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

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tessa Murphy.

This paper draws on archival documents held in Dominica, France, and Martinique in order to trace the establishment of a plantation economy that was integral to—yet technically outside the sphere of—French colonial rule in the early modern Americas. Prior to the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, European settlement in Dominica was formally prohibited by a series of treaties. Yet surviving notary and Catholic parish records reveal that in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, a number...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kendra Hein.

Sitting one quarter of a mile from the banks of the Ohio River in New Richmond, Ohio, are the foundational remnants of a 19th century school house and associated dormitory.The historical and archaeological work of this site are part of an ongoing transdisciplinary project, named for the school, The Parker Academy Project. The college preparatory academy, opened in 1839 by Reverend Daniel Parker and his wife, Priscilla Parker, is the first known documented school in Ohio to accept anyone...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Davide Domenici.

Non-invasive scientific analyses recently performed by the ‘MOLAB’ mobile laboratory on a number of pre-Hispanic and early colonial pictorial manuscripts provided a host of new data that deepen our knowledge of Mesoamerican coloring materials and painting practices. The huge corpus of available analytical data – obtained from codices Madrid, Cospi, Borgia, Vatican B, Laud, Fejérváry-Mayer, Nuttall, Bodley, Selden, Selden Roll, Tudela, Vatican A, and Mendoza – allows the first cultural-historical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Saul Hedquist. Lewis Borck. Alyson Thibodeau.

Turquoise is an icon of the U.S. Southwest, long drawing value as a metaphor for moisture in the arid region. As color and material, turquoise is fundamental to the worldviews of many indigenous groups. For the Hopi and Zuni people, the importance and use of turquoise dates back countless generations, to "time immemorial." Continuities in use (e.g., ornamental style and placement in offerings) suggest deep epistemological and ideological affinities; contemporary values are clearly visible in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicolas Delsol.

At the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th century, the massive introduction of new animal species in the Americas put an unprecedented stress on both the environment and Native American societies. Although archaeological animal remains are often used to inform discussions on American-European transculturation in other areas, few such studies have been done in southern Mesoamerica. This talk will use historical sources and published zooarchaeological data to provide a first overview of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alessandra Pecci. Fernanda Inserra.

Residue analyses have been applied for more than 40 years to the study of ceramics and floors (Barba, Bello 1978; Condamin et al. 1976). This has allowed to better understand ceramic contents, on the one side, and the traces left by human activities on floors, on the other. Both these disciplines provide important information on human activity markers, focusing on the use of ceramics in the first case and the use of space and the function of structures in the second. However, a deeper...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meghan Dudley. Allison Douglas. Bonnie Pitblado.

Like many other states, Oklahoma has a long history of productive public archaeology, with citizen and professional stakeholders working side-by-side to further archaeological research and preservation. However, the changing nature of archaeology (most particularly the shift to a heavy emphasis on compliance work) has led to miscommunication and misunderstanding among the many stakeholders in Oklahoma’s archaeological community and to less-productive working relationship among them than existed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ann Stansell.

The commemoration of disasters and their victims is a product of cultural, economic, political, and social forces in human society. Southern California's largely forgotten St. Francis Dam Disaster of 1928 provides an excellent opportunity to study this complex process of commemoration, engaging memory within different frames of reference. Previous scholarship related to the disaster has been focused within the fields of civil engineering and geology, with the singular goal of determining the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa Matisoo-Smith. Karen Greig. Katrina West. Anna Gosling.

For the last twenty years we have been studying modern and ancient DNA of the various commensal animals in the Pacific. Different patterns of distribution and genetic variation exist and may provide information regarding the animal-human relationships and the role these animals played in the various Pacific cultures through time.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Aiuvalasit.

The Jemez and Pajarito Plateaus of the Jemez Mountains share similar cultural, environmental, and climatic contexts, yet large Ancestral Puebloan communities of the Pajarito abandoned mesa-tops for lowlands of the Rio Grande during the 16th century while occupations of the Jemez Plateau persisted until the 17th century. Droughts are hypothesized as a driver of depopulation of the Pajarito Plateau, but if so why wasn’t the Jemez abandoned as well? Prehistoric communities built water storage...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stanley Walling. Travis Cornish. Chance Coughenour. Jonathan Hanna. Christine Taylor.

A number of seasons of research at the site of Chawak But’o’ob in the southwestern outskirts of the city of Dos Hombres have revealed an architecturally humble community characterized by dense habitation and extensive landscape modification as well as domestic and public ritual. The evidence suggests that the inhabitants of this farming community had an eye toward symbolism in decisions they made about the disposition of domestic and public structures as well as the manipulation of water and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew O'Brien. Danny N. Walker.

Communal hunting represents an intensification on particular prey species requiring significant cooperation and coordination, but identifying the social organization of this extinct mode of terrestrial hunting in North America leaves inquiries relegated to evidence derived from archaeology and ethnohistory. One tangible line of evidence used to identify social interaction between participants in hunting activity has been meat sharing. Yet observing meat sharing in the archaeological record has...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Spencer Pelton.

Communal hunting facilities such as drive walls, hunting pits, and other features, are one of archaeologists’ most direct proxies for past human cooperation. At the least, communal hunting facilities are unambiguous evidence for past cooperative effort. They are also informative of the nature of that cooperation, since variation in facility size and configuration should reflect variation in cooperative behavior. In this study, I present a model designed to understand variation in communal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katrina Kosyk.

This paper explores an alternative method for examining ephemeral aspects of material culture, such as sound, in the production processes of ceramic pre-Columbian aerophone construction. In a case study of a museum collection from the G-752Rj site in Greater Nicoya, I demonstrate that it is possible to identify groups of producers and evidence of knowledge transfer between persons that may reflect communities of practice. This research has the potential for examining regional trade and migration...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fabiola Silva.

I intend to present some results of my ethnoarchaeological research (1996-2016) on the ceramic technology of the Asurini do Xingu, an Amazonian indigenous people (Tupi-Guarani linguistic family) who lives on the banks of the Xingu River - Pará, Brazil. Based on collected data, I will demonstrate the relationship between the social organization of ceramic production and the standardization/variability of these artifacts over time. I will show how in Asurini context, teaching-learning framework,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tom Dawson. Elinor Graham. Joanna Hambly.

Around the world, thousands of archaeological sites are threatened by coastal processes. Although many countries have successfully implemented schemes to address threats from development, this is not the case for sites at risk from natural processes. Without developers to fund mitigation projects, the scale of the problem appears enormous, and it is difficult for individual agencies to commit to preserving, or even recording, everything at risk. Systems are needed to update information and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zev Cossin.

Recent archaeological studies of Spanish colonialism have redirected scholarly attention both to the workings of imperialism and the multitude of ways in which marginalized populations navigated and remade the grids of power that constitute empire. A focus on the household and the materiality of everyday life has generated a rich body of evidence by which to tack between multiple scales of social life and foreground the material culture of daily life as constitutive elements in the making of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alessandra Villarreal.

Collaborative archaeology is an approach that promotes the inclusion of modern, indigenous communities in the study of the ancient past. In the Maya area, local communities have recently become more involved with archaeological research at multiple stages, including research design, data collection, and community outreach. At the same time, advances in the qualitative and quantitative study of early ceramics have allowed archaeologists to further elucidate ancient Maya chronology, economy, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only J. Gregory Smith. Lawrence Todd. Brian Liesinger.

Heart Mountain was one of ten confinement camps established by the U.S. government during World War Two to incarcerate Japanese Americans living on the West Coast of the United States. Located in northwest Wyoming, the camp had a peak population of nearly 11,000 incarcerees, making it the third largest settlement in the state at that time. The Park County Historic Preservation Commission recently partnered with the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center to carry out mapping and test excavations at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bonnie Pitblado. Delaney Cooley. Horvey Palacios. Bobi Deere. Kaylyn Moore.

This is an abstract from the "Collaborative and Community Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Oklahoma Public Archaeology Network (OKPAN), founded in 2016, recently engaged in strategic planning that has helped streamline our programs and increase the breadth of our community engagement. In our paper, we highlight two initiatives that have proved particularly effective at empowering communities that have traditionally been excluded...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hua Wang. Jing Zhou. Ruin Mao.

This study focuses on human ritual animal use behaviors of Qijia communities, with the study of animal bones recovered from the Mogou Cemetery in Gansu Province. More than 1600 tombs have been excavated at the Mogou site. Since multiple burials with a few individuals of both sex and different ages were common and human bones were clumped together, most burials were classified as multiple and/or secondary burials. Animal offerings were also common in these burials, and animal bones were found...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristen Barnett.

The Xwisten (Bridge River) community has had an ongoing collaborative relationship with the University of Montana, exploring the archaeology of the Bridge River Village, site Eerl4. The latest series of inquiries at the Bridge River Village focused on the excavation of Housepit 54, a single, mid-sized, semi-subterranean pithouse with 17 anthropogenic floors from occupations spanning 1800BP-ca. 1850’s CE. The goal of this research is to explore the perceptions of the discipline of archaeology,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edy Barrios. Cameron L. McNeil. Mauricio Díaz. Antolín Velásquez. Walter Burgos.

Recent and ongoing research at residential groups at the sites of Río Amarillo and Quebrada Piedras Negras are providing a better understanding of the lives of commoners and of the population dynamics during the Late Classic through the Postclassic period in this area. These sites share the second-widest pocket of the Copan River Valley, and lie in the middle of one of the main trade routes between Copan and Quirigua. The excavations and mapping of the household groups distributed in this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Kowalewski.

In late prehispanic Oaxaca, Mexico, the community was a territorial polity cross-culturally comparable to the city-state. Sixteenth-century native and Spanish sources describe aspects of these communities. Full-coverage archaeological surveys have mapped dozens of cases, providing information on size and internal structure not available in the documents. This study compiled evidence regarding population, territory size, boundary marking, internal complexity, political status, languages,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cory Fournier. Francesca Neri.

Recent archaeological research in Wupatki National Monument has led to a complete baseline documentation of a suite of petroglyph assemblages located at the Crack-in-Rock community in Northern Arizona. Through collaborative efforts between the Museum of Northern Arizona, the National Park Service, and Northern Arizona University, this paper details a comparative analysis approach to understanding the use and placement of rock art within the region. The Crack-in-Rock community boasts numerous...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Macrae.

Tropical environments are defined by a shared suite of climatic and environmental variables. These unifying characteristics led past archaeologists to delineate these regions as incapable of fostering state level civilizations. These interpretations presumed a lack of resources required to support agricultural production at the level obligatory for the urban centers that define states. Modern studies in tropical ecology question this perspective by identifying a high degree of localized resource...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Naomi L. Martisius.

Recent studies have brought focus to a category of bone tools previously thought to be restricted to modern humans. Excavations of layers dating to approximately 50 kya from two different sites in southwest France, Pech-de-l’Azé I and Abri Peyrony, have produced four nearly identical fragments of bone tools identified as lissoirs (a French term meaning "smoothers"). Lissoirs are specialized tools thought to have been used in hide preparation. Although this tool type has been defined in various...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katy Mollerud.

The Cambria phase (AD 1050-1300) is an archaeological complex primarily centered on the elevated terraces of the Minnesota River in south-central Minnesota. Cambria phase pottery demonstrates technical and stylistic influences from several different late prehistoric cultural traditions, including Mississippian, Plains Village and Late Woodland. Cambria ceramics are currently classified as part of the Initial Middle Missouri Variant, but certain affinities are evident between the grit-tempered,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Richards. Robert C. Mainfort, Jr.. Seth A. Schneider.

Portable x-ray fluorescence (pXRF) was used in conjunction with petrographic analysis of ceramic thin sections to characterize a sample of red-slipped potsherds from selected late Mississippian sites in northeast Arkansas. Data from this analysis is compared to a similar characterization of two separate hematite rich deposits from the same region. Results are used to evaluate the potential of this type of analysis to distinguish ochre sources from one another and to identify deposits that were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hui Chen. Zhichun Jing. Changping Zhang. Weidong Hou.

The site of Panlongcheng is located 450 kilometers south of Zhengzhou in present-day Hubei province serves as the join point between the Central Plain Culture and the Lower and the southern regions of Yangtze River. Unlike almost all of more than twenty bronzes vessel shapes are represented in the Panlongcheng finds, there are three different ceramic types discovered at Panlongcheng: Typical Central Plain style(Erligang style), local style and numerous stoneware/hardware(some glazed). In pursuit...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carmen Sarjeant.

The analysis of ceramics in Southeast Asia has evolved from typologies and broad comparative discussions of vessel forms and surface treatments. Like other material culture, studies on ceramics from mainland Southeast Asian prehistoric sites that employ archaeometric techniques have escalated in recent years. The appearance of fine, incised and impressed ceramics in southern Vietnam dating to the Neolithic period (4500-3000 BP) is closely associated with sedentary settlements, cereal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Pailes.

One of the most enduring contributions made by Suzy and Paul Fish was their elucidation of the role played by multi-settlement communities in structuring socio-political organization. The community concept, initially elaborated in the Hohokam region, now fulfills a central interpretive role in many regions of Northwest Mexico. In this paper, I compare characteristics of communities across several regions of the Northwest/Southwest to demonstrate qualitatively different organizational precepts....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Hilson. Sarah B. McClure. Timothy M. Ryan.

Bone structure is known to reflect behavioral differences related to locomotion, diet, and activity patterns. We present new data using microcomputed tomography (microCT) to analyze cortical and trabecular bone structure on samples of modern domestic sheep bones from individuals with known biogeographies and life histories. Indicators of skeletal robusticity, such as thicker cortical bone, higher trabecular bone volume fraction, and thicker trabeculae, reflect consistently higher bone strain and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Gust.

In this paper I compare the working conditions and cultural material found at a cluster of three sites in the northeast corner of the Mexican Yucatán Peninsula, to those at San Pedro Siris in the Cayo District of then British Honduras. The people in both areas contended with more militant Maya groups that were unhappy with improved relations with Mexican and British Honduran authorities respectively. Similar workplace dangers confronted both the lumber workers at San Pedro Siris and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Derek Miltimore. Charles Perreault. Jonathan Paige.

We assess how photogrammetry and three dimensional (3D) model-based measurement approaches compare to traditional approaches of lithic analysis. Photogrammetry is a novel, inexpensive and accessible method of producing models of lithics. However, it is unclear how the rate of inter-observer measurement errors of 3D models produced through photogrammetry compares to that of traditional approaches. Here we analyze flakes from Salado period archaeological sites in the Tonto Basin, where...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elisabeth Culley.

Upper Paleolithic cave art is well-known for its skilled execution, specifically the use of shading, relief, and perspective to render life-like depictions of Pleistocene fauna. Cave art is equally well-known for a near absence of flora, humans, and scenes. In this regard, parietal imagery is distinct from "art mobilier," where these are more common. However, defining "scenes" as a graphic phenomenon can be problematic, and identifying them among superimposed and fragmented images more so....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Valorie Aquino. Douglas J. Kennett. Yemane Asmerom. Keith Prufer.

In studies of human-environment interactions, the conceptual framework of panarchy and its associated resilience theory posit that periods of stability and transformation are inevitable in what has been termed an "adaptive cycle". This presentation discusses the reconstruction of a community-level political adaptive cycle for Uxbenká, an ancient agrarian polity in the Maya hinterlands, and explores its linkages with the broader political ideology of divine kingship and climate stress. Employing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Martin Welker. Rebecca Duggan.

Dogs are the only domestic animal to have existed on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean prior to the Columbian Exchange. Historic documents indicate that European colonists to North America brought their own dogs and generally preferred large breeds capable of protecting livestock, hunting, defending settlements from both predators and Native American raids. As early as 1619 the Virginia Assembly banned colonists from trading European dogs to Native Americans, and these policies were quickly...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Catherine Scott.

This poster will present preliminary interpretations from a study comparing different techniques of elemental analysis for sediment geochemistry, the goal of which is to determine the "best" technique to answer the questions at hand. "Sediment geochemistry" here refers to the collection of sediment samples and the elemental analysis of these samples in order to map activity areas across archaeological sites. This study used sediment samples collected from a modern, abandoned village called Eski...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Beverly Chiarulli. Eleanor King. Anne Pyburn. Anabel Ford.

Small lithic flakes have been recovered from most Maya sites in Belize. They are often viewed as byproducts of the lithic manufacturing process. A closer analysis of small flakes recovered from four sites (Cerros, Chau Hiix, Maax Na and El Pilar) has found that while many of the flakes may have been removed during tool manufacture, the expedient tools themselves were used in a variety of household activities especially those associated with cutting or carving bone or wood. This poster...

DOCUMENT Citation Only A. Dudley Gardner. William Gardner.

This presentation will focus on the analysis of Projectile Points recovered in excavation at Eagle Rock Shelter that date from 13,000 to 3,000 BP. Eagle Rock Shelter is located in west central Colorado on the east side of the Gunnison Gorge. Eagle Rock contains occupation horizons dating from 13,000 to 150 BP. The shelter contains a full range of projectile points dating from the Paleo to Proto-Historic Period. In this presentation we will examine some of the size, shape, and structural traits...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lydia Pittman.

This study will compare the attributes of Miniature Pottery Vessels in the Mimbres and Reserve Branches of the Mogollon Cultural Area. I will focus on their types, forms, decorative elements, traces of use, and depositional context. The vessels will be no more than 10 cm (4") or less in any dimension. This long-term comparison compares the similarities and differences of the vessel’s characteristics in the two regions in the years between A.D. 450 and 1450. This study may yield important data...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michele Buzon. Sarah Schrader.

Tombos, located at the Third Cataract of the Nile River in Sudan, was established as an Egyptian colonial site in Nubia during the New Kingdom period. Burials provide evidence for high level Egyptian administrators and support staff as well as local community members. Previous investigations of the Tombos remains have indicated that individuals buried at Tombos participated in relatively low levels of strenuous physical activities, indicative of roles such as administrators, scribes, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathleen Holen. Steven Holen.

Notches produced during bone breakage by impact (dynamic loading) and pressure (static loading) present quantitatively different shapes when measured from the cortical view. The ratio of the measurement of notch breadth to notch depth differentiates dynamically (arcuate) from statically (semi-circular) produced notches. This poster compares a reference sample of Proboscidean limb bone notches with experimental samples of dynamically and statically loaded notches on cow femora and shows that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Delaney Cooley.

Archaeologists have long struggled to identify archaeological material diagnostic of prehistoric and protohistoric Ute occupation in the Rocky Mountains and surrounding areas. Despite continued efforts, researchers continue to rely principally on William Buckles’ (1971) seminal work examining Ute cultural continuity on the Uncompahgre Plateau of western Colorado. My research expands on Buckles’ 45 year-old dissertation by re-examining two excavated sites from his project: the open occupation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bretton Giles. Eric Skov. Shannon Koerner.

We compare two sites (14RY3180 and 14RY3184), located on the bluffs above the Kansas River valley on the Fort Riley Military Installation. We examine how these sites were initially interpreted and reassess their significance. This reassessment is based on recent field work at 14RY3184, while our insights about 14RY3180 derive from a reexamination of its lithic assemblage and a new AMS date. We demonstrate through this comparison that 14RY3180 and 14RY3184 were used for different activities, even...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yahui He.

For a long time, scholars have noticed that there are similarities in Neolithic ceramics from Southeast mainland China and Western Taiwan from specific periods. The provenance study adopting XRF (X-ray fluorescence) and ICP-MS (inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry) of analyzing stone adzes by scholars in recent years demonstrates that people in Southeast mainland China and western Taiwan did interact during the Neolithic dating back to 7450 B.P. From these studies, it is known that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cameron Griffith. Adam Spring. Brent Woodfill.

Over a period of just a few short years there have been dramatic advancements in digital imaging and scanning technologies. Increasingly, cave archaeologists around the world are utilizing many of these new platforms and techniques to document subterranean artwork. This paper outlines two different approaches to digital imaging of ancient Maya cave art. In Guatemala, a Z+F IMAGER 5010C 3D Laser scanner, mounted on a tripod, was employed in Cueva San Juan and Hun Nal Ye to document both...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brigitte Kovacevich. Duncan Cook. Michael Callaghan. Dawn Crawford.

This paper will discuss the various activities that took place on the exterior stone patio floor of the M6-12 domestic structure at Cancuen, Guatemala, and compare it to previously published findings of the M10-4 and M10-7 structures. These structures typically have a low investment in construction and appear to be non-elite in status, characterized by earthen mounds surrounded by limestone flagstone floors and perishable superstructures. These surfaces often appear to be communal activity areas...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Neeley. Steven Swinford.

Archaeological sampling of lithic assemblages is an important process for characterizing the make-up and range of variability of these materials. These characterizations often focus on complete pieces due to the greater number of variables that can be recorded and the uncertain utility of incomplete data. But do complete pieces adequately characterize assemblage variability? Are these samples capturing the same range of variation found in broken pieces (e.g., proximal pieces)? This paper...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa DeLance. Jaime Awe.

Mesoamerican archaeologists have traditionally, although not exclusively, viewed artifacts found in the context of construction fill as trash and devoid of primary contextual information, a view that has limited the questions that archaeologists are able to ask of these materials. This paper posits an alternative interpretation to the meaning of material culture used in construction fill, utilizing evidence from Formative period construction fill found at the site of Cahal Pech, Cayo, Belize....

DOCUMENT Full-Text Heather Walder.

Compositional analysis of copper-base metal artifacts using portable x-ray fluorescence (pXRF) is an accurate and non-destructive way to identify "protohistoric" European-trade items in early contexts and to assess the continuity of native copper object use on historic-era archaeological sites (Dussubieux and Walder 2015). This poster presents new results from pXRF analysis of artifacts from two late 17th century archaeological sites in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan: the Cloudman Site, a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Detlef Wilke. Tuende Kaszab-Olschewski. Gerald Grimm.

Nondestructive XRF was used to provenance Roman and 15th century molded figurines found in Worms, Rhineland-Palatinate (Germany). Three Roman kiln areas with waster material of various kinds of cooking and dining pottery were detected, but no coroplastics. Two kiln areas provided sherds with a highly uniform paste pattern identical to Roman amphora and roof tiles formerly analyzed by destructive WD-XRF, and supposed to be produced in Borbetomagus. A third kiln additionally contained utilitarian...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Case. Emma Britton.

The northern Mexican state of Chihuahua contains many little-known archaeological sites. Established collections, such as E.B. Sayles’s 1933 survey collection, can provide new insights using analytic techniques not available when they were originally acquired. We analyzed a subset of Sayles’s collection, including Carretas and Huérigos polychrome ceramic types, for glaze compositional information and geographic sourcing of the lead flux. Analyzing the samples using laser ablation inductively...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Shultz.

Agent-based computer simulation is an approach that models the behavior of individual agents, allowing for the observation of emergent phenomena created by the aggregate effects of individual actions. This presentation builds on a recent series of agent-based computer simulations exploring the development of wealth inequality as a function of environmental change in pastoral nomadic societies. When simulating a pure pastoral nomadic economy, it was found that wealth inequality increased under...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caitlin Rankin.

Recent soil coring and reexamination of mound height changes through time have revealed an extremely high historic sedimentation rate of 5.2 cm per year in the North Plaza, resulting in deep burial (around four meters) of the Mississippian landscape. Modernly, the North Plaza is noticeably lower than other plazas surrounding Monks Mounds; however, the North Plaza would have been a dramatic topographic feature during Mississippian occupation. The discovery of landscape six meters lower than the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Phil C. Riris.

Archaeologists have long sought to explain the distribution of rock art traditions across Amazonia and circum-Amazonia with reference to stylistic variability in the iconography, often as a proxy for exploring shared concepts of symbolic representation, mediated through local cultural norms. Where it has been possible, cross-referencing this kind of data with the ethnographic and archaeological records has engendered valuable new interpretations of indigenous symbolic repertoires in a variety of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gregory Monks.

The Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka) of Canada’s west coast are renown ethnographically for their cultural practice of open ocean whaling. Research in the last decade has shed light on the preferred species, the ecological reasons why whales were pursued, the antiquity of whaling, and the economic and social implications of whaling. Most of this research has been substantive and methodological in nature with only modest attention to theoretical issues. In this paper, I take a Human Behavioral Ecology...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniella Tarquinio. Gerald Conlogue. Jaime Ullinger. Ramon Gonzalez.

Skeletons from site Tell el-Hesi (ca. 1400-1800CE; located in the southern Levant) have been undergoing renewed paleopathological analysis with the use of non-destructive imaging techniques. Upon assessing for pathology a computed radiograph image revealed multiple thin radiolucent structures within the cranial fragments of an individual that were not observed on the surface of the bone. These canal-like structures, thought to be some type of nutrient vessel, required further analysis to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Verenice Heredia Espinoza. Christopher Beekman.

During the Late Postclassic, the Tequila region was home to multiple small, ethnically, and linguistically diverse polities, which both competed and cooperated with one another. This period was highly conflictive due to attempts by the Tarascan Empire to push its way into the valleys, wreaking havoc in several towns along the way. To the north, bellicose, nomadic groups were also a threat to Tequila’s population. Therefore, we hypothesize that Late Postclassic settlement patterns reflect this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacob Deppen.

This presentation examines connectivity in the Late Iron Age on the island of Mallorca. While most case studies of connectivity in the western Mediterranean involve the movement of people and/or the construction of new settlements by non-local people, there is little evidence that this occurred in Mallorca. However, there is still abundant evidence that indigenous Iron Age Mallorcans were increasingly connected to the broader Mediterranean and that non-local goods were being consumed throughout...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bruna Rocha. Vinicius Oliveira.

The first millennium AD saw an increase in population density throughout much of Amazonia; this is testified by an increase in the number and size of coeval archaeological sites, many of which include anthropogenic dark earths, widely considered as proxies for intensive and continuous human habitation and alteration of the environment. The Terra Preta do Mangabal and Sawre Muybu sites were village settlements occupied from c.700AD and c.900AD respectively, located along the rapids of the upper...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jane Eastman.

This paper considers the stratigraphic evidence for Connestee series and Pisgah series components in the Tuckaseegee Valley of Western North Carolina.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Luis Gomez-Gastelum. Victor Landa-Jaime. Emilio Michel-Morfin.

En el interés de los estudios interdisciplinarios cada una de las partes aporta un conocimiento especializado, lo que tiene como finalidad generar aportes más sólidos en los campos que intervienen. En el caso de la arqueología, el análisis de materiales de concha implica el concurso de especialistas bien entrenados, pues no es lo mismo el estudio de moluscos actuales que el de tiempos pretéritos. Ello obliga a partir de los conocimientos más actualizados tanto en el ámbito de la arqueología como...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristin Landau.

Understanding the growth and dissolution of state entities has long been a topic of anthropological inquiry. More recently, archaeologists are promulgating dynamic and careful conceptions of how leaders acquire power, and whether and why surrounding residents may support them. By turning our attention to the political economic relationship between Maya rulers and the local population, we can identify successful and failed attempts to maintain states. In this paper, I combine political...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alice Tratebas.

Wild fire damage to rock art can have long term effects. Panels may continue to spall over time from the fire damage or from the effects of soluble salts that were activated and spread during the fire. Rock outcrops and slopes may become destabilized after fire denudes vegetation. Panels can be buried or have ashy sediments washed down from the cliff tops above. What happens over time after wild fire kills lichen growing on rock art? Observations and studies following two large wild fires that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adriana Sanroman. Maria Barajas. Valeria Hernandez. Erika Robles.

Throughout the explorations of the Templo Mayor Project, numerous offerings have been surveyed, most of them standing out for the large number of animal remains recovered including a great deal of sawfish, characterized by an anterior long and flat snout that has teeth on both sides. Their skeleton and snouts are chemically composed by hydroxyapatite and collagen in different crystalline arrangements. This causes the stabilization and conservation processes to be a challenge for the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine Lee.

Tomb excavations have been documented in East Asia for over 100 years, however the focus has been on artifact collection. The systematic excavation and collection of human skeletal remains is new to this region. This study will outline three cases where there was a demonstrated need for the implementation of conservation techniques. The first case included several naturally mummified skulls from Xinjiang, Province, China. A graduate student had decided to wash the skulls to remove skin and hair....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryuzaburo Takahashi.

Recent advance in anthropology have resurrected the term totemism from earlier the theories developed by such scholars as Robertson Smith and E, Durkheim at the beginning of 20th century. The crucial features of totemism are: 1) it represents total emblems of the descent groups; 2) it functions to support solidarity of the group; 3) it has as exogamic function; 4) it invokes taboos against killing certain animals and eating them; 5) it constitutes intimate relationships between human being and...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Kyle Bocinsky.

Twenty-seven years ago, Bruce Trigger presented a "new synthesis of archaeological explanation," seeking to harmonize neo-evolutionary explanations dominant in the 1970s with socio-historical perspectives of the 1980s. Central to his thesis was the distinction between "external" constraints that structure human agency independent of humans themselves, and "internal" constraints that are historically and culturally constructed. Here, I critique Trigger's formula by acknowledging that even...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelly Ledford. Tanya Peres.

Pre-Columbian peoples of the Southeastern United States systematically altered their environment through forest clearing, gardening, terraforming, and urban planning. The end result of these activities encouraged certain native animals like the wild turkey (Meleagris gallopavo silvestris) to occupy these constructed and managed environments, especially forest-edges and agricultural fields. The sustained daily interactions between species resulted in a special and complex human-turkey...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Douglas Charles. Jane Buikstra.

Through several books and articles, Martin Byers has developed an interpretation of the Hopewell phenomenon in the American Midwest that radically departs from the general consensus. To date he has focused almost exclusively on Ohio Hopewell. Many of the important sites in that region were excavated almost a century ago and the reports and records are less detailed than we would wish. In his latest book, Reclaiming the Hopewell Ceremonial Sphere, Byers seeks to extend his vision beyond Ohio to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Céline Lamb.

The concept of rural complexity acknowledges that social, political, and economic complexity is not limited to large urban centers (Iannone and Connell 2003; Schwartz and Falconer 1994). Like urbanites, hinterland residents are involved in diverse and shifting interactions through which they form, maintain, and reinvent relations of commonality and social differentiation. Chunhuayum, a small settlement located in the Northern Lowlands and occupied from the Late Preclassic through the Late...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lucia Clarisa Watson. Krzysztof Makowski. Jessica Christie.

We will discuss the characteristics and scope of Inca politics in the Lurin Valley by focusing on the results of excavations carried out by Makowski (2016) in Pachacamac with its famous Imperial Inca temple and oracle, as well as in the administrative center Pueblo Viejo – Pucara. The comparison of landscape transformed by Imperial infrastructure between the Highlands of Cuzco (Christie 2016) and the lower Lurin Valley allows to reconstruct the mechanisms through which social memory was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paola Schiappacasse.

The archaeological collections crisis we have been facing for the last couple of decades has forced many of us to rethink how to conduct research without adding to the problem. Although the idea that you need to excavate in order to do "archaeology" still permeates the opinions in academia, we have been seeing more research projects that revisit archaeological collections. Therefore, how can we make archaeology students aware of other research possibilities? The archaeological excavations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kirsten Vacca.

Archaeologists have incorporated sex/gender and sexuality research in projects for decades, yet such foci have failed to become widespread as they are largely considered a specialty or niche topic. This paper first looks at why the topics in question have remained on the fringe of archaeological research. The subsequent discussion analyzes ways in which contemporary practices can counteract deeply embedded ideas about the archaeology of sex/ gender and sexuality, making this approach to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Howard Higgins.

Gaining meaningful information from traditional community consultants can often be difficult. Furthermore, exactly what constitutes such information has changed over time. Recently the focus in archaeology has shifted from a point based search for specific locations to a landscape based approach aimed at information that can be used to define the attributes of traditional cultural properties, so that areas which could contain them can be managed. This paper explores the elements needed to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Meierhoff.

In the mid-nineteenth century Maya refugees fleeing the violence of the Caste War of Yucatan (1857-1901) briefly reoccupied the ancient Maya ruins of Tikal, Guatemala. These Yucatec speaking refugees combined with Lacandon Maya, and later Ladinos from Lake Petén Itza to form a small, multi-ethnic village in the sparsely occupied Petén jungle of northern Guatemala. The following paper will discuss the recent archaeological investigation of the historic refugee village at Tikal, with a focus on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Leach. Brian Robinson.

The Seabrook Marsh site [SBM] in Hampton, New Hampshire is a ca. 3500-4500 BP multi-component site beneath 1-2 meters of salt marsh peat and exposed at a rapidly eroding shoreface. Like most intertidal archaeological sites SBM occupies a dynamic environment. Daily tidal fluctuations slightly modify surficial sediments, but on a monthly, seasonal, or annual scale the magnitude of changes is quite significant. The resulting landscape modifications range from minor erosion and deposition to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alejandro Uriarte Torres.

Durante el Preclásico, el noroeste de Yucatán atestiguo el desarrollo de grupos sociales complejos tempranos evidenciados por la aparición de una jerarquía de asentamientos y una arquitectura de función cívico-ritual. La evidencia arqueológica indica que estos grupos tenían acceso a bienes de intercambio a larga distancia de productos elaborados con diversas materias primas: obsidiana, jade y basalto, por mencionar los que aparecen con mayor frecuencia en contextos arqueológicos. En contraste,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristi Peterson.

In the pre-Columbian era of Mexico, devotional objects served to reinforce existing cultural systems while simultaneously shaping the overarching aesthetic narrative. This presentation will explore the manner by which ixiptla (lit. representation), a type of central Mexican cult effigy, functioned to form the visual rhetoric that is illustrative and formative of conceptions of space, place, and cultural identity in the late Postclassic Period. Within the category of devotional images, ixiptla...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erica Nicolay.

Transmigration and diaspora are topics which archaeologists have recently begun contributing to in more detail (Lilley 2004, Ross 2010; Ross 2011). These concepts assert the fact that cultural interchange exists when immigrant or migrant communities settle in new lands, and rejects the idea of homogenization, accultraltion, or complete resistance and can be addressed in archaeology via consumption. Consumption patterns, though seemingly unimportatnt, have the ability to shed light on almost...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacob Damm.

The site of Tel Yafo (modern Jaffa, Israel) provides unique insight into the tenure of the Egyptian New Kingdom empire in the Levant (ca. 16th - 11th centuries BCE). As attested to in both ancient documents and by the presence of Egyptian monumental architecture, Jaffa functioned as an important imperial center. As the empire waned, Jaffa persisted as one of the last Egyptian holdings in the region. Recent excavations by the Jaffa Cultural Heritage Project (JCHP) have opened this final period to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shea Henry.

In June 1503, Columbus and his two battered ships were run aground in the sheltered harbor of St. Anns Bay Jamaica, 1.4 kilometers from the Taino village of Maima. After spending a year marooned there, the Spanish left with the knowledge of the people and resources of the area. Six years later, in 1509, the Spanish returned to found the Jamaican colonial capital of Sevilla la Nueva. By the time Sevilla la Nueva was abandoned in 1534, Maima was deserted. Historical records kept by the colonists...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elic Weitzel. Daniel Plekhov.

Archaeological and historic data suggest that prior to European Contact, Eastern North America was heavily populated. However, within a century of Contact, the indigenous population was decimated. To explore one of many behavioral changes brought about by this demographic collapse, we model indigenous settlement in Eastern North America pre- and post-Contact as a function of environmental productivity. We hypothesize that if post-Contact settlement differed from pre-Contact, two scenarios are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tsuimei Huang.

The turquoise-inlaid bronze plaques with animal motifs excavated from the Erlitou sites are among the most conspicuous artifacts ever discovered in the Culture. This work explores issues regarding the function and origin of these items, which were worn as ornamental objects at the wrists of the deceased at the time of excavation. Through an analysis of the deposition and placement of these artifacts in the graves, it is speculated that this unique artifact type could be traced all the way back...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Evan Sternberg. Justin Lowry. Jason Paling.

Trade and inter-community connections are keys to understanding how the ancient region around the modern city of Managua, Nicaragua, interacted and participated in the larger Central American and Mesoamerican trade corridor. This paper will present potential interpretations of long distance and local connections through a cost and pathway analysis using ArcGIS. This study will incorporate recent research on obsidian and ceramic sourcing studies from the site of Chiquilistagua into the model of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pedro Ramon Celis.

Recientes trabajos de exploración llevados a cabo en la población de San Pedro Nexicho, ubicado en la Sierra Norte de Oaxaca, se han enfocado en el registro y análisis de cinco tumbas ubicadas en un sitio posclásico zapoteca. Las investigaciones en esta región han sido someras, por lo que encontrar contextos tan complejos y explorarlos con una metodología controlada nos ha ofrecido uno de los conjuntos de materiales arqueológicos más importantes para la comprensión integral de las relaciones de...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Peabody. Sarah Barber.

Known as estampias, pintaderas, or sellos, ceramic stamps are known from Precolumbian sites throughout Mexico although very little research has been done on this group of artifacts. Previously published examples depict a wide range of iconographic themes, including geometric, floral, and faunal designs. This paper presents an analysis of 19 ceramic stamps recovered from excavations in the lower Río Verde valley. This group of artifacts spans nearly the entire Precolumbian period, from the Late...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chapurukha Kusimba.

The role of ritual in the rise of complex societies is well understood in many regions of the world. In contrast, the roles ritual may have played in state collapse, regeneration, and resilience remains inadequately theorized in archaeological studies of the political dynamics of complex societies. This paper will evaluate the role of ritual in the emergence, resilience, and collapse of chiefly and state societies in Eastern and Southeastern Africa. Social and symbolic factors especially the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Manuel Mamani. Jesus Mamani.

Una de las más grandes reformas llevadas a cabo durante el Virreinato en el Perú fue la Reducción General de Indios, que consistió en el traslado y reubicación de las poblaciones indígenas. Este proceso de cambios no solo se enfocó en la generación de una nueva forma de asentamientos humanos, sino que también afectaron con toda una estructura social, que a su vez repercutió en el modo de vida y bagaje cultural materializado en la distribución, uso y representación de espacios, es este el caso de...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Cush. Richard Callaghan.

The Taiwanese or Formosan sailing raft likely has considerable antiquity as well as geographic distribution on the coasts of China, Taiwan, Vietnam, and possibly as far south as the Coromandel Coast of India. The Taiwanese version is the most studied and may have the longest continuous evolution into the 20th century. These seagoing craft were initially constructed from bamboo, equipped with lug sails, and steered using center boards in a very sophisticated manner. Analysis of their performance...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Niall Sharples.

The paper is an examination of the cultural differences that exist within the Western Isles and how these relate to similarities and differences with other areas of the North Atlantic, such as the Orkney and Shetland. It will focus on the changes that occur in the first and second millenium AD; the relationship with the Picts and Scots, the transformation brought about by the Vikings and the integration of the islands into the Kingdom of the Scots. These political changes can be compared and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eduardo Herrera Malatesta.

Landscape has been an useful analytical tool for archaeologists for a long time. Its definition since its first uses in the discipline has grown and diversified to the point that is has been called a "usefully ambiguous" concept. However, this broad definition should not be applied everywhere and in every temporal/historical context. This concept should not be used as an straight forward analytical tool, but requires a critical contextual revision. For an alternative approach in the area of this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Ochoa Castillo.

Las colecciones arqueológicas del Preclásico del Altiplano Central que se encuentran depositadas en el Museo Nacional de Antropología son una fuente de información fundamental para el conocimiento de este periodo, además de ser las más numerosas y completas en su tipo, ya que incluyen tanto las que proceden de las grandes excavaciones realizadas hace décadas (aunque desafortunadamente constituyen un porcentaje menor), como aquellas colecciones que llegaron al museo por adquisiciones diversas...

DOCUMENT Citation Only María Scattolin. Leticia Cortés.

The most ancient metallurgy of pre-Columbian America originated and evolved in the Andes, reaching great levels of technical sophistication. However, as a few interesting cases of these first moments of experimentation with metals come from Perú, with them comes the popular idea that any technical advance took place in the Peruvian Andes. Because complex societies later emerged in what is now Central Andes, there is a tendency to think that all technological innovations did as well. This could...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gavin Davies. Tomas Barrientos Quezada.

Lake Atitlan sits within the Sierra Madre mountain chain which represents the physical divide between the Guatemalan highlands and the Pacific lowlands. It was thus ideally situated to act as a hub for cultural and economic exchanges between these two contrasting ecological zones. The three imposing volcanoes that line its southern shore, however, severely limited options for travel between these areas and commerce and settlement thus concentrated around obvious natural corridors such as those...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lyrsa María Torres-Vélez.

Puerto Rico’s culinary history is characterized by a blend of the different ethnicities that settled in the island after the Spanish Conquest, as well as the incorporation of pre-Columbian food ways. This ethnogenesis can be studied through the culinary traditions that conform what we now refer to as criollo. This presentation uses El Cocinero Puerto-Riqueño, the only cookbook available from the 19th century in Puerto Rico, as a primary source to address the material culture associated to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Kooiman.

Identifying specific foods exploited and consumed by people from past societies is important, but decisions concerning nutrition and social identity can only be fully understood through the study of food preparation techniques and recipe development and traditions. Cooking and cuisine embody the intersection of the biological and the cultural. Their centrality in both everyday and ritual life makes them ideal thoroughfares into the exploration of adaptive, social, political, and ideological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cathleen Hauman.

Food is not only essential for survival but also an important element of any culture. Artifacts for the storage, preparation and serving of food and drink form a large proportion of archaeological assemblages demonstrating that this has always been the case. Understanding how these artifacts were used gives us valuable insight into our past. Organic residue analysis allows us to more accurately determine how a vessel was, in fact, used. My research looked at several vessels sourced from Thailand...