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

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hannah Mattson.

As early as the sixteenth century, Spanish explorers noted the abundance of turquoise and shell jewelry adorning the Pueblo residents of the Rio Grande Valley and southern Colorado Plateau. In addition to serving as aesthetically pleasing objects of bodily decoration, these ornaments figure prominently in Pueblo creation and migration stories and are vital to the performance of various ritual practices, including ceremonial dances and the making of offerings and prayers. Archaeological research...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Kopperl. Kenneth M. Ames. Christian Miss.

The Bear Creek site (45KI839) in Washington State’s central Puget lowland is among the earliest lithic artifact-bearing, professionally excavated archaeological sites on the Pacific coast between Haida Gwaii and the Santa Barbara Channel. Data recovery excavations in 2013 provided an unprecedented view of Native American settlement in a rapidly changing coastal lowland setting during the Late Pleistocene-Holocene (LPH) transition. We summarize the results of these excavations and attendant...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charlotte Beck. Amanda Taylor.

The lithic assemblage from Bear Creek (45KI839), a late Pleistocene-early Holocene site in King County, Washington, is representative of the Western Stemmed Tradition (WST), likely the oldest lithic tradition in most areas west of the Rocky Mountains. It is followed in the Pacific Northwest by the Olcott Tradition. Although some argue that Olcott represents an intrusion from Alaska, archaeological evidence supports in situ development from the WST. In the Great Basin the WST is biface oriented,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Berres.

The American black bear figured prominently in the visual arts, rituals, ceremonies, and cosmological beliefs of Native peoples inhabiting Midwest North America through antiquity. Bears are almost universally perceived as great Lower World spiritual beings possessing the power to cause or cure illness, maintain life, and change its form where bears become people and vice versa. Their remains and images are often found in mortuary ritual contexts – a powerful means of communicating emotions and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Ciani.

Archaeological evidence of prehistoric bear hunting and bear veneration in the northern Rocky Mountains and northwestern Plains is presented. Ethnographic documents and the writings of trappers, traders, and explorers are assessed in order to establish an interpretative framework to help decipher archaeological contexts in the region that include bear remains and rock art depicting bears. Examining prehistoric archaeological contexts in Montana and Wyoming within this framework suggests evidence...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gregory Waselkov.

Historical accounts and ethnographic studies of the Indians of greater southeastern North America dating from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries contain abundant information on native people’s attitudes toward black bears (Ursus americanus). These records provide a basis for inferences about changes in subsistence exploitation of bear populations in the Southeast over the last five centuries, while offering clues about longer-term non-subsistence relationships between bears and humans that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hannah O'Regan.

There has been a very strong relationship between human societies and the brown bear (Ursus arctos) in many different places and cultures. The bear has had multiple roles in European societies, from the ancient (and modern) epitome of the wild, through religious symbol to the arenas of the Roman Empire, and their later use as entertainment. At what point does the bear’s position change in society from an animal to be feared, to one to be mocked? In terms of captive management, a fully grown bear...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cristina Verdugo. Kimberly Zhu. Lars Fehren-Schmitz.

The prurient element in the popular notion of the Maya sacrifice of "beautiful virgins" during the first half of the twentieth century (Frost and Arnold 1909; Willard 1926) appears to have made researchers wary of the topic of gender in study of human sacrifice. The interest in human sacrifice arose in the 1990s at the same time as the formulation of the warfare hypothesis for the collapse of Maya civilization (Demerast 1990) so that models of human sacrifice tended to assume that victims were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Prince.

The intensive Historic Period exploitation of beaver and other fur-bearing mammals, especially those that are small bodied, has typically been seen as a fur trade phenomena that can be explained in terms of optimizing returns of both material capital and prestige represented by European goods through the use of more efficient technologies introduced by Europeans. If this were strictly the case, we might expect to find a greater representation of the remains of beaver and small fur-bearers in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nathan Stevens. Adrian Whitaker. Jeffrey Rosenthal.

Bedrock mortars were an integral part of intensive acorn economies in Native California and are a prominent feature of the Late Holocene archaeological record. Construction of these milling features also indicates a strong investment in particular locations on the landscape. Ethnographic evidence suggests the importance of local acorn crops led to ownership and defense of property and resource rights in many areas. Human Behavioral Ecology offers a framework for examining the conditions that may...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Arthur. Matthew Curtis. Susan Kooiman. Kathryn Arthur.

Porridges and beer make up a majority of the household diet throughout much of rural Africa and could possibly be some of the earliest foods produced. In Africa, pottery is one of the primary culinary tools used to make both porridges and beer. This ethnoarchaeological and archaeological research explores pottery using use-alteration and morphological analyses from the Gamo of southern Ethiopia to indicate the use of pottery as a culinary tool. Beer and porridges are considered luxury foods...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Jansson.

How did the ash fall from the Mount Mazama eruption (7682–7584 cal. yr BP (Egan et al. 2015)) affect the people on the Northwestern Plains who experienced it? Data from 24GL304 (the Billy Big Spring Site) in northcentral Montana is used to investigate this question. Excavations conducted in 1952, 1954, 1971 by Thomas Kehoe and in 2016 by our team all found extensive Middle and Late Plains Archaic deposits, but in 2016 we discovered a ~10 cm thick layer of ash from this eruption. This poster...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kazuhiro Uzawa. Mai Takigami. Yuji Seki.

Our research on faunal remains from the Pacopampa and the Kuntur wasi sites has shown that Camelid breeding began during the Late Formative period (800 – 500 BC) in the northern highlands of Peru. However, motives for the introduction and usage of these animals remain obscure. We conducted multi-disciplinary analyses of the camelid remains from the Pacopampa site to investigate breeding and utilization patterns of these animals. The Sr and O isotope values from tooth enamel showed that 17 of 18...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jianli Chen.

This paper analyses iron objects and iron making remains from the eastern Silk Road area, such as Xinjiang, Qinghai, Gansu, Ningxia and Shaanxi provinces, and found that there are several characteristics about the development of iron technology: 1. iron production not only related to geographical distribution of ore resources, but also to state pattern. 2. Iron played a vital role in everyday life. 3. The development and transmission of iron metallurgy had some relation to the evolution of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Schroll. Grant McCall. Theodore Marks. James McGrath.

Originally excavated in the early 1970s by Beatrice Sandelowsky, the Mirabib Hill Rockshelter is located roughly 250km southwest of Windhoek, Namibia, in the Namib-Naukluft National Park. This poster describes our re-analysis of the lithic technology recovered from Mirabib during the Sandelowsky excavations. The lithics examined in this poster were recovered from the lowest levels of the Sandelowsky excavation, just above bedrock, and date to around 19.5ka. This poster discusses the knapping...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pei-Lin Yu.

Six thousand years ago, encounters between Paleolithic Taiwanese foragers and seafaring farmers of Mainland China ushered in a new agricultural lifeway. Two hallmarks of the early Taiwanese Neolithic are sedentary settlements and red cord-marked ceramic wares. How quickly did foragers adopt these cultural traits? Did they adopt them together or separately? Archaeological data from the Neolithic transition are scarce, but ethnographic information suggests that the rate of change is affected by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Reeves. David Braun. Matthew Douglass.

The Early Stone Age record is a spatially continuous palimpsest representing thousands of years of artifact discard. The record thus reflects a long-term pattern of hominin movement at a landscape scale. Despite this, most recent research continues to employ interpretive perspectives suited for finer temporal grains and relies on targeted excavation of dense concentrations of artifacts. Here ‘sites’ are investigated as discrete functionally organized places and analytically interpreted based on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only R. E. Burrillo.

The Pueblo I period was a time of tumultuous throughout the Four Corners region. Long regarded as an era of gradual transition, it is now recognized by most authors as a discrete and decisive turning point in North American prehistory. While this topic has been studied extensively in the central Mesa Verde area of southwestern Colorado, very little formal research has occurred for the early Pueblo era in southeast Utah. The high uplands area of Elk Ridge contains probably the greatest...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alena Wigodner.

The annexation of Gaul into the Roman Empire in the mid-first century BCE spurred the development of new religious practices in that region, including the practice of offering votive figurines at sanctuaries. Because each votive represents a personal decision on the part of the dedicant, analysis of votive assemblages provides unique insight into the demographics of worshippers and illuminates aspects of individual identity in this colonial context. Here, I present the results of a quantitative...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ann Marie Mires. Claire Gold.

The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) database lists approximately 100,000 missing persons in the United States. Many of the people who go missing in the United States are victims of homicide. In many cases, the investigation begins only when human remains are found. DNA technology has helped decrease the number of unidentified cases but still, many “unfound” cases remain unsolved. Victims of homicide have no choice as to where their bodies are placed and often suffer violations before and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Inskip.

In 711 AD the influx of Arabs and Berbers into Iberia culminated in the formation of the only Islamic state in medieval Western Europe. The uptake of new religious ideology and cultural practices by the inhabitants, which when applied in their unique sociohistorical context, resulted in an Iberian Islamic identity. While much research has explored variation in the lives of women, including debates on their freedom of movement and activity, less is postulated about the lives of men and what it...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jim Railey.

Bell-shaped storage pits are a global phenomenon, and most (but not all) of these features were used for grain storage. Native Southwesterners’ use of bell-shaped pits began well back in pre-ceramic times. Both highly mobile hunter-gatherers and less mobile farmers dug and used them, and in a very general sense storage pit sizes track variation in settlement-subsistence patterns. Specifically, mobile hunter-gatherers dispersed small caches throughout their foraging ranges. This was a sort of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shane Montgomery. Jaime Awe.

The Upper Belize River Valley hosted a high density of ancient Maya settlement from the Early Preclassic Period onward, supported by abundant fertile alluvial floodplains. In addition to the handful of major civic-ceremonial centers spread along the valley, the region also sustained numerous middle-tier administrative, ceremonial, and residential loci. The site of Yaxox, strategically situated at the confluence of the Macal and Mopan rivers, provides an intriguing example of a minor...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Ashley. Chris Webster. Ruth Tringham.

Within the slender margins of academic archaeology, our funding options are extremely limited. The accepted pathways to sustainability have been institutional support (the academy) or starting a nonprofit. In both cases we all must battle over an ever shrinking grant and philanthropic pool. The alternative is to go for-profit, which has historically meant to become a CRM firm. In the past few years, Benefit corporations (B Corps) have become an international movement for individuals and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dylan Davis. Carl Lipo.

The use of multispectral imagery is particularly effective for studying the archaeological record of Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile) due to the lack of vegetation and the fact that record is composed of surface distributions of rock features. Flaws (2010) has demonstrated that WorldView-2 multispectral imagery that includes the NIR band can be used to identify "lithic mulch gardens," a key component of prehistoric Rapa Nui subsistence strategies. Recently, the availability of WorldView-3...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hendrik Poinar.

Our laboratory focuses on the preservation and degradation of organic signatures in archaeological remains. We devise and use state-of-the art genetic techniques to pull DNA sequences from tooth and bone remains to address questions of ancestry, origins, extinctions and evolution. Currently the lab is focusing on the evolution of infectious disease, namely plague, using full genomic evidence garnered from victims of past pandemics. I will speak about the centre, the overarching questions we are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Schneider.

In 2013, a group of Harvard graduate students launched ComSciCon—a science communication workshop for graduate students—with the goal of empowering young scientists to share research in their field with broad and diverse audiences. Each year since, 50 graduate students have come together every summer to spend three days undergoing intensive science communication training, interacting with expert panelists, and composing original pieces for publication. This paper provides an overview of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yitzchak Jaffe.

The traditional narrative of the Zhou expansion (1046-771 BCE, roughly 800 before the formation of the first Chinese empire in 221 BCE), has been to view it as a military enlargement and conquest and as leading, consequently, to the establishment of a polity controlling a large territorial state. To date, most studies have viewed the finding of Zhou artifacts in a given region as indicating Zhou political control over that area or even that actual Zhou people inhabited the region. This paper...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aurelie Manin. Antoine Dorison. Marion Forest. Grégory Pereira.

If the questions of herding or management of wild species have been regularly addressed in Mesoamerican zooarchaeology, cultural development is assumed to be essentially directed by agriculture. Indeed, the presence of only two widely recognised domesticated animals, the dog (Canis familiaris) and the turkey (Meleagris gallopavo), would have limited the growth of a more complex agro-pastoralism. However, the importance of non-domesticated animals and their interactions with the agricultural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Guadalupe Sanchez Miranda. Guadalupe Sanchez. Claudia Leon.

The sixteenth century Spaniards that arrived at the Central Coast of Sonora described the region between the Río Sonora and the Río Yaqui, as a transitional territory between the Comcáac (Seri) nomadic bands of the coast, and the farmers of the river Yaqui (Yoeme) and Pima. Unfortunately, the archaeology of this region is very little known and very little is known about the prehistoric history of the area. Recent investigations at several sites in this area, have yielded a variety of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Manuel Perales.

Research on the Inca occupation in the conquered territories usually addressed the topic from a perspective that has been built on data obtained from state and local sites. The case of Jauja in the central highlands of Peru has not been the exception and much of our current knowledge about the Inca occupation of the region is based on information coming from indigenous settlements and state facilities. This paper proposes an alternative and complementary insight, trying to reach an approach to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edward Stoner. Geoffrey Cunnar.

In a 1995 study of the chronological patterning of Elko Series and Split-stemmed projectile points, Bryan Hockett concluded that neither type entirely matches the patterns of the Bonneville or Lahontan Basins; and that neither area represents good chronological analogues for northeastern Nevada. Dart points recently found in the well-dated context of an Early Archaic stratified open site in the northern Goshute Valley exhibit characteristics of both early side-notched and corner-notched types. ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chris Jenkins. Lance Lundquist.

The National Historic Preservation Act requires federal agencies to consider the effects of their actions on historic properties. In contrast to many other federal agencies, the Army Corps of Engineers, Regulatory Branch does not initiate undertakings on its own behalf. Rather, it is tasked with verifying permit applications from other agencies and the public. The Regulatory Branch is neither a proponent nor opponent of the permitted action. As a neutral party, one of the more challenging...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sangtaek Lim.

Coastal foragers of southern Korean Chulmun period had actively exploited marine resources from the initial phase(6000~4500 B.C.E.), and they also have a complex network with groups of Japanese Kyushu Island from that times. Researchers usually have thought that islands served as economic patches for coastal foragers with large numbers of shell mounds. However, based on several burial sites recently excavated at some islands like gadeok, Yeondae, Yokji, we now need to reconsider islands as being...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Harrod.

Population level analyses of violence that are focused on quantifying and comparing traumatic injuries on human skeletal remains recovered from an archaeological context are crucial for understanding violent interactions through time and across regions. However, these types of studies are also limited because, by design, they place less emphasis on individuals and their lived experience. In contrast, when researchers create what Frank and Julie Saul called an osteobiography for each set of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Roddick. Greg Braun. Kostalena Michelaki.

Dr. Kostalena Michelaki founded the laboratory for Interdisciplinary Research of Archaeological Ceramics (LIRAC) in 2006, thanks to funding by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation. She established this facility to examine the relationships between technology, society and the environment, through the archaeometric analysis of technological choices made by people in the production and use of ceramics. Scholars working in LIRAC, and in associated McMaster research centres such as the Brockhouse...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Terence Clark.

Household archaeology has a long and fruitful history in Northwest Coast archaeology. Excavation at numerous sites has provided detailed data on living surfaces and activity areas, but the greater dynamics of household and village organization remain elusive. This paper looks at important, but neglected functional constraints of plank-house villages, namely the need for firewood, potable water, and disposal of waste. These factors, which almost certainly informed on the construction and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yukiko Tonoike. Dawn Brown.

The first step in ceramic analysis is typically to determine the age or cultural affiliation of the sherds. Traditionally, this process is done through comparisons of superficial attributes to those of sherds that are already known. This task is difficult to do without years of region-specific experience and knowledge. Using the ceramics collected from over 300 sites, ranging over 5000 years through surface collecting survey in northeastern Syria by the Yale University Khabur Basin Project...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tom Moore.

The question of whether Late Iron Age oppida in Europe were truly ‘urban’ has dominated debate over these sites since the 19th century. Oppida, however, have been surprisingly absent from comparative urban studies, despite increasingly nuanced perspectives on the nature and diversity of the urban phenomenon. In particular, Roland Fletcher’s suggestion that oppida might be examples of a range of alternative urban-like centres has been largely ignored by scholars of the European Iron Age. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Hechler.

The northern highland Ecuadorian site of Cochasquí is one of the country’s most respected archaeological resources. Investigations by archaeologists Jacinto Jijón y Caamaño (1910s), Max Uhle (1932), and Udo Oberem (1964-65) had principally focused on this Late Period site’s highly visible quadrangular earthen pyramids, which can reach heights of approximately 20 meters. The archaeological and public fascination with the visibly monumental has long diverted attention away from between and beyond...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michelle Rich.

Ample evidence suggests Classic period Maya royal tombs were intentional arrangements of symbolically-charged objects and offerings. Because of this, critical examination of the entire array of a tomb’s contents is vital. Analysis of polychrome vessels, greenstone jewels, and human remains are certainly essential. Relative to these more well-preserved or spectacular components of a mortuary assemblage, small-scale or fine-grained remains have historically tended to be understudied or overlooked,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennie Shaw.

Paleoethnobotany, while not a nascent field, is still an underutilized research framework in Pacific Northwest (PNW) archaeology. But increasingly, PNW projects have incorporated macrobotanical analyses as a precursor to radiocarbon dating. Analysts provide taxonomic identifications of woody fuel remains and assist in selecting fragments from short-lived genera that will mitigate the old wood effect, thereby increasing the accuracy of dates. This paper assesses the utility of an anthracological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Natasha Fernandez-Perez. Isabel Rivera-Collazo.

This case study explores how food consumption in the military garrison of San Juan de Puerto Rico played a role in the negotiation of status and identities during the Spanish colonial period. Since defense of the territories was the primary task, the military tended to have priority to the access of exotic foodstuffs, such as wheat products. Nevertheless, Puerto Rico was quickly relegated to the margins of the Spanish Empire and legal ships ceased to arrive in a constant mode. Thus, we want to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joanne Devlin.

As professors at Hamilton College, G. Tom Jones and Charlotte Beck taught their students how to engage in research and how to be effective instructors in the classroom. I have used these lessons to build a career in forensic anthropology. My long-term research at the Forensic Anthropology Center at the University of Tennessee has centered on establishing techniques to best examine burned bones and also on the application of geophysical methods to locate clandestine graves. This research has led...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sophie Goldberg.

Angkor, the capital of the Khmer empire, is famous for being the largest "dispersed," or "low-density," city in antiquity, with an estimated population of 750,000 people. Attracting and maintaining a large support population of agriculturalists to Angkor was paramount for Khmer rulers in order for them to amass the spiritual and physical capital needed to compete against their rivals in this society’s merit-based, temple economy. In the on-going conversation surrounding Angkor’s domestic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Lekson.

While there are hopeful signs of change, for most of the last half-century American Anthropological Archaeology has been highly skeptical or openly hostile to continental-scale dynamics, particularly north of Mexico. Why was that? This paper briefly explores the history of our discipline, contrasts it to Europe and Latin America, and remarks on emerging, more realistic frames-of-reference for the prehistory of Native agricultural societies in North America. Examples begin with old chestnuts in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kirby Farah.

During the Late Postclassic the Basin of Mexico underwent dramatic political and cultural shifts, chiefly due to the formation and rapid expansion of the Aztec Triple Alliance. Xaltocan was among the many regional centers to be conquered and incorporated into the Aztec state. Historical documents indicate that prolonged conflict ultimately resulted in Xaltocan’s conquest and partial abandonment, thus local leaders were not integrated into the new political framework and were replaced by Mexica...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Whyte.

Animal remains from three late prehistoric Pisgah phase sites in mountainous western North Carolina are described and compared. The sites include a mound (Garden Creek Mound No.1) and adjacent village, and a village with no mound (the Cane River Middle School site). Deer, black bear, turkey, and box turtle remains dominate all three assemblages. Three large bones from the mound, previously reported as bones of Bison, are definitively Elk. Whole large mammal bones, recovered almost exclusively...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mikael Fauvelle. Erin M. Smith.

No society exists in isolation. In order to understand the history of North America it is therefore critical to see the continent as a landscape of mutually known and interacting places and peoples. One of the goals of this panel is to bring together specialists from different corners of the continent to share narratives of regional interaction in their areas. This paper will introduce the thematic and theoretical groundings for the session, suggesting that both systemic and historical models...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ann Laffey.

Excavations from the Monqachayaq sector of the site of Huari uncovered an impressive burial that contained over 300 miniature vessels. The vessels were offered by a people known as the Wari (c. A.D. 600 – 1100), an ancient culture thought to be responsible for one of the Andes first great empires. Even more remarkable, the vessels retained the desiccated remains of their contents. The anthropological insight that can be gained has direct implications for a better understanding of Wari practices...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Kansa. Sarah Kansa.

This paper highlights the social challenges of bringing "Big Data" to archaeology. In the political economy of universities, corporations, and governments, Big Data enjoys a special status because it tends to require and reinforce institutional and information centralization. We often imagine that the research and analytic opportunities promised by Big Data are a function of the economies of scale offered by the centralized aggregation of fungible datasets. However, many forms of archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kyle Waller. Adrianne Offenbecker.

Variation in cranial and dental non-metric traits provides a unique method for investigating prehistoric biological variability at Paquimé, Chihuahua, Mexico. Previous biodistance analyses have demonstrated patterns of long-distance gene flow with both Southwestern and frontier Mesoamerican groups, while stable isotope analyses have suggested a pattern of immigration into the site. The primary goal of this study is to determine what the pattern of biological variability tells us about social...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bright Zhou.

Porotic hyperostosis, manifested as pittings on the outer table of the cranial vault, and cribra orbitalia, the analogous porosities that form on orbital roofs, are two commonly observed pathologies used extensively by bioarchaeologists to understand past health and nutritional conditions. Yet the etiologies of porotic hyperostosis and cribra orbitalia are largely varied and not well understood, with proposed explanations ranging from diet and nutrition to chronic and infectious diseases. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Newton. Kate Domett. Siân Halcrow. Korakot Boonlop.

This paper identifies the ethical and conservation challenges of working with skeletal remains from mainland Southeast Asia, a region including Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Myanmar. Due to the increasing political rest experienced over the past decades, researchers have had better opportunities to work in these countries, with relatively easier access to appropriate permissions to excavate archaeological sites. The first-hand accounts of bioarchaeological research conducted by the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Olivia Franklin. John Dudgeon. Amy Commendador. Rebecca Hazard. Michael Dega.

Garapan, a Latte Period (A.D. 1000-1521) archaeological site in Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands, was excavated under mitigation efforts by Scientific Consultant Services, Hawaii in 2015. The recovery produced over 400 sets of skeletal remains, of which forty-eight were submitted for dietary bioarchaeological analysis in the Center for Archaeology, Materials and Applied Spectroscopy. This research focuses on the importance of marine versus terrestrial protein sources and introduced plant...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wieslaw C. Wieckowski. Kelly Knudson. Lars Fehren-Schmitz.

The Wari imperial mausoleum, discovered in 2012-13 at the site of Castillo de Huarmey, Peru brought to light remains of 64 individuals buried within the main chamber underneath and additional seven in the contexts directly associated with the mausoleum. The upper layers of the building also yielded a collection of human and animal remains. The collection of human remains brings a unique set of data for bioarchaeologists. The research performed so far include standard analyses like taphonomy,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Allisen Dahlstedt. Jane Buikstra.

Recent studies of pre-Columbian Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTC) genomes identify pinnipeds as a source of human tuberculosis in South America (Bos et al. 2014). These results raise questions regarding the timing of this zoonotic transfer and the subsequent human host adaptation and dissemination of Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Here we present a survey of skeletal tuberculosis throughout the Osmore Drainage of southern Peru, where the pinniped to human "jump" had occurred by ~AD 1000....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Jones. Ana B. Marín Arroyo. Michael Richards.

The Cantabrian Region of Northern Spain was an important refugium during the harsh conditions of the Last Glacial Maximum, when ice sheets covered much of Northern Europe and populations were pushed further south. Late Upper populations in the Cantabrian region thrived at this time, and there is an increase in the density of archaeological sites is seen, in addition to cultural changes such as the creation of rich cave art assemblages. Understanding the climatic and environmental conditions...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Watson. Ivan Munoz. Bernardo Arriaza.

Indigenous groups have inhabited and exploited the coastal valleys of the Atacama Desert since Paleoindian times. Contact with the altiplano began early on but marine-based diets were eventually supplemented by agricultural adaptations as influence turned to population movement over time. We propose that the oral complex was likely subject to some degree of selection early in the sequence in response to dietary demands, but would have been relaxed as diet diversified and softened. This trend...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tommy Budd.

Ongoing archaeological investigations at the Shang capital of Yin Xu in modern Anyang have contributed much to the understanding of the Shang Dynasty (~1600-1046 BCE) and Bronze Age China. Bioarchaeological investigations of the thousands of sacrificed individuals recovered from the royal cemetery at Yin Xu has historically been somewhat limited, but is becoming an important component of current research at the site. Earlier work focused mainly on collection of craniometric data and the typology...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Martti Veldi.

Since the 1990s, landscape biography as a research method has diversified. The biographical approach expects a thorough study of a certain region in various fields of landscape research, which span far beyond just geography or archaeology. In contemporary approaches to landscape, the limits of the concept of landscape biography are being explored, but also tested. What exactly is a landscape biography? What does it constitute? Is landscape biography just a narration of a specific defined place...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lenore Thompson. R.C.P. Doonan.

This paper explores indigenous use of copper metal on the Northwest Coast of North America, and the impact of colonial contact on established cultural practices. Prior to contact (late 17th to early 19th century), native copper was collected, traded, and manipulated by indigenous communities that considered the material animate and powerful. Following the introduction of foreign trade materials, copper continued to be used to create culturally significant artifacts, however, strict frameworks of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elissa Bullion.

This paper examines the expression of community during the Qarakhanid period (9th- 12th century CE) through a study of patterns of phenotypic diversity at medieval sites across Uzbekistan. The Qarakhanid dynasty is argued to be an integral period in the shaping of population, linguistic, and religious frameworks that shaped the social and ethnic landscapes of Central Asia up through the modern day. Historical sources suggest that the Qarakhanid rise to power instigated an in-migration of Turkic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Courtney Hofman. Brian M. Kemp. Cecil Lewis. Christina Warinner. Krithivasan Sankaranarayanan.

The field of biomolecular anthropology has been transformed in recent years by new technological and methodological approaches, including DNA, protein and small molecule characterization. At the Laboratories of Molecular Anthropology and Microbiome Research (LMAMR) at the University of Oklahoma, we have successfully expanded these approaches to study past populations, for example through the investigation of: 1) ancient animal use, translocations, and domestication, 2) human dietary adaptations,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Pargeter. Metin Eren.

Lithic miniaturization, the systematic production and use of small tools from small cores, was a consequential development in Pleistocene lithic technology. Bipolar reduction is an important but often overlooked and misidentified strategy for lithic miniaturization. This experiment addresses the role of axial bipolar reduction in processes of lithic miniaturization. The experiments answer two questions: what benefits does axial bipolar reduction provide, and can we distinguish axial bipolar...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julia Brenan.

Archaeology has the ability to bring people together and assist communities in creating their own historical narrative so it can be passed on and acknowledged, corrected and recorded, within and outside of their community. My work in Happy Valley-Goose Bay, Labrador on an archaeological site that only ended occupation in the late 1960s facilitates the formalization of the historical narrative of the former Birch Island community through archaeology, historical research and personal interviews....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Catherine West.

Gulf of Alaska islands provide habitat for substantial populations of both seabirds and migratory waterfowl, which have been under threat from mammal introductions and landscape degradation for more than 200 years. Bird management drives decisions in this island region and focuses on the eradication of invasive species and restoration of island landscapes to their "natural" state. However, given that people and climate have influenced these landscapes for thousands of years, we ask: how do we...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Metcalfe. Vandy Bowyer.

Promontory people were proficient bison hunters with a sophisticated understanding of bison ecology. In contrast, modern researchers know relatively little about pre-contact bison ecology in the Great Basin. We combine botanical analysis of dung and isotopic analysis of various substrates (dung, hair, hide, bone) to reconstruct ancient landscapes and bison behaviour during the Promontory occupation. Carbon isotope compositions indicate that a C3-dominated environment existed at the Promontory...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kirsten Tharalson. Matthew E. Hill, Jr..

The Dismal River complex is a protohistoric archaeological complex likely representing an early Apache occupation on the Central Great Plains of North America. A key Dismal River complex site is the Lovitt site (25CH1), located in southwestern Nebraska. Excavations at Lovitt in 1939 revealed the site as a small residential locality with three ephemeral house structures and more than 150 pit features. Recent radiocarbon dating at the site suggests it was likely occupied either in the first half...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claire St-Germain. Christian Gates St-Pierre. Krista McGrath. Keri Rowsell. Matthew Collins.

Bear bones have been identified in the faunal assemblages of Iroquoian sites of the St. Anicet cluster near Montreal, Quebec. Three village sites will be the focus of this presentation: McDonald, Droulers, and Mailhot-Curran, with comparisons with other Iroquoian sites, especially Hurons and Iroquois. Bear bones are few in the St. Anicet faunal assemblages, but a ZooMS analysis indicates a high frequency of bear bones used in the production of bone projectile points. This unexpected result will...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Lapham. Thomas Whyte.

Historic accounts of Fort San Juan, a Spanish garrison built near the native village of Joara in the late 1560s in western North Carolina, inform us that chiefs from neighboring towns brought "meat and maize" to the soldiers on various occasions. Based on the high proportion of bear in the fort faunal assemblage, it seems likely that the foods gifted to the Spaniards included bear meat. A recent zooarchaeological study suggests that native peoples provisioned the soldiers with some prime bear...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexander Bauer. Owen Doonan.

Recent years have witnessed increasing scholarly attention to the Black Sea, a region often considered peripheral to better known "cores" of cultural activity, such as the Mediterranean, Europe, the Near East, and even the Caucasus. Challenging conventional views of the Black Sea as largely disarticulated prior to the arrival of Greek colonists in the 7th Century BCE, this paper argues that ongoing, informal networks of interaction existed across the region during the previous millennia,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Hurst. Caitlin O'Grady.

Black and red are foundational colors in Mesoamerican painting and scribal arts, often derived from easily accessible raw materials. Although their presence is ubiquitous, variations in chemistry and microscopic properties are data that tell a more nuanced story. This paper summarizes analysis of black and red colorants used in Maya wall paintings that contribute to observations regarding local traditions in manufacture, as well as individual variation in artistic practice. Reported results...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Reed.

The archaeological zone south of Grants, New Mexico and north of Quemado, New Mexico has long represented an enigma for southwestern archaeologists. Straddling the so-called Mogollon-Pueblo boundary and lying south of the boundary between the Pueblos of Acoma and Zuni, its archaeology combines traits of multiple cultural traditions. Detailed recording at sites in the area reveals a mix of architectural approaches including use of adobe, sandstone, and igneous rock—often at the same site. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cecelia Klein.

Scholars have invariably interpreted the blindfolds worn by certain figures in Aztec painted manuscripts as a sign of—in their words—"transgression," "sin," and "punishment." This talk challenges the simplicity and inherent Eurocentrism of that reading. It is true that the Aztecs perceived a person’s mistakes to plunge him into darkness and chaos, and that blindfolds, at one level, symbolized that disorder. The cause of a moral error, however, was embodied by certain objects and substances that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lindsay Shepard. Christopher Schwartz. Will Russell. Robert Weiner. Ben Nelson.

Intricately-crafted mosaics are prevalent among blue-green stone artifacts created in prehispanic Mesoamerica, but are rarer in the prehistoric United States Southwest and Northwestern Mexico (SW/NW). Because they occur earlier in Mesoamerica and are the most Mesoamerican-like of the SW/NW blue-green stone creations, we propose that the production and use of these artifacts in the SW/NW was derived from Mesoamerica. We describe the degree to which mosaics manufactured in the SW/NW resemble and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bruce Huckell. Chris Merriman. Matthew O'Brien.

Shallow open-air Folsom sites in central New Mexico have been known for six decades, but have received little investigation; most are known only from surface collection. Their post-occupational geomorphic histories of erosional exposure and reburial, coupled with limited archaeological investigation, pose significant challenges to efforts to examine and interpret Folsom intra-site activity organization. We report on our efforts to detect and make sense of patterning in the distribution of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charles Morse. Meredith Chesson.

Though death may seem an instantaneous experience, the treatment of death by a mortuary community provides implications for activity and identity that stretch far beyond a stilled heart. Archaeologically, we can use evidence associated with mortuary practices to inform us about lifeways and beliefs of the interred and the community at large. Mortuary contexts from the Early Bronze I (3500 – 3100 BCE) at Bab adh-Dhra’ provide just such an opportunity. The site, situated in the Southern Ghor...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claire K. Maass.

From its arrival in Lima in 1709 until the abolition of slavery in 1854, La Orden de la Buena Muerte was among the largest slaveholders in the sugar industry of Cañete, Peru. Moreover, as an order explicitly founded to oversee the physical and spiritual well-being of marginalized communities, the Buena Muerte also played a critical role in public health programs throughout the region. These activities were grounded in fundamentally different, and often opposing, perspectives towards the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amelie Guindon.

The Midi Toulousain area shows a distinctive organisation of its rural ceramic crafts during the early modern period. Three production centers made pottery, imitating each other’s decorative styles and techniques. Distribution patterns are keys to understanding the social and economic factors that underlie regional competition in production and marketing. We believe that Midi Toulousain pottery production fits into the much larger socioeconomic sphere of the French Atlantic. This pottery was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heleinna Cruz. Jaime Ullinger. László Paja.

Bronze Age Hungary saw the advancement of trade which may have been a cause of the movement from egalitarian societies to more complex societies with increasing social inequality. Social inequality between regions in Hungary may be reflected in variation among funeral customs. Excavations from Békés 103, a Bronze Age cemetery in south-eastern Hungary, have uncovered 68 burials, most of which are cremations. This study focuses on color analysis (identified by Munsell Soil Color Charts) of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Terrance Martin.

Analyses of the large faunal assemblage from the eighteenth-century Fort St. Joseph site (20BE23) in Berrien County, Michigan, are becoming more concerned with the question of "food or furs?" With over 70% of the identified animal remains coming from white-tailed deer, we are trying to discern whether broken longbones are the result of removal of marrow for subsistence, or if they may have also been used to prepare hides. In contrast to late prehistoric and early historic Native American sites...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sabrina Agarwal.

The morphology of the whole skeleton is crafted over the life course by bone remodeling across its skeletal surfaces: the endosteal surface of its trabeculae, and on the periosteal, endocortical, and intracortical surfaces of its cortex. The behavior of each of these surfaces differs between individuals and populations resulting in some understood differences in bone morphology across human groups. But the skeletal surfaces are also differentially influenced during growth, aging, reproduction,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Nowell. Ashley Hampton.

Excavations of Housepit 54 in the Bridge River village recovered an immense amount of cultural material that has contributed to a better understanding of the lifeways of its past inhabitants. The faunal assemblage contains a number of items tentatively identified as bone tools. This poster outlines the results of research aimed at understanding the effects of taphonomic and cultural processes associated with the formation of bone tool assemblages. Implications are drawn regarding activity...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan McRae. Gary Aronsen. Erin Gredell.

Efforts to repatriate Native American human remains and artifacts are of immediate importance to American archaeology. Excavated in the early 20th century, Casuarina Mound (8-Br-0122) was first dated to the Malabar II period (750-1565CE) by Irving Rouse in his 1951 publication A Survey of Indian River Archaeology, Florida. Historical accounts describe the removal of at least 112 skeletons and numerous funerary objects from three successive interments. A small subset of this material was donated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rafael Corteletti. Paulo DeBlasis.

Bonin site is one of many pit house villages located in Santa Catarina state, southern Brazilian highlands. It has been excavated since 2011. In this paper, we aim to present new data on pottery analysis, chronology, and spatial analysis which are suggesting a village plan organized in a circular shape. Dated from 13th to 17th centuries this village has 23 pit structures, many of them used as pit ovens, filled with basalt rocks and ceramic vessels. Micro-botanical remains analysis reveals the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lindsay Scott. Anna Marie Prentiss. Matt Walsh.

Cultural transmission is an evolutionary process that involves the transfer of information between people that over time can lead to the establishment of cultural traditions. This approach permits development of hypotheses regarding the cultural evolutionary process in a variety of contexts. In this paper we examine cultural transmission between generations by analyzing the effects of vertical and horizontal inheritance using archaeological data from the Bridge River housepit village. The Bridge...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hilary Becker.

The ancient trade in olive oil and wine is well understood thanks in no small part to typologies established for their transport containers. A synthetic survey of the containers used to transport other naturally-sourced products, such as pharmaceuticals, perfumes, and pigments, is lacking. Such products were subject to counterfeiting and adulteration in antiquity, thus packaging and labelling were often valuable tools for ancient consumers to help them recognize products. For example, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marlieke Ernst. Corinne Hofman.

Placed within the context of the ERC-NEXUS1492 research, this paper focusses on transformations in indigenous social and material worlds in Early Colonial Hispaniola. The initial intercultural encounters in the New World have led to the creation of entirely new social identities and changing material culture repertoires in the first decennia after colonization. The incorporation of European earthenwares in the indigenous sites of El Cabo and Playa Grande will be contrasted with the presence of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Teresa Fernández-Crespo. Andrea Czermak. Rick J. Schulting. Julia A. Lee-Thorp.

Stable carbon and nitrogen data of adult/adolescent human bone collagen from north-central Spanish Late Neolithic (ca. 3500-2900 cal. BC) provide evidence for the existence of significant isotopic differences among and between communities living in close proximity and burying their dead in caves and megalithic graves. This, together with previously identified distinct funerary selection patterns, suggests an unsuspected complex social or cultural differentiation. The purpose of this paper is to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dana Kollmann.

Archaeological excavations are much like crime scene investigations in that to study them, is to destroy them. Consequently, full-scale documentation, cataloguing, and proper packaging techniques are critical components of archaeological and forensic fieldwork. Archaeologists have the additional benefit to law enforcement of being trained to conduct line and grid searches, interpret soils for evidence of disturbance, and perform exhumations using standardized excavation techniques. Law...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lei Zhang.

The bird design, as a distinctive and time-honored decoration in the Chinese culture, has its unique national forms and artistic glamour, which had also condensed and accumulated rich and profound connotations. Being an indispensable part of the ancient Chinese civilization, the head-ware of ancient Chinese women had evolved continuously in the transmission of cultural heritage. Which, reflecting not only the changes in people's aesthetics, but more importantly, the ever-developing ideology and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Minnis. Patricia Gilman.

While Suzanne and Paul Fish are endemic to the Sonoran Desert, they have been invasive in other regions of the World. The hybrid vigor from combining Paul's Michigan foundation with Suzy's Texas background added to their wide spread geographic range of experiences. As well, an enduring monogamy, a not well know known for this species, contributes to their impressive contributions in archaeology. Here, we briefly explore the natural history of this unique team.

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Chenoweth. Mark Salvatore. Laura Bossio.

British colonial ideology originated, in part, from a view of the proper relationship between people, land, and government that was rooted in the ecology of Britain itself. This view was informed in the Caribbean by Barbadian and other large-scale sugar planting colonies, but the British Virgin Islands are ecologically and politically distinct. This paper employs high-resolution satellite imagery and GIS modeling to explore what happens when a British "peasant" ideology is laid onto a very...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dorcas Brown. David Anthony.

The final report of the Samara Valley Project (SVP), a U.S.-Russian archaeological investigation conducted between 1995 and 2002 in the Samara Oblast in central Russia, was published in June 2016. The SVP explored the changing organization and subsistence resources of pastoral steppe economies from the Eneolithic (4500BC) through the Late Bronze Age (1900-1200BC) across the steppe and river valley landscape in the middle Volga region.  Particular attention focuses on the role of agriculture...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mike Teufer.

The Late Bronze Age site of Saridjar was discovered during a survey of the northern Yakhsu valley in 2010. Excavations in 2012, in 2013, 2015 and in 2016 prove that we are dealing with a 200 x 200 m large settlement with at least three construction phases. The proportion of the hand-made ceramics in all levels varies between 80 and 90%. Only occasionally wheel-made ware appears. Andronovo pottery of the Federovo phase is present in small numbers. At Karimberdy nearly all the pottery was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heidi Altman. Tanya Peres.

Archaeological sites in the Southeastern United States often contain remains of the black bear (Ursus americanus), which, upon excavation, are placed into one of two general categories for further analysis: food or modified. The confines of these categories precondition interpretations of the bear remains, and limit possible crucial understanding of the roles of bears in the social life of the people who interacted with them. While the category of "food" can be further divided into quotidian or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Krista McGrath. Keri Rowsell. Christian Gates St-Pierre. Matthew Collins.

Fragmented and worked bone continues to be problematic for accurate identification using traditional morphology-based analyses. In this study, we apply a number of ZooMS (Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry) techniques for the identification of bone points from two Pre-Contact Iroquoian village sites in southern Quebec, Canada. The predominance of white-tailed deer in the mammalian faunal assemblages of both sites, combined with the approximate size of the original bones, led to the initial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Martindale. Konrad Gajewski. Michelle Chaput. Pierre Vermeersch. Carley Crann.

Since the launch of the upgraded Canadian Archaeological Radiocarbon Database (CARD) in April 2015, CARD has expanded to contain more than 70% of the world’s online 14C archaeological dates across six continents. CARD’s transformation into a global repository raises concerns about access, security, protocols, management, capacity and the prospects and long-term future of a single, comprehensive global 14C archaeological database. CARD is a template for that global database Here we present a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexander Antonites.

Regional social complexity in southern Africa is closely tied to the rise and development of the Mapungubwe polity of 13th century South Africa. Expanding political power and influence meant that Mapungubwe increasingly articulated with communities on its periphery - a relationship that is reflected in shared material culture. These hinterland sites are all located in areas where there is an absence of earlier twelfth century occupation, which suggests a process of active settling of these areas...