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

DOCUMENT Citation Only Miguel Vilar. Flavia Morello. Marta Alfonso-Durruty.

The colonization of Fuego-Patagonia is filled with questions of origin, timing and migratory routes taken by early colonizers (inland hunter gatherers) and later migrants, the highly-specialized marine populations. Our study compares mitochondrial DNA sequences taken from 20 prehistoric samples (teeth) ranging in age between 7,200 and 1,000 cal yrs BP (before present) to results from 38 modern Patagonians (Kaweskar, Mapuche-Huilliche and Yagan) who participated as part of the Genographic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jorge Ulloa Hung. Roberto Valcárcel Rojas.

The diversity, complexity, and continuity of ¨archaics ¨ communities is one of the most recurrent themes in contemporary Caribbean archeology. Despite this, the tradition of research on this phenomenon goes back more than 40 years in Cuba and La Española, prompting classifications and models under the dominance of four basic theoretical approaches: colonization, difussion, evolution, and transculturation. This paper examines, discusses and compares the treatment and management of archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Romain.

In this presentation I consider Adena-Hopewell earthworks from a relational perspective. For decades, archaeologists have focused on individual sites. But what if it was found that the significance of certain sites unfolded in their relationships to other earthworks as well as other dimensions? In this presentation I use LiDAR imagery, archaeoastronomic analyses, and ethnohistoric data to explore the idea the Newark Earthworks, Great Hopewell Road, Mound City, Serpent Mound, and others were part...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Kelly. Katharine Reinhart. Zachary Singer.

The Ohomowauke site (72-137), located on the Mashantucket Pequot reservation in southeastern Connecticut, contains a mid eighteenth-century Euro-American sawmill and associated domestic structures that would have been situated on the historic border of the reservation. While little remains of the sawmill, the cultural material recovered within and around the domestic structures, including the house of the mill operator’s family, provide an opportunity to examine the lifeways of a working class...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pablo Cruz. Christian Vitry.

Expansion into the Andean highlands located to the south of Cuzco was a movement of capital importance in the consolidation of the Tawantinsuyu. This southward extension permitted the Incan annexation of important political and religious enclaves, like those located on the shores of Lake Titicaca. That region is identified by various colonial sources as the place of origin of the Incas themselves. However, beyond this, expansion of the empire to the south provided access to the gold, silver, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan Perry. Anna Osterholtz.

Although bioarchaeologists have recently developed best practices for the analysis of commingled samples, few scholars have theorized the significance of communal, commingled burial. In many cases, the practice of commingling skeletal remains is but one possible variant in the mortuary process. Numerous societies, including the Nabataeans at Petra, utilize collective burial in addition to primary inhumation within the overall mortuary program. The actual practice of commingling, such as when and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claire Barker. Samantha Fladd.

Within the archaeological literature there are several studies of miniature vessels that have attempted to explain the presence of these unique artifacts in prehistoric Puebloan society. The two most common hypotheses are that these pots were made by inexperienced potters while learning their craft, or they were produced by expert ceramic artisans and served a ritual function. These analyses have largely depended on assessing the skill with which miniature vessels were produced. The results of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lydia Pittman.

This paper presents a study of Miniature Pottery vessels from the Mimbres region of the American Southwest. I define these vessels as no larger than 10cm in length in any dimension. My data set includes over 150 vessels from sites in southwestern New Mexico. I will look at attributes such as painting, slip, temper, and completeness as well as depositional context to make inferences about the possible uses of these vessels in the time period that is covered. My vessels span almost 1000 years...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Richard H. Wilshusen.

Forty years ago Bill Lipe dared archaeologists to fundamentally change their views about archaeological practice. We were like miners, exploiting a non-renewable resource. If we were to have a future we would need to practice conservation as well as salvage, and education as well as preservation. Lipe published his 1974 Kiva article just as CRM and modern government archaeology were coming into being. Today, we live in a fundamentally different archaeological culture: there are four times as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kurt Rademaker. David Reid. Katherine Moore. Herve Bocherens.

In southern Peru our group is investigating a Paleoindian settlement system with linked sites situated in diverse ecological zones and exhibiting vastly different subsistence adaptations. This system encompasses one of the earliest coastal fishing settlements in the Americas and high-elevation hunting sites on the Andean plateau. Determining the nature of this and other early inter-zonal connections in adjacent areas is important for identifying routes used to settle Andean South America, with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Derek Anderson. D. Shane Miller.

The Mississippi Paleoindian and Archaic Point Survey was initiated in 1968 by archaeologists at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, and due largely to the efforts of Sam McGahey over the next 30 years, grew to include over 2,100 points at the time of his retirement in 2003. The survey was idle for a decade, but was recently reinstituted with the help of numerous avocational "citizen scientists" who share an interest in Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene hunter-gatherers. Intact...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Steere.

In the twenty years since the publication of Mississippian Communities and Households, improvements in GIS and database software have enabled archaeologists to analyze and compare the material remains of past communities and households at spatial scales that were once infeasible. In this paper I use a database of over 1200 Native American structures from 65 sites across the Southeast to compare changes in the architecture of Mississippian houses and settlements at a broader temporal and spatial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edmond Boudreaux.

Archaeological uses of the term “community” incorporate elements of the physical environment, which often include a particular place on the landscape, and elements of the built environment, such as the structures and spaces that people created there. In addition to being a place, the concept of “community” also entails the social, economic, and political relationships that existed among the individuals and groups that lived there. This paper presents an overview of the Mississippian community at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Douglas Smit. Antonio Coello Rodríguez.

Located in the Central Peruvian Andes, Huancavelica was the largest source of mercury in the Western Hemisphere and a critical source of wealth for Spain’s colonial empire. The Spanish administration mobilized labor through the infamous mita, a rotational labor tax that required colonial provinces to send one-seventh of their population to work in the mines. Forced labor in Huancavelica not only exposed these indigenous miners to the horrors of colonial mercury mining, but also brought...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Taylor. Carl Halbirt.

This poster explores hurricane risk mitigation in colonial St. Augustine, Florida, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. The city was primarily under Spanish rule during these centuries, although brief British and American periods are also represented. While St. Augustine is not a hurricane hot spot it does suffer occasional blows. Its waterfront location and the importance of shipping and fishing to the local economy made the town vulnerable to hurricane-associated wind and flooding....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelsey Witt. Inge Lundstroem. Ripan Malhi.

Mitochondrial DNA of ancient dogs in the Americas has been studied extensively, but most studies focus solely on the hypervariable region. We sequenced the complete mitochondrial genomes (mitogenomes) of dogs in the Americas from multiple geographic regions and time periods in order to compare populations between regions as well as to compare the genetic diversity of ancient dogs in the Americas to modern dogs worldwide. When comparing the HVR and mitogenome data, we found that the two data sets...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lucas Bueno. Andrei Isnardis.

The occupation of Central Brazilian Plateau between late Pleistocene and early Holocene seems to have privileged as displacement axies the fluvial valleys of the great perennial rivers that crosscut this region. This proposal is based on the existence of sites with similar characteristics, located at great distances, as the Rio Peruaçu (Minas Gerais state) and the Serra da Capivara (Piauí state), connected to the same hidrografic basin, and presenting same occupation chronologies. Throughout...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Patterson. Carolyn Freiwald.

The movement of Classic Maya people has been recorded in numerous epigraphic texts. These references, along with migration studies at Tikal, Copán, and other smaller communities, suggest that there was a considerable amount of migration among Maya centers. We present the results of strontium, oxygen, and carbon stable isotope analysis of 71 individuals buried at the sites of La Corona and El Perú-Waka’ in the northwest Petén, Guatemala. The sample includes single and multiple burials, non-burial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jose Capriles. Calogero Santoro. Daniela Osorio. Juan Albarracin-Jordan. Claudio Latorre.

One of the main constraints limiting understanding late Pleistocene archaeology in South America is the lack of compatible and standardized datasets from scholars working in neighboring countries. Here, we present interdisciplinary collaborative work for discussing the nature of human mobility between the Pacific Coast, the Atacama Desert and the Lípez Highlands of Chile and Bolivia at 21° S. In an attempt to identify mobility strategies by human populations occupying these drastically different...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kisha Supernant.

Relationships between artifact assemblages and cultural identities are complex and difficult to disentangle. The Canadian west during the 1800s provides an interesting historical and archaeological case study that has potential to shed light on the dynamics of settlement, material culture, and the mobile nature of Métis peoples. Based originally in the Red River Settlement, some of the Métis began to expand west after 1845, forming interconnected wintering communities to participate in winter...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Julie Markin. Vernon Knight.

The complex nature of ceramic style geographies of the Woodland period in northern Georgia has led many to argue that pottery cannot be properly seriated in this region. When we rely on our current typological tools, this assertion holds true because major styles are contemporaneous for long periods. A further complication is the use of different decorative modes within a small community or even by a single household. The overlapping nature of decorative modes does not yield itself well to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tomás Gallareta Cervera.

Throughout sixteen years of research at the archaeological site of Kiuic, located in the Puuc zone of the Yucatán Peninsula, explorations have yielded the complete construction sequence of its Late Classic Period royal court and central architectural group, Yaxché. Deep and detailed excavations at the group’s central building, Str. N1065E1025, have produced a unique picture of the evolution of architecture, modification of the landscape, and its role in the consolidation of royal power through...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christian Isendahl. Elizabeth Graham.

Drawing from our own research on food, water, and waste management, we describe the development and characteristics of settled life in the humid neotropics with a view to isolating features or patterns that reflect sustainable trajectories. Because mainstream concepts of “the city” tend to be structured by urban experiences that lie outside the tropics and are recentist in outlook, we suggest that there are urban (and peri-urban) phenomena in the deep past of the neotropics that tend to be...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Redding.

The distribution body parts of animals consumed at a site is an important variable in understanding human subsistence behavior. I present a model of expected body part distributions for meat versus non-meat bearing elements that assumes whole bodies are transported to and deposited in a site. The model is based on observed fragmentation at three sites in the Middle East and Egypt: Hallan Chemi (Turkey), Farukhabad (Iran) and Heit el-Ghurab (Giza, Egypt). The model predicts that 33% of all...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Ciolek-Torello. Michael Heilen. Jeffrey Homburg. Amraturvshin Chunag. Gunchinsuren Byambaa.

Around the world, predictive models are increasingly important to heritage management by estimating where sites are likely to be located, particularly in un-surveyed areas. Northern Mongolia is well known for its archaeological resources, particularly Bronze Age and Early Iron Age sites, but vast areas remain to be surveyed. This poster presents a project conducted by the Mongolian International Heritage Team and Statistical Research to provide recommendations on the routing of a proposed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jasmine Kidwell. David Kilby.

Blackwater Locality No. 1 (the Clovis-type site) served as a catchment for spring-fed streams during the late Last Glacial Maximum, providing a water source for the Paleoindian occupants of the Southern High Plains. During episodes of high effective moisture, water flowed out of the basin via an outlet channel into Blackwater Draw proper. Coinciding with the changing climate of the early Younger Dryas, the flowing waters of the outlet channel were obstructed, impounding the waters of a shallow...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eleanor King.

A profusion of data now supports the existence—long doubted—of markets in the Maya area prior to the Postclassic (C.E. 900-1500). Using a range of approaches from examining the effects of market exchange on artifact distributions to identifying marketplaces within sites, researchers have established that markets were important building blocks for Classic Maya (C.E. 250-900) economies. To date, however, models of prehispanic Maya markets remain nebulous. Scholars continue to rely on frameworks...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Jarriel.

This paper explores how community interaction can be modeled on a local scale using the Early Bronze Age Cyclades (Greece) as a case study. Small worlds—the local, intensive networks of interaction among communities in the Aegean islands—sustained essential ties among small communities that had limited subsistence and few labor resources (Tartaron 2008: 109). By combining material evidence for exchange and ritual deposition, environmental data, and cost-surface analyses of travel time and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Reeves. Jonathan Scott Reeves. Melissa Miller. David R. Braun.

Previous research has demonstrated that surface artifacts provide insight into land-use patterns when the taphonomic processes influencing their distribution are understood. This understanding is derived from detailed field mapping of landscape topography and geomorphology. Aerial imagery, when combined with photogrammetry and geospatial analysis, produces datasets that can be used to characterize the erosional processes that actively influence the occurrence of surface material. Using unmanned...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jocelyn Connolly.

This paper examines Woodland (ca. 1,000 BCE to 1,000 CE) land use patterns in the lower Little Miami River valley of Ohio. Theoretically, two models can be applied to the distribution of archaeological sites which date to the Woodland cultural period in this region: an ideological model based on ceremonial and mortuary behavior and a pragmatic model based on the socio-economic optimizing and risk-reducing behaviors of human evolutionary ecology. Archaeological data including artifact typology...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alvaro Castilla-Beltrán.

Diverse types of models have been proposed to shed light to Caribbean colonization process as well as general patterns of mobility, exchange and connectivity. These models have hitherto been narrative, theoretical and statistical and their products have widened our understanding of the archaeological record. Agent-based models (ABMs) represent a promising step forward on the modelling approach to Caribbean archaeology by placing attention to the interactions among agents and agents and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melinda Allen. Alex Morrison. Andrew McAlister.

The effects of past climate change on Polynesian societies are poorly understood, in part because detailed palaeoclimate records have been lacking. Drawing on recently assembled palaeoclimate observations from across central Polynesia, along with those from realistically forced climate simulations, we assess how climate variability affected marine fisheries and long-term trends in harvesting practices. Little Ice Age (ca. 1400-1800 AD) conditions are modelled for central Polynesia focusing on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Trevor Lea. Danielle Soza. Candice Disque. Kevin Conti.

The Alkali Ridge Project conducted by New Mexico State University is a data modernization project geared towards updating maps and providing artifact analysis around the Ten Acres community in the National Historic Landmark Southern District in southeastern Utah. Though much work in this area has been done by our predecessors, additional data is necessary to better understand the community organization. The 2015 field season allowed us to survey four sites, including the Ten Acres site...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniela Klokler.

For many years, normative approaches to shell mound archaeology in Brazil have characterized hunter-gatherer-fisher (HGF) populations as nomadic groups whose mound sites represent accidental accumulations of refuse, despite the fact that almost all contain numerous burials. A shift in perspective, especially regarding the role of aquatic resources, allowed great advances in the understanding of mound-building activities. A dramatic transformation of the southern Brazilian coast by HGF...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Whyte.

Late Woodland ceramic vessels in northwestern North Carolina are highly variable in tempering materials and surface treatments but are nearly limited to jar forms of a limited size range. Coil breaks are found almost exclusively on shoulder, neck, and rim sherds. Vessel bodies sometimes exhibit evidence of net impression underlying rectilinear stamping. These attributes coupled with experimental observations indicate that vessel bodies were often formed in molds. This mode of ceramic vessel...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Izumi Shimada.

The use of one or more pairs of concave molds has been a major ceramic formation method throughout much of the world. This method has traditionally been seen as a rational solution to efficiently producing a large number of standardized products. This paper questions these views as being overly generalized or untenable in terms of data from excavated ceramic workshops and examination of products pertaining to Mochica and Sicán cultures on Peru's north coast and to the persistent figurine...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eden Washburn. Lars Fehren-Schmitz.

This study examines early population dynamics and ecology at Hatahara, an approximately 1500-year-old archaeological site in the Brazilian Central Amazon. Due to poor preservation of pre-Columbian human remains, little is known about the genetic make-up and diversity of this region before European contact. In contrast to other regions of South America and especially the Central Andes, this underrepresentation of human paleobiological data inhibits our potential to fully reconstruct Native South...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Camila Capriata Estrada. Raúl Zambrano.

Molle is a prehispanic settlement located the Lurin Valley, central coast of Peru. Preliminary data indicates that it was primarily occupied during the Late Intermediate Period and the Late Horizon. During excavations performed in the years 2014 and 2015 we were able to determine that one of the major sections of the Inca road system or Qhapa Ñan, the one connecting Pachacamac to the administrative center of Hatun Xauxa, runs across this site. In this paper we will discuss the role that Molle...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Douglas MacDonald. Staffan Peterson. Tobin Roop.

The Montana Yellowstone Archaeological Project (MYAP) is a cooperative effort of the University of Montana (UM), Yellowstone National Park, and the Rocky Mountain Cooperative Ecosystem Study Unit of the National Park Service. Now in its ninth year, the MYAP engages undergraduate and graduate students at every level of cultural resource management projects so they are prepared for careers in the field. In addition, UM facilitates the completion of Yellowstone’s CRM responsibilities in a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nelly Robles Garcia.

El estatus de Monte Alban como sitio de Patrimonio Mundial implica su manejo adecuado en la vida contemporánea. Aunque la tendencia general sería esperar que el sitio sea reconocido en su imagen histórica-social por los sectores académicos, económicos y los medios como un ejemplo de buenas prácticas, la realidad nos mueve a considerar como prioridad un esquema de gestión que tienda hacia una imagen de inclusion de las comunidades alrededor del sitio. Esta ponencia contrasta la imagen...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amber Laubach. Sarah Baires.

Monumental Construction at Cahokia, a geoarchaeological perspective Amber Laubach and Sarah E. Baires Examining Pre-Columbian earthen mounds from both a macro and micro-scale lens can reveal geotechnical knowledge of construction as well as the cultural significance of this pervasive past practice in the Eastern Woodlands. Micromorphology soil samples provide a rich volume of data to examine fine-grained construction fill composition, pedogenic activity and the relative rate of monumental...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Darcy Mathews.

Archaeologists do not think of the peoples of the Northwest Coast as monumental stone builders, yet current research indicates that the enhancement and demarcation of critical resource sites entailed both the massive movement of stone and the building of stone monuments. The Coast Salish peoples built remarkable numbers of burial cairns and mounds, using stones cleared from important and valuable root crop fields to then inscribe the landscape with their ancestral dead. Their Heiltsuk neighbors...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jayur Mehta. Elizabeth Chamberlain.

Resilience is the ability of complex systems to adapt to change in the wake of disturbance. Here, we describe the relationship of natural deltaic land evolution and anthropogenic monument construction using a case study of Ellesly Mound, an earthen monument located in the Lafourche subdelta of the Mississippi Delta. Borehole and LIDAR data show that Ellesly mound is situated above naturally deposited crevasse sediments underlain by organic-rich facies indicating a relatively low-lying vegetated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kent Lightfoot. Edward Luby. Matthew Russell. Gabriel Sanchez. Thomas Wake.

This paper examines the construction of impressive mounded landscapes along the greater San Francisco Bay in Late Holocene and Historic times.The authors address some of the theoretical and methodological issues involved in the investigation of extensive accretional shell mound complexes that were built up over multiple centuries. In evaluating questions about how and why these monumental landscapes were constructed, they present recent findings from the study of both large and small sized...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Terry Powis. George Micheletti. Norbert Stanchly. Kaitlin Crow. Sheldon Skaggs.

In the Middle Preclassic (900-300 BC), physical evidence of the increasing complexity of Maya society can be found in the form of monumental public architecture. However, the origins of temple building are poorly understood during this time period, especially in the Belize Valley. At the site of Pacbitun we have been exploring the initial purpose of public architecture as constructions to bring likeminded communities together for ritual, ceremonial, and/or social functions. Archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric McLay.

Clam gardens represent monumental coastal landscapes constructed by Northwest Coast hunter-gather-fisher peoples over the past 1000 years. The slow, laborious movement of boulders and cobbles to build up rock-walled intertidal terraces not only created new productive shellfish habitat for greater food security, but transformed social and political relations over peoples’ rights to lands, foreshore and access to shellfish at a regional scale. As large-scale community works, clam gardens must be...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rodney Fitzsimons.

Prior to the appearance of the first palaces at Mycenae in the 15th century B.C., the most impressive architectural manifestation of elite authority in the Argolid was not the palace or the house, but rather the tomb, specifically the shaft grave and the tholos tomb. While the funerary data supplied by these burials have long served as the primary means by which the study of Early Mycenaean state formation has been approached, such studies focus almost exclusively on the grave goods themselves,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Margo Schwadron.

The Ten Thousand Islands, Everglades, Florida contain an impressive maritime landscape, composed of entire islands constructed and terraformed with shell midden. These shell work sites are the tangible and complex vestiges of hunter-fisher-gatherer communities. Shell work formations include extensive complexes of mounds and features. Similarities in temporal and spatial patterning among shell islands suggest that communities were interrelated across a broad region. Shell work islands and their...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Abtosway.

Ometepe Island, Zapatera Island and Las Isletas of Lake Nicaragua are home to a distinctive group of monumental ground stone statues of up to two meters in height. Sometimes referred to as the "Alter-Ego" style, they depict humans with full animals on their back and shoulders, or elaborate headdresses with animalistic imagery. Well known throughout the country, they are featured prominently in murals and even currency. Yet their purpose and symbolism remains poorly understood due to challenges...

DOCUMENT Citation Only J. Cameron Monroe.

Archaeologies of urbanism in West Africa have long focused on major cities associated with expansive kingdoms and empires of the second millennium AD. In recent decades, however, archaeologists have turned to the countryside for an alternative view on urban dynamics in this period. Yet, for most of the forested region this shift has been hampered by the problem of identifying sites, both large and small. This difficultly arises from the combined effects of dense vegetation, poor site...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jay Silverstein. Robert Littman.

The Rosetta Stone is one of the most famous inscriptions in the world, yet few could actually tell you about its content. The topics on the stone relate to the reign of Ptolemy V and provide critical insight into the nature of Hellenism, imperial structure, indigenous relations, ideological assimilation, and process and consequences of the Great Rebellion of 204-185 BCE against Macedonian rule. While textual references to the rebellion abound there have been few archaeological correlates. At...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aaron Woods. Ryan Harrod.

Many existing studies of Fremont mortuary data have been limited to documenting the location of burials, the presence or absence of burial goods, and the position of the remains. Furthermore, much of the analyses of Fremont human skeletal remains have focused almost exclusively on population-level comparisons or evidence of extreme violence. Current bioarchaeological methods have expanded the type of questions that researchers can ask. Equipped with hypotheses influenced by social theory, it is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine South. Leslie Cecil.

Investigations in the western Petén lakes area have provided useful collections of pottery excavated from a variety of sites ranging from the Middle Preclassic to the Contact periods. This abundance has enabled intensive study of pottery from both macroscopic and compositional perspectives. This paper compares compositional results from Middle Preclassic and Postclassic pottery samples collected and analyzed by the authors. A comparison of petrographic analysis from thin sections demonstrates...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jason Mancini.

Between December 1773 and June 1774, a new road was surveyed and laid out across the Mashantucket Pequot Indian Reservation. Two survey points along this route, mention an “Indian meeting house” and a “small Indian house.” The construction of this road and the architectural landmarks along it illustrate, in part, the considerable adjustments that Pequots were making in the aftermath of colonization and land dispossession. Public architecture such as the “meeting house,” was unknown at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Weinstein.

High-altitude hypoxia, cold ambient temperatures, and malnutrition are critical environmental stressors affecting living human populations in the highland Andes. Decades of scholarship in human biology explain the complex physiological responses that provide adaptive fitness to living human groups at high altitudes through both developmental acclimatization, in which the human body adjusts to environmental stress during growth, and genetic adaptations from natural selection. Given the longevity...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Luc Doyon.

This study examines the morphometric variation of Aurignacian bone, antler and ivory projectile points, the first continental-wide occurrence of hunting armatures made from animal material during the Early Upper Paleolithic. Morphometric analysis is a powerful instrument that separates and quantifies variation of both shape and size thereby allowing exploration of both functional and stylistic variation of an object. Applied to armatures from the Western Mediterranean region (Grotte de...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jess Beck.

At 113 ha, Marroquíes Bajos (Jaén, Spain) is one of the largest villages known for the Iberian Copper Age. Attention was first focused on the site in the 1960s after construction work underneath the modern city of Jaén unearthed a series of elaborate artificial burial caves. However, over the past several decades salvage excavations revealed even more mortuary areas at the site, including commingled depositions in enclosure ditches, primary and secondary inhumations in discrete subterranean...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Manion. Geoffrey McCafferty.

Excavations in 2009 and 2010 established the presence of mortuary remains at the El Rayo archaeological site, located on the Asese Peninsula near modern Granada, Nicaragua. In 2015 an additional field season expanded upon previous excavations in Locus 3, one of two known cemetery locations at the site, exposing several more burial urns, and further investigating previously known urn burials. This new data contributes to a greater understanding of mortuary practices at El Rayo, which at Locus 3...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Osterholtz. Virginia Lucas. Andre Gonciar. Angelica Balos.

Frontiers are fuzzy spaces, allowing for cultural diffusion and the negotiation of cultural identities. Identity is defined both based on interaction and on exclusion of surrounding groups. Located at the confluence of the Mures and Strei Valleys, the Magura Urioului rock formation stands as a natural fortress dominating the built and natural landscape. The highly visible rock outcropping and surrounding terraces have been continuously used by various groups including the Hallstatt, Celtic and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Seinfeld.

William Sears’s reconstruction of a Hopewellian charnel platform with wood carvings at Fort Center (8GL12) is one of the more vivid imaginings of prehistoric ritual in Florida archaeology. This model has been influential in our thinking about ritual in the Okeechobee area. It was long believed that Sears’s excavations completely destroyed the pond-mound complex and that further data recovery would be impossible. Recently, wallowing wild hogs (Sus scrofa) uncovered wood artifacts in the Fort...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Palumbo. Laura Brodie.

This paper explores the mechanisms by which sumptuary art was deposited in mortuary contexts in parts of southern Central America. Rather than signal the existence of ”eliteness” or chiefly office, it is argued that the production and procurement of mortuary art was one feature of a factionalized political landscape. The burial of staggering quantities of this artwork may be interpreted as deflationary attempts to limit the capital available to rivals. Such practices may have promoted a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steven Meredith. Daniel Turner.

The Alabamu people, along with the affiliated Coasati, were an important part of the Creek Confederacy in the late 18th century. Excavations at Mossy Bluff (1Ct610) in northeastern Alabama revealed the first Alabamu site to be identified in the area that they inhabited before their migration and coalescence with the Creeks. The site is located in a relatively secluded location, near the southeastern margin of what is interpreted to be the tribe’s pre-migration territory. This paper describes the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Alt.

In the Cahokian world the sounds and sights of night would have brought stories: the moon, morning star and evening star; human origins. Origin stories generally abound with sex, (mother earth, father sky) but our analyses are oddly devoid of sex. Yet Mississippian figurative art plays with the seen and unseen of sex as it hints at how cosmic principles, sex, and gender were entangled and tied to night and reproduction. By focusing on reproductive themes, but not sex, archaeologists have not...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alejandro Figueroa.

Caves and shelters hold a special place among Mesoamerican cultures. Some of the earliest evidence of human occupation in this region is found inside these natural features, where well-preserved materials attest to the detailed knowledge past populations had of their surrounding landscapes and resources. In later time periods, caves were treated as the portals to the underworld and became an essential part of Mesoamerican ideology. The landscape of the Santa Elena highlands of southwestern...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Guy Hepp.

For decades, scholars have discussed Mesoamerica as a land characterized by two ancient linguistic and cultural traditions: Mixe-Zoque to the southeast, and Otomanguean to the west. Recent evidence from the initial Early Formative (2000–1500 cal BC) village site of La Consentida in coastal Oaxaca suggests that early “Red-on-Buff horizon” ceramics of Otomanguean-speaking peoples compete temporally with the earliest southern pottery traditions, such as that of the Soconusco region’s Barra phase...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Jennings. Giles Spence-Morrow. Felipe McQueen. Willy Yépez Álvarez.

During the Middle Horizon (AD 650-1050), the site of Quilcapampa la Antiqua in the Sihuas Valley of southern Peru grew from a small village into a major political center. This chapter considers how the growth of Quilcapampa was linked in part to the experiences of people passing through this location. Drawing on Alfred Gell’s idea of “technologies of enchantment”, we examine how the site’s associated geoglyphs, petroglyphs, and pathways marked and gave meaning to a place already ritually charged...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aleksa Alaica.

The north coast of Peru during the Middle Horizon Period witnessed a shift in the way that people, things and animals moved across the landscape. The often fragmented polities that formed the occupation sites for communities engaged in Moche ideology and politics were also associated with trade and interregional interaction on a different scale. The role of animals in this exchange is often overlooked and taken for granted. Camelids (alpacas and llamas) were the conduits of mobility within the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Dawson. Mark Schurr.

Edged Pearlware, a type of refined earthenware imported from England, is found at many early nineteenth century Native American and Euro-American sites in North America. Due to the small size of sherds and the lack of sherds with maker’s marks, it is currently difficult to identify the date, location, and manufacturing process for Edged Pearlware. This poster compares sherds from three sites occupied during the first half of the nineteenth century: Pokagon Village, a Native American site;...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Krystal Britt.

The Multi-Kiva site (AZ P:3:112 [ASM]), situated on the Colorado Plateau in Northern Arizona provides insights into the ways that groups interacted and negotiated their place on the landscape during migration. The Middle Little Colorado River valley region has traditionally been characterized in the Pueblo III (1125-1275 C.E.) period by dispersed pithouse settlements. Recent investigations have illuminated the presence of masonry pueblos in the Middle Little Colorado River valley during the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Sherwood. Gerald Smith. Stephen Carmody. Alex Friedl. Patrick Vestal.

This poster summarizes the preliminary results from a multidisciplinary research project that began as a salvage project when a 22 room, 150 year old log frame house burnt on the campus at the University of the South in Sewanee, TN. Faculty, students and volunteers are actively involved in an integrated program that includes archival research, architectural history, dendrochronology, dendroecology, geoarchaeology, paleoethnobotany, zooarchaeology, and historical archaeology. The 7 acre site...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jose Iriarte. Denise Schaan Pahl. Shira Maezumi. Salman Khan. Daiana Travassos.

This presentation summarises the preliminary results of the interdisciplinary research carried out in the context of the ‘Pre-Columbian Amazon-Scale Transformation’ project that investigate the nature and scale of past human impact across the Amazon integrating archaeology, archaeobotany, palaeoecology, soil science, botany and remote sensing. We present initial results from the unique region around Santarém city at the confluence of the Tapajós and the Amazon rivers, home to the Tapajós...

DOCUMENT Citation Only R. Alan Covey. Kylie Quave.

Systematic regional survey research identified Yunkaray as a town at the center of a hierarchical network of villages near Maras, approximately 20 km to the northwest of the Inca capital. A grid of more than 80 intensive collection units established Yunkaray to be larger than 20 hectares, almost all of which was occupied and abandoned during the Late Intermediate Period (c. AD 1000-1400). The scarcity of Inca imperial pottery in surface collections suggested that abandonment occurred during the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine French.

Variability is a defining characteristic of early medieval pagan mortuary practice. Groups may have buried individual decedents in myriad ways all falling under the definition of ‘pagan.’ When the variability of a specific ritual practice is compared at the community rather than individual level, however, then local and regional trends emerge. One such ritual practice is the incorporation of animals into human cremations – a practice common in terminal Iron Age and early medieval mortuary...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stefan Brannan. Jennifer Birch.

Mississippian archaeology has benefited from historicized approaches which situate communities and their constituent parts within larger socio-political landscapes, rather than treating them as bounded or normative entities. In this paper, we explore historical and socio-political dynamics within the community centered upon Singer-Moye, a large (30+ ha) mound center located in the lower Chattahoochee River valley. Our analyses combine archaeological and geophysical data from mound and off-mound...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabriela Ore Menendez.

Large scale survey of anthropogenic landscapes using traditional methods requires considerable fieldwork time and effort. Diverse air- and space-borne imagery enables registry of key data prior to the execution of field research. We present a multiscale imagery-based survey methodology to optimize limited research resources and to broaden the scale of archaeological landscape research. This broader approach enables identification and mapping of agricultural terraces, canals, and architectural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edward Bormann. Matthew Capece. László Paja. Julia Giblin.

The identification of the temperature at which bone was burned is an important technique for both archaeological and forensic applications that deal with cremated skeletal material. Known color changes in burned bone can be systematically quantified using a Munsell Soil Color Book and associated with known temperature ranges at which the material was burned. Non-invasive techniques, such as computed tomography (CT) scanning may be able to provide analogous information for archaeological material...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Capone.

Collections in museums are components of refocusing and revising archaeological interpretation in the United States alongside the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Review of collections as prompted by NAGPRA is improving documentation and interpretation of those collections subject to the Act and beyond, across sites and regions. Previously incomplete archaeological contexts may be refined and these bring potential for updated research questions and methodologies. A...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angela Bellia.

Studies on Ancient Greek music often concentrate on evidence from Athens or Sparta. However, Athenian or Spartan musical activity may not be typical of other areas of the Greek world, particularly the Western Greeks, as indeed is evident from other areas of social, artistic, and political activity. This paper will combine the methods of musicology and archeology towards the study of the archaeological remains of musical interest, considering their findspot and context of use, in order to place...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Bennett. Sarah E. Miller. Amber J. Grafft-Weiss. Lianne Bennett. Emily Jane Murray.

The Florida Public Archaeology Network was established in 2005 and within a year hosted its first Project Archaeology: Intrigue of the Past workshop. As a proud sponsor of Project Archaeology in Florida, regional center staff partnered with the National Park Service and University of Florida to publish the first Investigating Shelter investigation in the southeast. It was also the first in the Investigating Shelter series to feature a National Park site. Investigating a Tabby Slave Cabin teacher...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Linda Hansen.

Past scholarship concerning human sacrifice in ancient Mesoamerica has suffered from oversimplification and misuse of traditional theoretical models of sacrifice. In addition, many scholars are still suffering a hangover from a twentieth century Western scholarly binge that romanticized notions of an iconic, peaceful Maya civilization (a type for all Mesoamerica) with exceptional interactions with nature. As a result, pan-Mesoamerican cosmological principles are still endorsed as the ubiquitous...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Fash. Barbara Fash.

Delimiting the “core” area of the Late Classic Copan kingdom may be enhanced through analysis of its shared mythology, associated with the ballgame. Placed at the geographic and social center of the royal compound, the main ballcourt of Copan established a narrative of mythological macaws, and a Macaw Mountain, that spanned the entire dynasty from the 5th-9th century CE. The geographic distribution of archaeological sites with stone macaw head ballcourt markers, all of which had Copador pottery...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mauricio Uribe.

A partir de los postulados de Murra sobre los Incas, Llagostera planteó para el Norte de Chile la ausencia de una conquista propiamente tal, puesto que sus poblaciones se hallaban insertas en sistemas preincaicos de complementariedad ecológica, cuyas cabeceras o “señoríos” se encontraban vinculadas al altiplano central del Titicaca. Las que una vez anexadas al Tawantinsuyo, implicó un dominio casi automático de las entidades restantes ubicadas en lugares más bajos como los del norte chileno,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ursel Wagner. Friedrich Wagner. Werner Haeusler. Benilde Costa. Jean-Yves Blot.

A decade ago Roman Haltern 70 amphorae were found in the sea near Cortiçais on the Atlantic coast of Portugal. They stem from a shipwreck dated to between 15 BC and 15 AD. We have studied fragments of these amphorae by Mössbauer spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction to look for changes caused by two millennia of exposure to seawater. For comparison we studied Haltern 70 type amphorae excavated on land at Castro do Vieito in the north of Portugal. The sherds show a layer structure with 2 to 3 mm...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Martin Giesso. Andrés Laguens. Silvana Bertolino. Michael Glascock. Mathew Boulanger.

We analyze the provenience of clays used in the manufacture of Aguada ceramics, mainly black incised, characteristic of the Ambato valley of southeastern Catamarca (Argentina). This ceramic style is also present in lesser quantities in sites of other neighboring valleys/regions, most of it manufactured with the same clay. The research is part of a broader project to study economic organization and the emergence of complex societies in northwestern Argentina. Research that took place in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gregory Zaro. Martina Celhar. Dario Vujevic. Kenneth C. Nystrom.

In the eastern Adriatic, the process of urbanization unfolded over the course of several thousand years, resulting in significant changes in landscape, environment, and human societal organization. With support from the National Geographic Society, our joint Croatian-American team recently engaged in a collaborative effort to evaluate urban change surrounding the archaeological site of Nadin-Gradina, a moderately-sized center located near the coastal city of Zadar along Croatia’s Adriatic coast....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lourdes Henebry-DeLeon.

In 2008, Central Washington University NAGPRA Program and the Columbia Plateau Tribes created a more visible, participatory osteobiography process. CWU let go of the “culture of secrecy” around our NAGPRA human remains documentation process and found the benefits outweigh fears. The change showed the tribes what we really do and generated research questions from Tribal representatives.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Branden Rizzuto.

This poster highlights emerging results of the ongoing study that aims to further characterize the technological strategies, standardization practices, and social relations associated with the production of naipes during the Middle Sicán (900 – 1100 CE) period on the north coast of Peru. Initially conducted as part of MSc. research under the supervision of J. Merkel, archaeometric (pXRF, SEM-EDXS) and metallographic (chemical etching, optical microscopy, microhardness) analyses were carried out...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Beth Scaffidi.

Excavations of two sectors of the cemetery site of Uraca in the Lower Majes Valley (coastal Arequipa, Peru) yielded human skeletons with evidence of post-mortem processing, including defleshing, removal of the soft tissues of the eye orbit, and drilling holes into the frontal and parietal bones. The 11 beheaded individuals were young adult or adult males. In addition, 6 defleshed (and unarticulated) mandibles belonged to likely males, whose crania were not recovered. Decoration styles,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Kerchusky.

The Middle Horizon (AD 750-1000) was a tumultuous time in the Nasca region, located on the south coast of Peru. The highland-centered Wari Empire established at least three colonies (Pacheco, Pataraya, and Inkawasi) in the Nasca Valley and its tributaries (Edwards 2010). Local settlement patterns changed drastically in response (Edwards 2010, Schreiber 1999). The number and size of habitation sites in the Nasca and Taruga Valleys decreased but increased in the Las Trancas Valley, away from and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Monica Oyola-Coeur, RPA.

The National Archives is best known as a repository of the Charters of Freedom and less known for the wealth of historical resources from the vaults, many accessible digitally. This paper discusses how U.S. government records of historical value such as documents, maps and early photographs are organized to facilitate search of archival resources available for archaeological research. An overview of the National Archives collections, databases, and digital information from selected federal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Steadman. Janet Franklin. Jim Mead. Angel Soto-Centeno. Nancy Albury.

We report 83 taxa of vertebrates (11 reptiles, 63 birds, 9 mammals) from late Pleistocene bone deposits in Sawmill Sink, Abaco, The Bahamas. These bones were recovered by scuba divers in non-cultural contexts at water depths of 27-35 m. Among the 83 species, 40 (48%) no longer occur on Abaco (4 reptiles, 31 birds, 5 mammals). We estimate that 17 of the 40 losses (all of them birds) are linked to changes during the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition (~15 to 9 ka) in climate (becoming more warm and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steve Kosiba.

In creating Cusco, the Incas assembled a landscape of monuments and pathways that embodied a mythic vision of the past. But how did Cusco’s landscape, which was invested with pre-Inca meanings and memories, become Inca? In this paper, I present archaeological and ethnohistorical data from Cusco to explore how Cusco’s indigenous people constructed their past under Inca and early Spanish rule. I examine how pathways and landscapes in Cusco—the processions of the Capac Raymi and Situa ceremonies,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bryan Núñez Aparcana.

One of the main socioeconomic characteristics during the late periods is the high and dynamic presence of exchange of foreign goods, many of them coming from the amazon basin, including Nectandra sp., a seed with psychoactive properties, characteristic of moist woodlands, associated with offerings and funerary contexts in the Andean region. This study presents the preliminary analysis of Nectandra sp., including physical and chemical properties, such as the pharmacological features mentioned in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Agapi Filini.

Negative or resist-painted ceramics are present in diverse Mesoamerican ceramic traditions and at different time scales and a millenary functional continuity may be postulated thereof. At the lacustrine region of Michoacán, for example, they were first recorded at the Preclassic El Opeño site (1500 BCE) and manufacturing processes reached a level of technological complexity within the Postclassic Tarascan state. Recent archaeometric studies through SEM/EDX and Raman spectroscopy techniques on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marco Milella. Christopher J. Knüsel. Scott D. Haddow.

At Neolithic Çatalhöyük adult burials are usually located beneath platforms within habitations. Middens (waste areas) are, on the other hand, only sporadically used as burial locations at the site and, overall, are consistent with intentional exclusion from platform depositions, therefore representing a form of irregular burial. Here, we describe a young adult male from Çatalhöyük buried in a midden and presenting several skeletal anomalies (united and unhealed fractures, and bone structural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sean Bergin.

The significance of the spread of agriculture cannot be overstated and for this reason strong disagreement continues to arise over the processes responsible for the shift from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic. Four influential models have been proposed for the spread of agriculture in the west Mediterranean and can be applied to the circumstances of the Impresso-Cardial spread: the Wave of Advance Model, the Capillary Model, the Maritime Pioneer Colonization Model and the Dual Model. All four...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Barse.

Nericagua, Corobal and The Upper Orinoco Ceramic Sequence William P. Barse, Smithsonian Institution This presentation reviews the relatively unknown ceramic complexes of Nericagua and Corobal defined in the late 1950's by Clifford Evans and Betty Meggers, currently housed in the Smithsonian Institution curation facilities. The range of variation in ceramic vessel shapes and their decorative motifs of these two complexes will be compared to neighboring ceramic assemblages in the northern Tropical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Francisco Estrada-Belli. Alexandre Tokovinine.

The recent finds at Holmul has opened a narrow window on the hitherto largely unknown dynastic history of this medium-sized kingdom in eastern Peten and on the complexities of Late Classic lowland Maya hegemonic relations. We now have a royal tomb, a palace, and a funerary temple with dedicatory texts that can all be attributed with a certain degree of confidence to a single Late Classic ruler with ties to Naranjo and Kaanul (Snake Kingdom). This set of contextual information allows us to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hali Thurber. Steven Wernke.

This paper investigates the occupation of a planned 16th century Spanish colonial resettlement named Santa Cruz de Tute, hereafter referred to as Mawchu Llacta. My analysis incorporates data compiled for the Proyecto Arqueológico Tuti Antiguo (PATA), with a particular focus on colonial census records from 1591, 1604, and 1617, which detail land tenure and livestock holdings. I argue that the construction of a computer-based representation of pathways in ArcGIS platform contributes to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tom Froese. Linda Manzanilla.

The political organization of Teotihuacan continues to be unknown. While some researchers see evidence for a powerful centralized hierarchy, others argue for a more collective form of government. We created an abstract computer model of hypothetical social relations among neighborhood-level representatives to show that such a distributed political network could in principle have been sufficient for globally optimal decision making, as long as there are community rituals and sections of the city...