Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Kubicek. Patricia Richards.

Excavations at the Milwaukee County Poor Farm Cemetery (MCPFC) in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin in 1991 and 1992 recovered 1649 individuals associated with Milwaukee County’s practice from the mid-1800s through 1974 of providing burial for institutional residents, unidentified or unclaimed individuals sent from the Coroner’s Office, and community poor. In 2013, Historic Resource Management Services of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee recovered an additional 632 individual coffin burials representing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only AJ White. Lora Stevens. Varenka Lorenzi.

Determining the timing and magnitude of Cahokia’s demographic rise and fall is crucial to understanding the reasons for its advance and collapse. Fecal stanol biomarker analysis is an emergent geoarchaeological method that may provide a more direct record of Cahokia region population change than previous population estimates. This study analyzed sediment from Horseshoe Lake, Illinois for fecal stanol content to establish a population proxy of the Cahokia region. The stanol record indicates...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeffrey Rasic. Joshua Reuther. P. Gregory Hare. Robert J. Speakman.

The archaeological record of Eastern Beringia plays an important role in understanding global human dispersals and settlement, and is a proving ground for testing ideas about high latitude hunter-gatherer land use, technology, and socioeconomic interaction. Obsidian provenance studies provide an excellent means to address these issues. Since 2006 we have compiled, organized and generated new obsidian geochemical analyses for more than 11,000 artifacts from 1200 sites across Alaska and Yukon...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Keith Eppich.

In the course of 13 field seasons, archaeologists have carried out 23 operations across the ruined city of El Perú-Waka’. During these investigations, excavators recovered upwards of a million ceramic sherds from a wide variety of contexts; palaces, pyramids, residences, sheet middens, construction fill, ritual deposits, spoil piles, termination deposits, votive deposits, surface collections, burials, caches, and tombs. The excavation contexts are good enough, the quality of preservation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only George Bey. Stephanie Simms. Betsy Kohut.

This paper examines the evidence for what and how the Maya of the Puuc region ate during the long history of occupation of this region. Data collected from almost two decades of research by the Bolonchen Regional Archaeological Project and covering close to two millennium of occupation are used in this exploration of eating. Household archaeology primarily from the site of Kiuic and the suburban site of Stairway to Heaven, and ceramic data from throughout the BRAP study area provide insights...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shaelyn Rice. Geoffrey McCafferty. Sharisse McCafferty. Dieuwertje van Boekel.

Expanding on prior field seasons, the 2016 field school at El Rayo, with the support of the Institute for Field Research, continued the exploration of the unique Bagaces to Sapoa transition period site, located on the Asese Peninsula, Lake Nicaragua. This season focused of the excavation of four loci, continuing to explore previous questions regarding cultural activities in Pacific Nicaragua. Loci 2 and 4, which had been studied in previous field seasons were expanded, while new Loci 6 and 7...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carolina Guedes.

The use of digital photogrammetry and 3D scanning as tools for archaeological heritage record, analysis and dissemination has increased markedly in recent years. Using these technologies a post-doctoral project is currently in progress at the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology (MAE) of São Paulo University, Brazil with the scope to document, record and analyse the animal stone figurines collection at the Museum. The objects are threefold: 1) to use photogrammetry and 3D scanner technologies to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samuel Burns. Beau Kromberg.

The measurement of platform angles on lithic flakes by hand is notoriously difficult, and is plagued by intra- and inter-observer variability. The measurement method proposed in this poster uses 3D models of flakes loaded into Blender, a free open-source 3D design program. After identifying the platform, two points (a) and (b) are defined at the intersections of the left and right lateral margins and the platform. A line (a-b) is drawn between these two points, ignoring any platform roundedness...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shawn Fehrenbach. Ben Hammer.

Aerial photography with unmanned aerial systems (UASs), 3D modeling through photogrammetry, and the development of virtual reality environments are methods that are taking root within the discipline of archaeology. Developments in hardware and software over the past several years have led greater numbers of archaeologists to adopt these methods with more diverse applications. PaleoWest Archaeology, working under contract with our partners at PacArctic for Naval Facilities Engineering Command...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Van Alstyne.

On the Shivwits Plateau, there is scarce information concerning how the Virgin Branch Ancestral Puebloan people constructed their pueblos. This is a result of post-depositional processes that have destroyed much of the building materials. To overcome this hurdle, 3D Building Information Modeling (BIM) is allowing archaeologists to reconstruct these ancient structures digitally. These digital 3D models output volumetric data that are used to estimate material quantities, labor investments, and to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Roberto Campbell. Ismael Martínez.

Islands are territories that allow us to assess phenomena and processes in a way that is impossible to do in the mainland. One of these concerns the human interaction with animals that are usually considered as wild. The case of Mocha Island (Chile; South Pacific, 38,36°S) is remarkable because of its small size (50 km2), proximity to the mainland (30 km), three different and independent human occupation events, and an endemic terrestrial fauna constituted only by small reptiles, amphibians,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Flexner.

A mounded landscape in south Vanuatu provides archaeological evidence relating to chiefly performance, voyaging, and ritual transformation during a period of cross-cultural contacts spanning 400 years or more. The site of Kwaraka is located at the southern end of Tanna Island. The area has a view on clear days of the neighbouring islands Futuna and Aniwa, and there is ethnohistoric evidence of long-term patterns of interaction between Tannese people and the people of these nearby islands....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Tremblay. Daniel E. Ehrlich.

During excavation, it is often safer to record areas separately and later identify associations between strata across a site. Such practice waits until detailed analyses can be conducted and avoids erroneously comparing material from separate depositions. However, the process can lead to more identified strata than are truly present. This project considered relative frequencies of pottery fabrics as a multivariate dataset to characterize and analyze site formation at the Lower Town site of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lara Gonzalez Carretero. Dorian Q. Fuller.

Remains of archaeological cereal preparations are often recovered from archaeological Neolithic sites across the Near East and Europe through flotation. These are recognizable as seemingly amorphous charred fragments of plant material. The study of these charred fragments of ancient meals is of considerable importance because the identification of their components allows the characterization of the nature of the food types represented, and their preparation, provides insights into past culinary...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Albert. Caitlin Clark. Susan Kooiman. William Lovis.

There is no recorded maize (Zea mays ssp. mays) at Laurel or North Bay Initial/Middle Woodland sites in the northern Lake Michigan-Huron or Superior basins of the western Great Lakes, despite the presence of maize microbotanicals in Michigan, New York, and Quebec as early as 400 BC. To evaluate the potential for an early maize presence in this region, samples of carbonized food residues adhering to sixteen ceramic vessels from the Laurel/North Bay Winter site (20DE17) were processed and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angela Buttress.

This report focuses on the northern abalone (Haliotis kamtschatkana) recovered in the 2016 excavation of Hup’kisakuu7a (Site 93T) in Pacific Rim National Park. This study combines an analysis of the data recovered through archaeological excavation and column sampling at 93T, a review of neighbouring archaeological site reports, and the collection and measurement of a modern assemblage of abalone shells. The aim was to answer three research questions: first, how ubiquitous is the presence of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yue Li. Yue You. Yiting Liu. Nuo Xu. Jianxin Wang.

This research examines seven horse skeletons unearthed from the burials and sacrificial pits of the late Warring States Period to the early Western Han Dynasty at the Shirenzigou and Xigou sites in Xinjiang. Vertebrae were observed for lesions such as hyperostosis, asymmetry, spinal fusion, horizontal fractures on epiphyses, and dorsal inter-pressing or joining of the vertebrae. Because the abnormalities are similar to those identified as the result of horseback riding in archaeological research...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emilie LeBrell. Geoffrey McCafferty.

A desire for art to reflect social identity is made apparent through prolific representations of human faces in Pre-Columbian ceramics. The ceramic art of Greater Nicoya and the surrounding regions demonstrates an intrinsic drive to communicate distinct group characteristics and illustrates the importance of individuals’ bodies as instruments of both personal expression and social relationships. Physical expressions of collective identity foster a sense of belonging and satisfy the human desire...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Gusick. Jillian Maloney. Todd Braje. Jon Erlandson.

Methodological advances are reshaping our understanding of island colonization. Refinements in dating methods, paleoenvironmental reconstructions, and search techniques have resulted in discoveries that challenge outdated theories of islands as marginal to human migration, settlement, and subsistence. This is particularly true for research related to the initial peopling of the New World via a Pacific Coast route. Once considered irrelevant to the story of New World colonization, California’s...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam King. Terry Powis. Kong Cheong. Nilesh Gaikwad.

We recently identified residues indicative of the preparation of Datura in ceramic and shell vessels dating to the Mississippian period (900-1600 CE) of the southeastern United States in the collections of the Gilcrease Museum. Datura is a genus of flowering plants whose seeds and flowers contain tropane alkaloids that produce hallucinogenic effects when consumed by people. The use of Datura for a variety of medicinal ritual practices is well established among Native Americans today and in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joseph Pnewski.

Intensively recorded, researched, and utilized historic and archaeological sites present many unique opportunities and issues in their study and interpretation. One such site is Fort Snelling National Historic Landmark. The large amounts of historic map and archival data available throughout the history of Fort Snelling allows for both more complete, and more complex understandings of the site. The use of georeferenced archival maps can highlight and visualize a timeline for the progression of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erik Marsh.

Long-term cultural change can be non-linear and punctuated by brief episodes of accelerating history. Such episodes, or emergent phenomena, have been described by a diverse set of theoretical approaches such as complexity theory, complex adaptive systems, panarchy, resilience theory, "eventful" sociology and archaeology, and the Annales School of History. These episodes can result in profound, lasting changes for large groups of people, but can happen too fast to be clearly documented without...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Francisco Estrada-Belli.

Investigations in the thickly forested Peten region is complicated by lack of roads, water, communications, visibility and other things we often take for granted even in archaeology. In most cases the time it takes for results of such field work to reach a general audience can be measured in years. Many of us have turned to technology to alleviate this situation but the gains can be less than what is expected. The advent of GPS handheld devices have been useful to locate sites (and ourselves)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julio Mercader Florin. Robert Bird. Mariam Bundala. Fernando Diez-Martin. Manuel Dominguez-Rodrigo.

Several compendia have illustrated the reach of conventional approaches to exploring the origin of omnivorous diets. Included are the cost of developing large brains and bodies; tooth size/shape, enamel thickness, wear; and the chemical signal from diet on bones/teeth. Over the last decade, new interpretations of human origins have proposed a long history of fire dependence, suggesting humans are biologically adapted to cooked food. However, these studies have not provided direct indication of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelsey Hanson. Paula Bryant. James Skibo.

Recent research in the Upper Great Lakes region has demonstrated the importance of acorns as a dietary staple. As a plentiful and easily storable source of carbohydrates and fats, acorns provide an excellent dietary complement. Organic residue analysis of pottery sherds and fire-cracked rock from Grand Island, Michigan yielded lipid profiles consistent with nut oil, suggesting that the vessels may have been used to process acorns through boiling or simmering. In order to make many species of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chelsea Blackmore. Shankari Patel.

One of the strengths of prehistoric archaeology is its ability to document the full range of human variation. For Latin America, activist archaeology has the potential to inform postcolonial and Third World feminist critiques that challenge white supremacist legal systems that marginalize women of color and indigenous peoples. The false universalisms and cultural essentialisms found in human rights debates ignore the diverse experiences of women’s oppression, especially the indigenous, poor,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa LeCount. Kara Fulton. David W. Mixter. E. Christian Wells. Thomas R. Jamison.

This report describes the results of a geochemical analysis of nearly 1,000 samples from earthen and plaster surfaces at Actuncan, a prehispanic Maya city in western Belize. Studies of the social, political, and economic relationships between elites and commoners demonstrate that the lived experiences of both groups were dramatically different. However, we know little about how social roles and relationships impacted the organization and daily use of domestic and public spaces. Multivariate...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eszter Bánffy.

In the 6th millennium BC, first farmers reached the area between south east and central Europe, soon spreading into central Europe. About the character and identity of these first farmers at the boundary area, a series of new research results is available. At the boundary, harsh environmental conditions made their long well-working subsistence system unstable, as the ‘package’ of farming and mainly sheep and shifted to cattle keeping. Yet, it has hardly been investigated, what reflections of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bryna Hull. Jemer Eerkens. Reba Fuller.

This study examines human dietary responses to the Medieval Climatic Anomaly (MCA), an extended period of warmer and drier environmental conditions from AD 900-1300, in the Central Sierra Nevada Mountains of California. Stable isotope and radiocarbon analyses of human remains attributable to the Tuolumne Me-Wuk reveal individual-level dietary behaviors. Results show a region-specific "Central Sierran" pattern of resource use in the form of a distinctive isotopic signature relative to other areas...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shannon McPherron.

The orientations in three dimensions of clasts within a deposit are known to be informative on processes that formed that deposit. In archaeological sites, a portion of the clasts in the deposit are introduced by non-geological processes and these are typically systematically recorded with total stations during excavations. By recording a second point on elongated clasts it is possible to quickly and precisely capture their orientation. The statistical and graphical techniques for analyzing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stacy Dunn.

Adolf Francis Alphonse Bandelier (1840-1914) was an ethnologist and archaeologist best known for his work in the American Southwest. What is less well-known is Bandelier’s later years studying the ancient Andes, such as his 1892-1894 expedition on the central coast of Peru. Due to an unstable political environment, he moved his expedition to the Bolivian highlands and instead wrote about highland myths. Shortly thereafter, he passed away while pursuing historical sources in Seville, Spain to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sandra Olsen.

How petroglyph images are recorded in the field is instrumental for analysis, archiving and publishing data. Being prepared to implement multiple advanced imaging techniques provides numerous advantages. Because lighting conditions, preservation and manufacturing techniques vary from one petroglyph locality to the next, having the flexibility to apply different imaging options as appropriate greatly facilitates data retrieval. Many archaeological projects require that the bulk of the image...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Cohen.

Regime change is a social process that has occurred throughout human history and yet much is still unknown about how political developments shape local communities. This paper examines the impacts of the Late Postclassic (1350-1530 CE) Purépecha Empire on residents at Angamuco, an ancient city within the Lake Pátzcuaro Basin imperial heartland in Michoacán, Mexico. Imperial narratives in ethnohistoric texts emphasize that authorities controlled craft production, tribute, and social practices....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Peresolak.

The Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR) manages over two million acres of state land. Forbes State Forest, located in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, is home to numerous cultural resources, including the Morrow Jones cabin. Given its location on state-owned property, neglect and natural decay are greater threats to this historic house than development, yet DCNR has limited funding and a finite amount of time to devote to such resources. Detailed study of this house...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ani St. Amand. Daniel Sandweiss. Alice Kelley.

Los Morteros is a preceramic mound located on the North Coast of Peru composed of anthropogenic structures interlayered with aeolian deposits. A study combing multidisciplinary approaches and methodologies was used to evaluate the hypothesis of mound construction through intentional aeolian sand deposition via manipulation of strong winds across the desert environment. Wind velocities were measured across the site and in the surrounding valley. A complex wind model was created utilizing these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stanley Ambrose. Jibril Hirbo.

Neanderthal and Denisovan genetic admixture with Eurasian modern humans, and a "signature" of Neanderthal admixture in African populations, are widely accepted "facts". Inferences of admixture are based mainly on the assumption that Yoruba, San and/or Pygmy populations contain all African genetic variation. Variants shared among Neanderthals and modern Eurasians, but not present in these Africans, are assumed to reflect 2-4% admixture. However, genetic diversity and geographic structure are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Micca Metz.

This historical archaeological analysis examines differences in the age of mortality for US Army personnel who fought for America in the last 100 years. This study centers on the historical data gathered from historic mortuary monuments and compare that data with contemporary mortuary monuments. Specifically, I focus on the timing of death for returning veterans and the increased occurrence over time and by war, as reported by Veterans Affairs (2016). The data are separated by years of service,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Annabeth Headrick. Dorie Reents-Budet.

The Teotihuacan-style censers from Guatemala have received relatively little attention since the 1980s. Following upon earlier suggestions for a merchant-warrior presence in the Escuintla region, this study examines the butterfly imagery on a group of Teotihuacan-style censers in the national collections of Guatemala. This group of unprovenanced artifacts has research value because (1) its original imagery is intact, and (2) all have been sampled for paste analysis (instrumental neutron...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dawn Hadley. Elizabeth Craig-Atkins. Jenny Crangle.

The practice of charnelling human remains has recently been revealed to have been widespread in medieval England, with chapels specially built for this purpose. However, this practice ceased at the time of the early sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation, and the charnel chapels were emptied and in some cases demolished. A rare exception is at Rothwell (Northamptonshire, UK), which survived the Reformation intact, apparently because it was closed up at this time with the charnel in situ. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Moeana Franklin. Nick Kardulias.

The original age at death estimations of the adult individuals excavated from Helton Mound 20 (Middle to Late Woodland) in the Lower Illinois Valley were re-evaluated using Transition Analysis. In addition, a taphonomic evaluation of each individual was undertaken to determine the ways in which the bones would have been modified during their interment. The goal is to understand how the current recognition of taphonomic processes differs from the original estimations from the 1970s and how that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Allison Mickel.

Digital recording methods offer a range of new means of collecting, organizing, and presenting archaeological information, which lead to new ways of thinking about the past. Capitalizing on the intuitive design of digital technologies additionally creates the potential for communities whose voices have been missing from the archaeological record to contribute their perspectives. In this paper, I draw upon my experiences experimenting with multimedia recording strategies at Petra, Jordan and at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Whitley.

Recent theoretical over-emphasis on human agency and denial of the significance of socio-cultural structure presents a radical challenge to a century of research. It implies that Durkheim, Boas, Weber, etc., are irrelevant, and that long-standing structures of inequality (e.g., of gender or race) somehow do not exist or are not important. Examination of recent human-agency studies illustrates that, instead of studying human agency as action, interpretations are based on the kinds of structures...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Owens. David Byers. Molly Boeka-Cannon.

This talk presents a new, non-destructive, empirical, and replicable method for aging bison teeth with mandibular tooth photos and ArcGIS digital mapping. Tooth eruption, growth, and attrition can document age-at-death, which informs on hunting strategies, occupation seasonality, environmental conditions, and herd health. Previous dentition studies utilize numerous tooth metrics that commonly require specimen-destructive research methods. Also, occlusal wear age estimates rely on subjective wear...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Krigbaum. Christina Giovas. Scott Fitzpatrick.

Light isotope data for bone collagen, bone apatite, and tooth enamel apatite have been collected for prehistoric agouti (Dasyprocta sp.) recovered from secure archaeological contexts on Carriacou (Sabazan and Grand Bay) and Nevis (Coconut Walk) in the Lesser Antilles, West Indies. Stable carbon isotope ratios of individual specimens exhibit a wide range of values for both bone collagen (-20.0‰ to -11.5‰; avg = -17.8‰) and bone apatite (-13.6 to -6.5‰), with apatite-collagen spacing also quite...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Countryman. Gregory Zaro.

Generalized models of Mediterranean agroecosystems often elide the specific historical and political contexts in which food production necessarily takes place. This paper presents new historical-ecological research currently underway at the multi-period settlement site of Nadin-Gradina near the Adriatic coast of southern Croatia, a typically "Mediterranean" landscape that has hosted a dynamic social-political history of repeated invasion, migration, and colonization by a variety of human actors....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chris Stevens. Dorian Fuller.

Mesopotamia and the Yellow River of China had long trajectories from early farming through to primary urbanisation, but to what extent do the archaeobotanical records indicate parallel developments in terms of agriculture? In both areas agriculture diversifies during the later Neolithic, with an increasing range of annual field crops as well as evidence for the cultivation of some perennials (tree fruits or vines). However, diversity was much higher in western Asia, from both a highly diverse...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alemseged Beldados. A. Catherine D'Andrea.

Archaeobotanical analysis of samples from the site of Mezber are underway with the goal of investigating the early agricultural history of northern highland Ethiopia. Mezber is a Pre-Aksumite site excavated by the Eastern Tigrai Archaeological Project (ETAP) with cultural deposits dating from 1600 BCE to CE 1, and occupied over four phases. In 2014-16, a total of 59 soil samples ranging in size from 1.8 to 7.5 liters was processed by manual flotation. Macrobotanical remains from light fractions...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeremy Kulisheck. Sandra Arazi-Coambs. Jess Gisler. Kathi Turner. Christina Sinkovec.

The Cañada Alamosa is the northernmost frontier of the ancestral Pueblo Mimbres people of the U.S. Southwest. Intensive survey of a side canyon has defined a distinct agricultural landscape composed of small pueblos, farmsteads, field houses, shrines, and other features. Occupation was centered around alluvial fans located on the first terrace above the drainage, fed by runoff from upper terraces, rather than the floodwaters of the drainage bottom itself. While the Cañada Alamosa has significant...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Raymond Mueller. Jessica Hedgepeth Balkin. Arthur Joyce.

As part of the larger Río Verde Settlement Project (RVSP), soil sampling of different physiographic zones was conducted during the spring of 2016 in the lower Río Verde Valley. The major goal of this sampling program was to assess variation in soil fertility across the region, as related specifically to maize agriculture. The lower Verde Valley was broadly divided into four physiographic zones (floodplain, coastal plain, piedmont, and secondary valleys). Previous studies identified the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Guiyun Jin. XianJun Fan. GuoKe Chen.

The combination of crops and weeds found in the site reflects a typical rainfed agriculture dominated by foxtail millet and broomcorn millet. Under the external cultural influences, wheat and barley started to be cultivated. Since late Machang culture and, through the agricultural development during the "Transitional type" period, were widely cultivated during the period of Siba culture, when marijuna appeared in the crop assemblages. The integrated study of archaeobotanical and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adriana Sanchez.

Mensabak Lake, in the Lacandon Rainforest, is surrounded by caves that were used as pilgrimage destinations and for different rituals in the Protohistoric period. The role of Maya women in the rituals and ceremonies has been delimited to fertility and dependency stereotypes not only in the historical documents but in the archaeological research. This presentation discusses Maya women’s participation in a multi-regional pilgrimage network having Mensabak as the epicentre.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kate Yeske.

Ethnographic accounts of communal hunting activities in Alaska are abundant, yet archaeological evidence of this practice is scarce. The inuksuit--elaborate stacked rock cairns--that demarcate many game drives in Alaska provide evidence of these important traditional subsistence strategies. Improved documentation of these features will facilitate a better understanding of not only their function but their meaning to the original builders and implementers of game drive systems. Comprehensive...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bradley Russell.

The modern residents of Yucatán, Mexico blend traditional Maya beliefs in a pantheon of ancient gods and other supernatural forces with more recent Catholic traditions flowing from centuries of Spanish colonial influence. This paper compares and contrasts modern rituals from the Yucatec Maya village of Telchaquillo, Yucatán. Each rite was associated with a local cenote, limestone sinkholes that along with caves serve as accesses to the Maya underworld and homes to the gods themselves. My...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lawrence Todd. Rachel Reckin. Emily Brush. Robert Kelly. William Dooley.

The alpine archaeological record above 3000m of Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem has received much less research attention than the adjacent plains, basins, and foothills. We have been working in an area of NW Wyoming where dense surface stone tool scatters, stone features (including some of the highest elevation habitation stone circles in the region) are associated with dwindling ice patches that have yielded both perishable artifactual material and an array of wood and bone that provides...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Weyrich. Keith Dobney. Alan Cooper.

Interpreting the evolutionary history of bacterial communities within the human body (microbiota) is key to understanding the origin of many modern diseases. The link between humans and their microbiota can also be exploited to examine and track the extent and severity of human adaptation to the environment and impacts on health. Here, we utilize a shotgun sequencing approach to examine ancient DNA preserved within dental calculus from a wide range of ancient South Americans (n=162)....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nadia Johnson. Kenneth Hirth.

Altica’s location, in the Patlachique Range 10 km away from the Otumba obsidian source, suggests a potentially significant role in the distribution of Otumba obsidian. Altica may have served as an important middleman and processing site in Formative obsidian exchange, but a greater understanding of the nature of these exchange relationships is required to define this role. This paper combines geochemical sourcing and technological data from obsidian from nine Early and Middle Formative sites,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Carballo. Oralia Cabrera.

Craft specialization and exchange feature prominently in explanations for the development of the first complex societies in Mesoamerica. It is clear from analyses of surface collections at Altica that during the Early and early Middle Formative periods (c. 1300-850 B.C.) its inhabitants exported obsidian tools and imported pottery from long distances, including the southern Gulf Coast. Altica is one of the few early agricultural settlements located in the northern Basin of Mexico from which we...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wesley Stoner. Deborah Nichols.

The Altica Project, that began in 2014, is an important step in addressing the limited problem-oriented research at Formative sites in the Basin of Mexico for over two decades. Altica is the earliest-known settled village in the Teotihuacan Valley and one of the only first-farming village sites in the Basin of Mexico that has not been engulfed by the urban sprawl of Mexico City. Despite its small size and remote location, Altica was an important piece in Early and Middle Formative exchange...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Knut Andreas Bergsvik.

Caves and rockshelters occur frequently in Norway and they were extensively used as dwelling-sites for humans in most periods of the prehistory. During the transition to the medieval period (AD 550 – 1500), however, archaeological excavations show that their use changed significantly. From then on, they mainly served as offering sites, burial sites and as workshops for metal smiths and stone masons. This change may have been related to a change in the perceptions of caves and rockshelters. One...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Oswaldo Chinchilla.

An archaeological collection from finca Pompeya in the Antigua Guatemala valley provides significant information about Late Classic interaction with the adjacent Pacific coast. Excavated in 1893, the collection was eventually scattered to several museums in Germany, the United States, and Guatemala. However, it can be reconstructed from a photograph made not long after the discovery, and from newspaper reports that provide rough descriptions of the excavations. The objects themselves are still...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Belem Zúñiga Arellano. Adrian Velazquez-Castro.

The anahuatl pectoral is one of the shell ornaments that have been found in the offerings of the great temple of Tenochtitlan. In paintings and sculptures, it is worn by Tezcatlipoca and deities that are stars and warriors, as Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli and Mixcoatl. Inside the offerings, the anahuatl are associated to items related to the underworld, sacrifice and war. This has led to propose that these pectorals represented the stars, which were the warriors during the night. The presence of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tyler Laughlin. Anna Dean.

The Debra L. Friedkin Site (41BL1239) near Salado, Texas, is the oldest known, continually occupied site in North America. While the previous focus of excavations and analyses at the Friedkin Site has been on Paleoindian strata, this site also has extensive early and late Archaic components, and recent excavations in 2015 and 2016 uncovered a 3 m x 5 m series of five overlapping hearth features in the late Archaic strata (14C 4,000-1,250 B.P.). Projectile points, tools and organic materials...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Brush. Lawrence Todd. Rachel Reckin.

Obsidian samples from a variety of sites across Northwest Wyoming have been sourced using X-ray fluorescence and analyzed in order to determine the importance of a relatively unheard of source from the Cougar Pass region of the Absaroka Mountain Range. Artifacts manufactured with obsidian nodules from Cougar Pass have been found in archaeological contexts across Northwest Wyoming, extending as far as a presently unknown kilometer range from their source. The wide range of specimens from a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Deibel. Corinne Deibel. Ye Wa. Liping Yang.

Field studies were performed at the Yangguanzhai Neolithic site near Xi’an, China, using an Olympus Delta Premium portable XRF spectrometer and an Agilent ExoScan FTIR spectrometer. 932 ceramic sherds collected from nine locations across the site were selected and classified based on color (red, tan and brown), decorations (painted, rope impression - cord or thread, and plain), and time period (Miaodigou and Banpo IV). Each sherd was broken, so that the analysis could be performed on a clean...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sebastian Warmlander.

At the Hrísbrú site, located in the Mosfell valley just a few kilometers outside Iceland’s capital Reykjavik, the Mosfell Archaeological Project has excavated a 10th-11th century farmstead including a traditional Viking Age longhouse, a farm church with an associated cemetery, and a pagan cremation site. At the cemetery and the cremation site human remains in varying degrees of preservation have been unearthed, while in the longhouse a rich material record has been uncovered consisting of e.g....

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Farley.

This paper includes an overview of the Calluna Hill site (59-73) in Mystic, Connecticut, a 1637 Pequot village burned down immediately after the English siege of Mystic Fort. The site offers the opportunity to explore important methodological and theoretical questions. Here I focus on the village as the location of intense intercultural exchange and cultural entanglement. Calluna Hill offers insights into the complex ways that the Pequot consumed European-made goods and participated in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Humberto Nation. Leah Minc. Holley Moyes. James Brady.

The occurrence of "foreign" ceramic materials as well as the breakage and transport of speleothems during ancient Maya cave visitations have become an increasingly well-documented phenomenon (Brady et al. 1997). This phenomenon has raised several questions such as the spatial and temporal extent of these interactions, practices, meaning and specifically what does all this tell us about the relationship between Maya polities and proximal or distant caves. Geochemical analysis of geological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nataly Bolaño-Martínez. Oscar Uriel Mendoza-Vargas. Erika Lucero Robles-Cortes.

Numerous fish from diverse species have been found inside the Great Temple offerings. These were transported from the coast to Tenochtitlan. During the seventh field season of the Templo Mayor Project, five sawfish rostra were found inside three offerings. By analyzing macro and microscopic structures, and through the comparison with modern specimens from the Ichthyology Collection of the Institute of Marine Sciences and Limnology, at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, these animals...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Chan.

Food played an important role in ancient Egyptian funerary practices, but there has not been an examination of the types of food offered. I examined food offerings and their corresponding imagery in Theban tombs from New Kingdom, Egypt (1550- 1070 BCE) in order to analyze how food in funerary rituals changed over time. Through museum records, excavation reports, and examinations of artifacts in the British Museum, the Petrie Museum and the Museo Egizio in Turin, I determined the most common food...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Nicolas. Anthony Morales. Melanie Saldana.

CA-SBR-14 is a rock shelter site located in the South Range of Naval Air Weapons Station (NAWS), China Lake in the west central Mojave Desert. Subsurface investigation of the site has provided important contextual data that challenges previous interpretations of prehistoric use of the area. Artifacts collected include milling slabs on the surface of the site, fire-affected fragments that were recovered from subsurface test units, and three handstones that appear to have been deliberately placed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heath Bentley. Lauren Sullivan. James Garber.

From 2009 to the present, an abundance of whole and partial glass bottle remains of various types have been recovered throughout excavations on St. George’s Caye, Belize. Much of the glass collection has been found within the island’s cemetery among an assemblage of various other historic artifacts. The majority of the bottles and bottle fragments have been identified as eighteenth and nineteenth century English cylindrical bottles. In 2016, analysis of this assemblage commenced in order to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kami Ahrens. Phil Geib.

In the early 1990s, excavations conducted at Old Man Cave in southeastern Utah unearthed various Basketmaker II materials, including an incredibly well-preserved bundle of burden bands made from human hair, dog hair, and yucca cordage. Radiocarbon dating places the manufacture of these textiles between 170 BC and AD 135. The bundle, when unfolded, contained a complex set of artifacts, including two smaller fragments that appear to be carrying bands, and another far more unique woven artifact....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Roberto Rosado Ramirez. Heather McKillop. E. Cory Sills.

In this paper we present the results of archaeological research at two Classic period Maya salt works currently submerged in a shallow salt-water lagoon in Paynes Creek National Park, Southern Belize. These two contexts are part of the more than 100 locations so far identified in the area where salt was produced by boiling brine over fires near wooden structures. Through the study of marine sediment recovered at excavations from sites 24 and 35, we were able to document environmental and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kurt Dilores. Heather McKillop.

Archaeological research in Paynes Creek National Park, Belize provides insight into environmental changes over time. Sea-level rise has affected coastal Maya settlements during both the Classic and Postclassic Periods. Marine sediment samples from five submerged Classic Period Maya sites were exported under permit to the Archaeology lab at Louisiana State University where the samples were analyzed using loss-on ignition and microscopic sorting. The results from loss-on ignition as well as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julia Pérez Pérez. Carmen Cristina Adriano-Moran. Ximena Maria Chávez Balderas.

Paleodiet analysis from individuals found inside the Great Temple ritual deposits have been succesfully conducted by analyzing carbon and nitrogen isotopes, with the aim of distinguishing between marine and terrestrial diets. Recently, we incorporated microbotanical analysis of dental calculus to these studies in order to search for plants remains, with the goal of having a broad picture of ancient diet and paramasticatory use of the oral cavity. For this purpose we selected individuals with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elanor Sonderman.

Conejo Shelter (41VV162) is a perennially dry rockshelter in the Lower Pecos region of southwest Texas. This shelter was excavated in the late 1960s by the Texas Archeological Salvage Project, an offshoot of the joint Smithsonian and National Park Service River Basin Survey program, as part of mitigation efforts during construction and inundation of Amistad Reservoir. As is common among the rockshelter habitation sites in this region, the artifact assemblage from Conejo Shelter is largely...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lynn Dodd. Kevin Mercy. Nolan Leuvano. Su Jin Lee.

Modeling of late Pleistocene and early Holocene coastal regions in the northern Channel Islands and globally has provided important foundations for understanding impacts of sea level rise on the archaeological record, near coastal communities and environments during the past 20,000 years. A complex, effective model of suitable coastal locations for human settlement and habitation takes into account myriad variables, including resources such as water and less-quantifiable, cultural causes. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yu Han.

The Shangjing city site is located on the boundary between agricultural and herding subsistence economies in the Western Liao River Basin, eastern Inner Mongolia. The site was used as the Upper capital in the Liao Dynasty (A.D 916 - A.D. 1125) and the Northern capital city in the Jin Dynasty (A.D. 1115 - A.D. 1234). In 2013, several burials in the Liao and Jin Periods were unearthed, and more than 36,000 faunal remains, including bones and teeth, were collected systematically. Although Liao and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michelle Carpenter.

Our current knowledge of the historic fort of Jamestown in Virginia has developed through interpretation of the archaeological record and historical documents. The success of all colonies in the New World depended on the integral ability to produce food. Prior to developing a stable food source, the colonists at Jamestown relied heavily on those provisions they brought with them from England. We can learn about these provisions from ship manifests, colonists’ diaries, and inventory lists....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kat Loftis. Robert Speakman.

The presence of exogenous organic carbon is a major concern when radiocarbon dating bone. A particular source of error and frustration in the field of radiocarbon dating has been the analysis of bone that has undergone humification. Humification occurs during burial and results from a combination of two distinct processes: Maillard reactions involving indigenous organic carbon, and the complexation of collagen with soil humic substances. Soil humic substances—composed of fulvic acids, humic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amber VanDerwarker.

Paleoethnobotanists continue to push plants into the realm of social archaeology, particularly in terms of examining how plants articulated with ancient ritual practices. The examination of the connection between plants and ritual, however, is not a straightforward process—researchers must first appropriately identify special contexts and/or foods, after which they must attribute meaning to the contexts and events they have identified. This presentation focuses on the first step – identification...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Dello-Russo. Banks Leonard. Robin Cordero.

Accuracy in the identification of Late Pleistocene-Early Holocene open activity areas and the subsequent inference of human behavior requires that non-behavioral causes for differential spatial patterning be considered before approaching the question of how patterning reflects human activities. Such challenges in the interpretation of behavioral patterning are exemplified at the Water Canyon Paleoindian site. In this paper, we initially describe the lithic and bone assemblages recovered from the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Garrett Briggs.

Wupatki Pueblo is one of the best known pre-Hispanic settlements in northern Arizona. Unfortunately, very few excavation reports exist and only a couple of successful dendrochronological analyses have been published. Through a reexamination of wooden construction elements, legacy data from previous publications, and unpublished field notes, stored at the Laboratory of Tree-ring Research, this paper presents the results of the first wood-use behavior analysis at Wupatki Pueblo. The use of a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kerry Sagebiel. Helen Haines.

Maya archaeologists commonly discover "smash-and-trash" deposits, collections consisting of large quantities of broken sherds, lithics, faunal materials, and other remains, in varying contexts on Maya sites. Interpretations of these deposits vary from simple trash or midden deposits, to remains of feasting, to termination and other rituals. These interpretations are often strongly influenced by the theoretical and analytical approaches taken by the excavators. At Ka’Kabish, Belize, a series of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric McLay.

This paper will explore indigenous and archaeological ways of understanding "inland shell middens" in the Salish Sea on the Northwest Coast, British Columbia, Canada. Archaeological evidence suggests inland shell middens represent depositional practices that may have embodied new strategies of social memory and ritual practice beginning in the Marpole Phase (2400 to 1200/1000 calBP). To move beyond the deeply-plumbed Northwest Coast ethnographic literature to interpret the archaeological past,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Lindeman. Henry Wallace.

The transition to the early Classic Period (ca. A.D. 1100-1300) in the Tucson Basin has its roots in the disintegration of long-lived pre-Classic Period (ca. A.D. 500-1100) villages in the 11th century. The break-up of these villages engendered a variety of responses among the constituent social groups including the use of ancestral ties to place, real or constructed, to stake claims to land. Early Classic period settlement at the site of AA:12:46 begins during the fluid period immediately...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claudia Leon Romero.

Cacao had a transcendental role in the life of prehistoric people of Mesoamerica, becoming part of their economic, ideological and social system. Due to the morphological and environmental characteristics necessary for the growth of cacao tree, the main producers were concentrated in places like southern Mexico and Central America. However, written sources of the first colonizers in Yucatan disclose that the indigenous nobility of that time had at their disposal cacao orchards in different...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rissa Trachman.

Investigations at the ancient Maya city of Dos Hombres have been guided by an interest in social, political and economic organization, based on architecture and material culture remains. Excavations in the civic ceremonial center of Dos Hombres have been focused in the northern plaza, a very public space that likely was a place of commerce, public ritual and sacred space, thereby the prime backdrop for publicly legitimizing authority. Newly excavated data, especially architectural exposures as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ginevra Toniello. Dana Lepofsky. Kirsten Rowell.

Clam gardens, anthropogenic rock-walled terraces built at the lowest intertidal, are part of an ancient system of mariculture of the Indigenous people of the Northwest Coast of North America. The construction of clam gardens increased shellfish production by increasing ideal clam habitat and creating substrate preferred for clam growth. On Northern Quadra Island, where there is a dense concentration of clam gardens, we assess bivalve productivity of clam gardens by 1) calculating how much clam...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Natasha Salter. Amy Groesbeck. Kirsten Rowell. Anne Salomon.

Emerging evidence suggests that Northwest Coast First Nations sustained and enhanced shellfish production through features known as clam gardens, intertidal rock-walled terraces, built in the late Holocene. Experiments and surveys have revealed that clam gardens are 2-4 times more productive than non-modified clam beaches, supporting greater densities, biomass, and higher growth rates of important clam species. While heightened productivity within clam gardens is partly attributable to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cedric Habiyaremye. Jade d'Alpoim Guedes. Kevin Murphy.

Millets are among the world’s oldest crops. Unique characteristics such as their adaptation to high temperatures, drought conditions, marginal environments and low-input farming systems, make millets promising rotational in diverse agro-environments across the U.S. Millets could play a vital role in the diversification of cropping systems and provides a regionally available source of highly nutritious cereal grain. Despite being a very early domesticated cereal crop, and a major food source in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Anthony.

New methods for analyzing ancient human DNA are introducing a new "molecular archaeology". aDNA permits us to detect mating networks, to see ancestry evolve across generations as populations expanded or died out, to track migrants and their genes across geographic space, and to say whether and with what frequency migrants and the indigenous population mated at the destination. aDNA analysis is an unprecedented tool for the study of ancient migrations, kinship, and biological adaptation. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dawei Cai. Quanjia Chen. Hui Zhou. Dongya Y Yang.

The Houtaomuga site is located on the east bank of Xinhuangpao Lake, in Da'an County, Jilin Province, Northeast China. According to the archaeological excavations, the Houtaomuga site can be divided into seven phases from the early Neolithic to the Late Bronze Age (8000-2050 BP). Although many Bos skeletal remains were found in the phases Houtaomuga III (6300-5500 cal. BP) and Houtaomuga IV (5000 cal. BP), it was very difficult to identify to the species level. In this study, ancient DNA...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Royle. Dongya Y. Yang.

Excavations of Charlie Lake Cave (HbRf-39) in northeastern British Columbia, Canada, have recovered well-preserved faunal remains from stratified deposits that span the Late Pleistocene and Holocene. These remains represent a variety of taxa, including amphibians, birds, fish, mammals, and reptiles. A previous morphological analysis of the fish remains from the site (n=1,235) identified the majority of the fish remains as sucker (Catostomus sp.) (n=669). Due to bone fragmentation and other...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Antonia Rodrigues. Chelsey Geralda Armstrong.

It is now generally accepted that humans are the primary drivers of environmental change; virtually no ecosystem has escaped our influence. With increasing awareness of the impact of humanity on the biosphere, researchers have begun to focus on understanding, protecting and perpetuating biological diversity at all scales and levels of biological organization. One of the best ways to understand current and future anthropogenic impacts on biodiversity is by studying their effects in the past....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meradeth Snow. Clare Super. Anna Marie Prentiss.

Proteins and DNA can be trapped in the microcracks on the surface of stone tools, which can then be extracted and analyzed to aid in inferring the use of the tool (Shanks et al. 2001; 2005). This nondestructive method involves the use of sonication to release DNA from the microcracks, then amplification of regions of mitochondrial DNA that are species specific. This technique was applied to ground and chipped stone from the Bridge River site in British Columbia. Focus on groundstone was of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jiawei Li. Ye Zhang. Xiyan Wu. Yongbin Zhao. Hui Zhou.

The genetic diversity of the ancient Mongols, especially the Gold family of Genghis Khan remains unclear. Gangga site was a nomadic site dated to the 8th to 10th centuries AD in the HulunBuir grassland, northeast China. This site belonged to the Shiwei population, believed to be the direct ancestors of the ancient Mongols. Nine graves at the Gangga site were excavated with log coffins, which were considered the characteristic burial custom of the royal ancient Mongols, included the Gold family...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ash Matchett.

Studies into ancient DNA have advanced significantly in the last few years, but these have largely been absent in tropical environments. In the Caribbean, a number of questions still pertain as to the bioarchaeology of the indigenous pre-Columbian populations and the exact origin of these early inhabitants. Focusing on the skeletal remains of a late Saladoid population from Punta Candelero site (AD 640-1200), three correlated and simultaneous studies have been coordinated with the aim to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Xin Zhao. Dongya Yang. Jing Yuan. Xiaoling Dong. Hui Zhou.

This study aims to use ancient DNA techniques to characterize the genetic features of ancient domesticated cattle in order to trace the origin and spread of cattle in ancient China from eight Late Neolithic and Bronze Age sites in Northern China. DNA was successfully extracted from ancient cattle bone or tooth samples in dedicated ancient DNA labs following vigorous protocols for contamination controls. This study was focused on amplifying mitochondrial D-loop using standard PCR techniques....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meagan Dennison.

Skeletal remains of domestic dogs, particularly dog burials, are common from prehistoric archaeological sites in the Southeastern United States. Efforts to describe these ancient canines have traditionally focused on body size and cranial morphology, however, more recently paleopathology has played a key role in understanding ancient canine lifeways and the interactions between humans and domestic dogs. Mortuary analysis can also bolster interpretations of life histories and dogs’ roles within...