2016 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Elizabeth J. Reitz
Part of: Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)
Elizabeth J. Reitz is the recipient of the 2016 Fryxell Award for Interdisciplinary Research in Archaeology. The Fryxell Award is presented to a scientist in recognition for excellence in interdisciplinary research that significantly has contributed to American Archaeology. The 2016 Fryxell Award specifically recognizes a scholar who has made significant contributions in the application of the zoological sciences in archaeology. Dr. Reitz has a distinguished career as a zooarchaeologist. Her zooarchaeological research embodies interdisciplinary scholarship, bridging studies of human-environmental relationships in the past with topics of global concern in the modern world. Her pioneering work focuses on developing analytical methods that make zooarchaeological data compatible, accessible, and relevant across disciplines. Her research spans the terminal Pleistocene to post-Columbia era, from the United States to the Caribbean and South America, and has been featured in numerous books, monographs, journals, and zooarchaeological reports. This symposium, sponsored by the Fryxell Award for Interdisciplinary Research, highlights Dr. Reitz’s contribution to American Archaeology through her zooarchaeological research paradigm.
Other Keywords
Zooarchaeology •
Historical Archaeology •
Environmental Archaeology •
Subsistence •
New Orleans •
Archaeomalacology •
Peru •
Colonial Period •
Fryxell •
El Niño
Geographic Keywords
North America - Southeast •
South America •
North America - Southwest
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-8 of 8)
- Documents (8)
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Building on the Vertebrate Data: Invertebrate Analysis Offers New Insights on Southeast Coastal Subsistence-Settlement Systems (2016)
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Mollusc shell is often the most conspicuous component of coastal archaeological sites in southeastern North America. The shear abundance and bulk of the material presents logistical challenges during all stages of investigation, from excavation and recovery to analysis and curation. These challenges, combined with the assumption that molluscs were low-ranked resources, result in the tendency for zooarchaeological analyses of the coastal Southeast to focus on vertebrate remains, and to exclude...
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The Historical Zooarchaeology of New Orleans in Comparative Perspective (2016)
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The zooarchaeology of historical contexts in New Orleans has benefited significantly from analyses conducted by Dr. Elizabeth Reitz and her students and colleagues. Several of these analyses were conducted as part of cultural resource management projects that were primarily site specific. I present a comparative analysis of various zooarchaeological projects from New Orleans contexts to examine the contribution of Reitz and others to our understanding of past food practices, animal economics,...
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"Just Move On": Lessons from the Career of Dr. Betsy Reitz (2016)
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Betsy Reitz is universally admired as a scholar, mentor, and colleague, and known for her prodigious production of high-quality, interdisciplinary, and rigorous scholarship. She taught her many students that research should be question-driven, anthropologically significant but not disciplinary confined, and multiscalar, with an emphasis on the long view. Betsy has long crossed the traditional divide between pre- and post-Columbian archaeology, exploring long-term trends in fisheries exploitation...
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No Need for White-out: Building on Betsy's Work on Multiethnic Community Foodways in Spanish Florida (2016)
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Elizabeth Reitz has had a distinguished career partially built on her efforts to document exchanges in foodways as groups came together to form multiethnic communities. Her research investigating animal remains recovered from multiethnic communities in colonial Spanish Florida exemplify this work. She has shown that as Native Americans and Spaniards interacted, they blended their established food traditions. Part of this blending was the introduction of novel subsistence strategies (in both...
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On the Zooarchaeology of Bears in Southeastern North America (2016)
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Ever since Irving Hallowell's classic 1926 study of the special mythic status of bears in the Subarctic, anthropologists are generally aware that many peoples throughout the world have treated bears as something more than a straight forward subsistence resource. Hallowell attributed that special relationship between Subarctic humans and bears to some striking parallels between bear and human behaviors and physiologies. If that were indeed the case, then one would expect to see similar...
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The Reitz Stuff: A Faunal Perspective on El Niño from Coastal Peru (2016)
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For the last thirty years, zooarchaeological data from coastal Peru have provided groundbreaking insight into the Holocene history of El Niño, the interannual climatic phenomenon that affects global climate and human societies. Elizabeth J. Reitz has authored important studies with both of us on El Niño and faunal biogeography, and she served as a mentor to one of us in developing biochemical proxies for El Niño. In this paper, we review the history of faunal studies of El Niño and analyze...
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Shaping the South: Environmental Archaeology's impact on colonial archaeology of the American South and the Caribbean (2016)
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This paper argues that the incorporation of environmental archaeological data into long-term research programs can significantly influence theoretical and methodological practice thereby enriching and sometimes reshaping interpretations. We draw on our respective experiences of producing, consuming and integrating environmental data to reflect on the benefits of such collaborative endeavors. To illustrate our points, we use examples from the American South and the Caribbean to explore the ways...
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Zooarchaeology of Three PreHispanic Sites in the Southern Georgia Bight: Evidence for Cultural and Ecological Continuity, Flexibility and Resilience (2016)
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Zooarchaeological research in the central Georgia Bight has arrived at a point where human subsistence behavior over space and time can be modeled. Elizabeth J. Reitz and colleagues have offered a testable hypothesis that subsistence rested on three cultural and ecological pillars: continuity, flexibility and resilience. For nearly 5000 years, and possibly longer, resilient estuarine finfish taxa that easily recover from intensive harvest were most frequently exploited, while terrestrial and...