints. This paper will present the results of this study, and compare it to published ratios of lead ores, as well as archaeological and geological galena samples from sites in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Margaret Jodry.

Belongings placed with a 40-year-old man and an eleven year-old girl suggest that the adult may have been a healer. A bundle placed beneath his head includes turtle shell bowls, antler pestles, red ochre, a deer bone stylus, sandstone abraders, and an Edward’s chert biface. Perforated shell beads, coyote teeth including a scarifier, non-perforated badger claws and Swainson’s hawk talons, and other items accompanied this Elder. His participation in body painting, scarification, and incision is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jayne-Leigh Thomas. April Sievert. Teresa Nichols. Anne Pyburn.

In 2014 and 2015, researchers from Indiana University received National Science Foundation funding through their Cultivating Cultures of Ethical STEM initiative to study how repatriation is taught and learned, and to work toward interventions to improve the resources available. The “Learning NAGPRA” project prioritizes a more thorough understanding of the challenges and bottlenecks in preparing professionals for work related to NAGPRA and repatriation. It also seeks better ways to assist...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Teresa Nichols. April Sievert. Jayne-Leigh Thomas. Anne Pyburn.

Although the Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was passed as federal legislation in 1990, it seems that many students do not receive comprehensive coverage of the law and its connections to the broader disciplinary histories of anthropology and museum studies and to professional research ethics. Indiana University was awarded NSF grants in 2014 and 2015 to conduct a nationwide study on NAGPRA teaching and training and to collaborate with specialists in preparing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Patton.

Field trips are an integral component of undergraduate education in the natural sciences and in human geography. In archaeology, field trips are a nexus of pedagogy, heritage tourism, public archaeology and critical theory. British archaeological theorists and educators have long discussed these elements of field trips, perhaps because such trips are central to undergraduate studies in the discipline in the UK. Little has been done, however, to assess the impact of archaeological field trips on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Sloan.

This presentation describes how archaeologists are using the knowledge of community stakeholders from the Yup'ik village of Quinhagak, Alaska to analyze gender dynamics at Nunalleq (GDN-248), a pre-contact village site located on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. During the summer of 2015, Quinhagak residents were invited to participate in semi-structured interviews about gender roles and activities in Yup'ik society and about the relevance of gender to stakeholder questions about the past. Interview...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Gustas. Kisha Supernant. Andrew Martindale. Bryn Letham. Kenneth Ames.

Spatial modeling of early prehistoric maritime movements on the Pacific Northwest Coast is important in contemporary archaeology as a site prospection tool in a landscape which has radically changed over the last 16,000 years. GIS analysis can model ancient site locations now hidden by changing sea levels. We present findings from a project which developed a new method for modeling maritime movement using least cost path analysis (LCA) of both behavioral and cultural constraints to determine the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Arthur.

This paper will focus on the importance of including women’s legacies and narratives in the heritage of southern Ethiopia. In particular, women’s memories reveal the significance of life rituals associated with birth, marriage, and leadership, which served as reminders for illuminating their indigenous ontology Detsa concerning animism, fertility, and prestige. Traces of their life experiences and thoughts are tangible as visible markers on the landscape at Biare Dere, first settlements....

DOCUMENT Full-Text Carrie Heitman. Worthy Martin. Stephen Plog.

This is a pdf copy of the PPT slides used for the presentation in the SAA symposium. Over the last 12 years, the authors of this paper have been involved in a range of digital curation activities pertaining to legacy records and the integration and manipulation of those data to create new knowledge about the past. Primarily, we have worked together to create the Chaco Research Archive (CRA) and a variety of complementary projects including a mobile application and, more recently, the Salmon...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yasha Rodriguez. Paola Schiappacasse.

In 1874, upon his death, George Latimer bequeathed his collection of archaeological artifacts from Puerto Rico to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. In the early 20th century Agustin Stahl sold his collections to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. For many decades archaeologists have hoped to be able to request the return of archaeological collections of Puerto Rican pre-Colonial artifacts located in museums within the United States. These two collections are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Strecker.

While the restitution debate has developed substantially since the Second World War – some even herald the age of ‘post-restitution’ – this is not necessarily the case for the Caribbean. Although archaeological and ethnographic objects of Caribbean origin have long been expropriated, the restitution debate has not played as essential a role in post-colonial discourse in the islands as in other former colonies. This is due to a number of reasons: first, most of the cultural objects outside the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Groff. Tosha Dupras.

Stable oxygen isotope analysis of tooth enamel and bone apatite from adults afflicted with leprosy from the Kellis 2 cemetery (50-450 AD) in the Dakhleh Oasis provides insight into social perceptions of disease stigma during the Roman-Christian era in Egypt. Because there are no grave markers found in Kellis 2, this research focuses on the spatial analysis of stable isotope results to develop an interpretation of the burial location of leprosy cases. In particular, stable oxygen isotopes, which...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ronald Anthony.

As part of the analysis of the colono ware from Lesesne and Fairbanks Plantations on Daniel Island, South Carolina in the mid 1980s, a class of colono ware called Lesesne Lustered was described and offered as a variety of colono ware likely present in colonial Lowcountry South Carolina. Subsequent research since the Daniel Island study and a recent re-look at colono ware from selected Lesesne Plantation contexts support an interpretation of Lesesne Colono Ware as a rural as well as an urban...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Odess. Julie Esdale. Jeffrey Rasic.

Louis Giddings began work in northwestern Alaska long before the advent of radiometric dating, at a time when all but the most basic outlines of human history in the region were unknown. Over the course of a relatively brief but remarkably productive career in Arctic Archaeology, he established a basic culture-historical framework for the region that remains largely valid today. He did so by employing the best available sound science – borrowing techniques and principles such as beach-ridge...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Theresa McReynolds Shebalin.

Archaeologists committed to public outreach are typically motivated by the hope that helping individuals appreciate how archaeology contributes to understanding the past will in turn encourage citizen stewardship of the archaeological record. Archaeologists working with children in particular have the best chance of making an impact in this area since their audiences can in turn act upon and help spread messages of site preservation and other matters of archaeological ethics for many years to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Witt. Charles Vandrei. Kristy Primeau.

The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation manages approximately 4 million acres of state owned land and an additional 910,000 acres through conservation easements with the stated goal “to conserve, improve, and protect New York’s natural resources and environment….” New York state law interprets “environment” broadly, including cultural and historic resources within the concept. Thousands of archaeological sites, ranging from Archaic camps to Revolutionary War battlefields to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Seidemann. Christine Halling.

Unlike many other aspects of archaeology, forensic archaeology and anthropology is, in part, only as effective as the courts believe it to be. While peer review is the gold standard for assessing the integrity and viability of the scientific aspects of forensic archaeology and anthropology, passing muster in a court of law can be a different—and sometimes counterintuitive—standard. Although some recent research in this area has examined the impact of court attempts to “police” the integrity of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Urban.

Archaeologist J. Louis Giddings is known widely for his excavations of major sites in the western arctic from the 1940s until his untimely death in 1964. Giddings was also a notable innovator in archaeological science, integrating new techniques into his research almost immediately after they were developed. Very early on in his career, for example, Giddings made use of dendrochronology, establishing some of the earliest tree-ring chronologies in Alaska. This was immediately after dendro was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kirsten Vacca.

Investigating the use of memory allows for an increased understanding of how historical knowledge is used in the reproduction of social actions in the past and production of knowledge in the present. This paper analyzes the importance of memory in Hawaiian culture and academic literature. Many archaeological analyses of pre-European contact Hawaiian households are predicated on the writings of 19th century ethnohistorians (among others) that recorded Hawaiian oral traditions. The act of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christian Peterson. Robert Drennan.

Since the 1980s, archaeologists have measured economic inequality by borrowing the Gini index from economics, and applying it to the archaeological record in various ways. Burial assemblages were the earliest targets, and more recent efforts have expanded to house sizes, areas of agricultural fields, and household possessions. Each of these sources provides potentially enlightening information about the distribution of wealth within an ancient community. Each source has its advantages and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Todd Koetje.

Leukoma staminea sclerochronology data are now available from several mainland sites along the middle portion of the Salish Sea dating to the Locarno Beach Phase (~3500-2400 bp). Western Washington University field schools have conducted several seasons of test excavations, resulting in an extensive collection of shell from spatially distinct sites of this phase. Leukoma seasonality and maturity data from these sites will be used in combination with a modern sample of to address questions of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Roberto Valcarcel Rojas. Jorge Ulloa Hung.

The archaeological site Levisa 1, in northeast Cuba, possesses one of the earlier radiocarbon dates for the so called ¨archaic¨ communities in this Island and one of the earliest one from the Caribbean region. For this reason that place is a basic reference for the study of the ¨archaic¨ groups. Also due to its location and potential link with other important archaic sites, and because possesses contexts that reflect diverse types and moments of pre-Arawak’s occupations, and even ceramic use....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sharon Moses.

African magic rituals among the graves of the recently dead in the South and elsewhere may not be as rare as one might think. This paper is an exploration of a case wherein the author was called in as a forensic archaeologist and consultant to law enforcement investigating a case of cemetery desecrations with supernatural overtones. Further, during the course of this investigation, possible connections between the author's historical archaeological research excavation of a slave street on a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marit Munson.

What defines an ochre: its chemical composition, its color, or both? The Ancestral Pueblo people of the US Southwest used a range of red and yellow pigments, some of which fit strict scientific definitions of ochre and some that do not. Ancestral Pueblo people also created a variety of paints by mixing these pigments with clays and other materials. In this paper, I consider the use of mineral pigments and paints through time and space, drawing on material from Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde, ancestral...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meghan Buchanan.

Analyses and interpretations of Mississippian Period warfare have typically been couched in evolutionary theoretical frameworks that down play, dismiss, or ignore the impacts of endemic violence on the lived experiences of past peoples. Carolyn Nordstrom (1997) advocates the telling of "a different kind of war story," one that focuses on human experiences, tragedies, and creativity during periods of political and social upheaval and violence. In this presentation, I discuss a framework for...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Kathryn Allen.

In recent years, analyses of human skeletal remains have significantly contributed to our understanding of the past. A cemetery collection of 160 skeletons from the 16th and 17th centuries excavated from the city center of Timişoara, Romania have provided a rare opportunity to study a brief, tumultuous time when the Ottoman Empire extended into Central Europe. The inhumations, representative of the Ottoman population that relocated into the fortified city center after Turkish expansion, provide...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Mathews. John Gust.

The Nineteenth Century in the Yucatán Peninsula was a period of major transition. Amidst the backdrop of colonialism, slavery, indentured servitude, and an indigenous revolt during the Caste War (1847-1901), foreign and local residents of the remote region of northern Quintana Roo engaged in small-scale commodity industries such as sugarcane farming and rum making. While workers dealt with harsh and dangerous conditions, they also had access to an unusual array of cosmopolitan luxury goods...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alyssa Hyziak.

The Johnston site (36In2) is associated with the Johnston Phase of the Monongahela tradition during the Late Prehistoric period in Southwestern Pennsylvania. Located on the Conemaugh River floodplain in Blairsville, Pennsylvania this large village site was excavated both in the 1950s by the Carnegie Museum and more recently by Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and is one of the largest known Monongahela sites. This project aimed to describe the artifact densities for this site to interpret the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kimmarie Murphy. Guðný Zöega.

Iceland was settled in the 9th century by people of Norse and Celtic stock. Located on the margins of the Viking world, the Skagafjörður region was, by the 11th century, home to a large number of independent households forming core social units in a country without a king or central government. Although they maintained close ties with their old home world, ship arrivals were erratic and individual households were largely dependent on their own produce for survival. Early settlers lived in a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Simon Haberle. Richard Cosgrove. Asa Ferrier. Patrick Moss. Peter Kershaw.

The use of fire in Australian Aboriginal society has been well documented and has been pivotal to arguments about human impact on the Australian biota. Continuous and well-dated palaeoecological sequences from the humid rainforests of NE Queensland are beginning to reveal detailed records of vegetation transformation and shifting fire regimes within rainforest environments. The archaeological record is also providing new insights into plant exploitation and adaptation strategies to enable people...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tiffany Earley-Spadoni.

GIS analysis can helpfully intervene in highly-theorized debates about archaeological landscapes by allowing archaeologists to empirically evaluate assertions about (inter)visibility. In recent decades, visibility studies have clarified the sociocultural significance of structures such as tombs, settlements, signalling installations and other landscape markers. However, it is often difficult to evaluate inter-visibility and challenging to distinguish intentionally-constructed inter-visibility...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Martin Menz.

Early phases of Kolomoki’s occupation have been characterized as relatively egalitarian, with little evidence for status differentiation. However, patterned variability in lithic raw material use and intensity of production in domestic areas suggests heterogeneity in the community at multiple scales. In light of Kolomoki’s emphasis on communal ceremony, internal divisions between groups of households highlight the tension between public and private expressions of status and social solidarity....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jason Chambers.

The Lindenmeier Folsom Site (5LR13) was excavated from 1934-1940 by Frank H.H. Roberts, Jr. of the Smithsonian Institution. Over the course of six field seasons spent excavating the site, the spatial locations of approximately 6,000 items were mapped and recorded by Roberts, and later published as a series of maps in the appendices in the Concluding Report. These maps have been digitally reproduced using ArcGIS mapping software, preserving the spatial relationships between the artifacts mapped...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Harrod. Aaron Woods.

Prior to A.D. 1300, several archaeologically defined cultures were identified at the intersection of the American Great Basin and Southwest. Human skeletal remains were analyzed from site that represent the borders and the heartlands of the Fremont, the Virgin Branch Puebloan, and the Northern San Juan Puebloan cultural areas. The goal was to examine how life in the crossroads of these regions affected the experiences of individuals and groups. The following indicators were used to reconstruct...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Colleen Strawhacker. Thomas McGovern. Emily Lethbridge. Gisli Palsson. Adam Brin.

This is a copy of the PowerPoint presentation from the SAA Annual Meeting symposium. The cyberNABO Project is designed to solidify a developing multidisciplinary community (centered on the North Atlantic Biocultural Organization, NABO) through the development of cyberinfrastructure (CI) to study the long-term human ecodynamics of North Atlantic, a region that is especially vulnerable to ongoing climate and environmental change. It builds build upon prior sustained field and laboratory research,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nathan Wilson. Philip J. Arnold III.

In this paper we present new data on lithic production, consumption, and importation during the Early and Middle Classic Periods (AD 300-650) at the site of Teotepec, located in the Sierra de los Tuxtlas region of Veracruz, Mexico. Using the results of recently completed technological and visual source analyses, we identify differences in production and consumption behavior across the site and over time, and situate this behavior within the larger region. Changes in importation in the region...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicolas Naudinot.

The second half of the Late glacial is marked in North Western Europe by a major climatic instability with clear consequences on the vegetation and in resources density and distribution. At the end of this period, the GS-1 cooling is well recorded and is one of the most important of these events. During this period, hunter-gatherer groups experienced major changes in a large part of Europe extended from Spain to Scandinavia. This period is marked by the rapid spread of a phenomenon characterized...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rodrigo Loyola. Isabel Cartajena. Lautaro Nuñez. Carlos Aschero. Patricio Lopez.

Despite its extreme aridity, the Atacama Desert (18-25ºS) was not a biogeographical barrier during the period concerned with the early peopling of the area and of other regions in South America (12.6 ka). The Imilac and Punta Negra (24ºS) high altitude basins, located in the Precordillera of the Andes (3000 masl), are among the few micro-regions of the Atacama Desert which were continually occupied during the Late Pleistocene to Early Holocene transition (12.6-10.2 ka). Results from the analyses...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Clément Ménard. François Bon. Lamya Khalidi.

The Horn of Africa plays an important role in debates on emergence and dispersal of Anatomically Modern Humans (AMH) and their associated technologies (Middle Stone Age). In comparison, the period that follows (Late Stone Age) has been the subject of much less investigation. We argue that evidence regarding prehistoric groups that remained or came into the region during the latest part of the Pleistocene is critical for understanding the conditions of AMH’s unprecedented expansion and diverse...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan McCullen.

The Western Wendat were refugees that fled their homeland villages in Ontario in 1649, and resettled in the western Great Lakes. This paper examines the lithic resources from their village at the Straits of Mackinac, inhabited from 1670-1701. Lithics can be indicative of multiple aspects of the resettlement process – particularly knowledge of local resources and strength of social networks. Results show that formal tools, excluding gunflints, tend to be made from cherts from the lower peninsula...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Geoffrey Clark.

With the recognition that practically all archaeological sites are depositional composites unrelated to the activities of any contemporary group of individuals (i.e., palimpsests) and that forager adaptations are not ‘site-specific’ but rather landscape-scaled phenomena, statistical approaches designed to take these predicates into account have been developed over the past decade that depart from the traditional techno-typological systematics used for decades in much of Europe and the Levant....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Hammerstedt. Amanda Regnier. Sheila Savage.

Artifact color has both chronological and symbolic significance at Spiroan burial sites in the Arkansas River drainage of eastern Oklahoma. In this paper, we examine litter burials from the Great Mortuary and the Brown mound at Spiro. Ethnohistoric descriptions are used to suggest color symbolism in Spiroan ritual displays. These data are compared with color usage in earlier burials at Spiro and mounds elsewhere in the drainage. We wish to determine whether the Great Mortuary was the culmination...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Lints. John Ives. Kristine Fedyniak.

With an estimated temporal range spanning from 900 to 1400 AD, the Devils Lake Sourisford (DLS) pottery tradition has been viewed as a northern expression of Mississippian cultural influence within the Northernmost Great Plains. Owing to the recovery of these vessels in direct association with human remains and the paucity of available vessels for analyses, understanding this phenomenon has posed a complicated challenge for archaeologists. However, advancements in pottery analyses have provided...

DOCUMENT Citation Only George Lau.

There is no more palpable or ambivalent a presence in the Andean landscape than that of mountains--distant and harboring, fertile and terrible, rocky and liquid, inviting and impervious. Yet their understanding for Andean groups is only in its infancy, and largely informed by insights from Inka, colonial and ethnographic studies. This paper focuses on pre-Inka engagements with 'mountains' as nonhuman beings on the landscape, especially around Peru's Cordillera Blanca. I am interested in when and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katie M Whitmore. Michele R Buzon.

Tombos is located at the Third Cataract of the Nile River in modern-day Sudan, and marks an important literal and figurative boundary between Egyptian and Nubian interaction. During the New Kingdom Period (1400-1050 BC), the cemetery at Tombos in Upper Nubia exhibits the use of Egyptian mortuary practices, including monumental pyramid complexes, likely used by both immigrant Egyptians and local Nubians. Despite the influence of Egyptian culture during this colonial period, there are several...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marcia Bezerra.

This presentation deals with the use of ancient fish-traps by fishermen of Vila de Joanes, Ilha do Marajó, Amazon, concerning the status of these sites as a living thing and their role in the constitution of memorial narratives about fishing. Based on research conducted with a group of fishermen I suggest that: a) the contemporary use of the fish-traps is not an act of destruction, but a memorial engagement with the past; b) the continuous process of decay and reconstruction of the fish-traps by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabriel Popescu.

The region between the Eastern Carpathians in Romania and the Prut River in both Romania and Republic of Moldavia, knew both temperate and continental / cold climates throughout the Late Pleistocene, and still witnessed significant and rapid environmental shifts caused by global climate regimes, especially during the Last Glacial Maximum. I will examine in this poster the important interplay between technological, social, and land-use dynamics as culturally mediated responses to climate change...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Galen Miller-Atkins. Luke Premo.

Modern human behavior, including regional cultural differentiation, has traditionally been characterized as a relatively recent phenomenon despite evidence of modernity before 50,000 years ago from the Paleolithic record of Africa. Researchers interested in how demography might improve our interpretation of the archaeological record have shown that the rate of local group extinctions can affect neutral cultural diversity and the rate at which copy errors accumulate in structured populations....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chelsea Gardner.

This paper presents a new approach to studying ancient identity in the Mani peninsula, using a combination of archaeological and epigraphic evidence and existing theoretical paradigms. Mani can be classified as an 'ahistorical historical' region – one that is inhabited within the historical period but which does not itself produce emic written evidence. Regions like Mani are often left out of typical inquiries into ancient Greek identity, which are overwhelmingly divided between studies of a)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Bria.

Research in the Andes has long focused on how early complex societies performed elaborate rituals in monumental spaces to both organize communities and establish authority. In pursuing this research for the Formative Period (1800-1 BC), comparisons between local ritual practices and the regional traditions of Kotosh and Chavín have overshadowed the study of how and why communities selectively altered and replaced ritual practices over the long term. For example, how did different generations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kimberly Munro.

This paper will explore the development and use of a localized ceremonial complex at the base of the Cordillera Negra Mountains, in coastal Ancash. Located at the headwaters of the Nepeña River valley at an elevation of 2650 masl, the Cosma Archaeological Complex shows a repeated occupation from the Pre-Ceramic through Late Horizon. This paper will cover the chronology and ritual use of the two main ceremonial mounds: Karecoto, and Acshipucoto, which date from the Pre-Ceramic through Final...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caroline Von Nicolai.

In Neolithic Europe, certain artefacts made of high-quality stone were distributed over considerable distances. For example, Jade axe heads, which originate from the Alps, were found between 5300 and 3700 BC in small numbers all over Central and Western Europe as far as Brittany, Scandinavia and the British Isles, i.e. up to 1700 km from their original quarries. Likewise, between 4500 and 2200 BC single daggers, arrowheads and other artefacts made of flint that came from Northern Italy have been...