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

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jack Corbett. Nelly Robles Garcia.

Archaeological research frequently produces material elements we seek to safeguard for the benefit of future generations, a goal that requires organizational support and a mix of resources. When the research materials pass to the responsibility of communities or groups with limited preparation and resources for management of said materials, we encounter a serious disconnect between the accomplishments of research and the long-term viability of archaeological resources. In Mexico the long...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Colleen Parsley.

A mass grave of cremated individuals representing 15,353 comingled bone fragments representing 65 individuals was uncovered from the ancient Northwest Coast archaeological site of DgRw-17, a continuously occupied Stz’uminus First Nation village in Kulleet Bay. Cremation of multiple individuals buried in a mass grave is not an established burial tradition or mortuary practice of any Coast Salish community. Mass graves of comingled and cremated human remains may represent ossuaries or episodic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zhe Zhang.

Houtaomuga is a late Neolithic site located in the northeast of China. A special feature G2 has produced a large sample of aurochs (Bos primigenius) skeletal remains. Examination of the assemblage in G2, including bone quantity, surface modification and mortality profile suggests a site of mass aurochs procurement that took place during late summer to fall. Feasting is suggested to be a likely reason that could lead to this mass deposition.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cassandra Bill.

Features of material culture can be actively constructed and transparently manipulated to various sociopolitical ends, with the installation of elaborate monuments and possession of ornate goods making bold statements of power and authority. While other more common elements of material culture may provide perhaps less conspicuous commentary on the "state of the union," they can also be equally symbolic of the conditions under which they were created. This paper examines the material culture...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carla Klehm.

Megalithic architecture appeared suddenly in northwest Kenya 5000 years ago in tandem with the earliest pastoralists in the region. As Lake Turkana’s levels dropped, these people built "pillar sites" – massive feats of labor and coordination that represent one of the earliest instances of monumentality in Africa – in a brief explosion of material and architectural elaboration. The burials associated with these pillar sites are highly ornamented, with thousands of beads made from stone, bone, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Fowler. Jeb C. Card.

Mapping and excavations of the Conquest-period and early colonial site of Ciudad Vieja, the ruins of the first villa of San Salvador, El Salvador, afford a view of material culture encounters and indigenous transformations in northern Central America. The Ciudad Vieja archaeological research has focused on material culture encounters between Spanish and indigenous populations in the realms of landscape, architecture, technology, economy, society, and religion. The time span for Ciudad Vieja runs...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacob Salmen-Hartley.

Archaeological materials can provide data useful for modern conservation and resource management efforts. Zooarchaeological materials have been used to provide information about past species distributions as well as their characteristics. I am interested in using the material technology of prehistoric resource harvesting to provide information about species in the past. This poster will discuss my research using traditional halibut fishing technology to provide information about the fish being...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kerry Thompson.

As investigations of cultures’ material pasts, archaeology’s units of analysis are tactile. The concepts we employ need material referents in order to be accessible to archaeological analysis and interpretation. To bring together the scientific method of archaeology with Indigenous frameworks, material referents of Indigenous concepts necessarily require theorizing the dynamic relationship between culture, time, and place in concert with Indigenous perspectives. In scaffolding theoretical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jaya Menon.

Most State and University-sponsored excavations in India have tended to focus on public and elite spaces, in keeping with nationalistic aims of projecting a grandiose view of the past. This has led to the inevitable marginalization of non-elite domestic spaces. One of the few cases of household archaeology in the Indian subcontinent has come from Indor Khera in the Upper Ganga Plains in northern India. Archaeological data recovered during the excavations has given valuable information on the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan Cifarelli.

The site of Hasanlu, Iran, was destroyed thoroughly by a marauding army in approximately 800 BCE, leaving a hulk of smoking rubble that was a virtual tomb for the hundreds of residents and combatants who weren’t able to escape its citadel. The excavations of Hasanlu, led by Robert H. Dyson of the University of Pennsylvania Museum, took place between 1956 and 1977, and uncovered a remarkable range of contexts containing personal ornaments within the relatively narrow historical horizon of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Valeria Bellomia.

This presentation focuses on some results of an interdisciplinary study carried out on two scraping idiophones made of human bones from ancient Mesoamerica (omichicahuaztli). Both the instruments are today on exhibit at the Museo Nazionale Preistorico Etnografico "Luigi Pigorini" in Rome. The detailed analysis of the bone surfaces allowed us to reconstruct the taphonomic processes that affected the bones and the steps employed to transform them into musical instruments. Our research team...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Felipe Criado-Boado. Lois Armada. César Parcero-Oubiña. Alfredo González-Ruibal.

This paper deals with a so-called "negative" approach to social complexity and social development. Instead of understanding the arising of complex societies as a result of positive ontology, it focuses on the resistances, negations and the invisible that tried to avoid or at least to minimize social inequality and exploitation. The arising of complex societies could, alternatively, be conceived as the trend to resist social division and its generalization. The paper will show as the material...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marcelo Acosta.

In this paper we will be discussing the iconography of the roof tiles found in the primitive missions of Nuestra Senora de Loreto and San Ignacio Mini located in the region of the Guairá. The aim is to analyze the material and symbolic universe that circulated in the primitive Jesuits missions (1610 - 1631). In order to achieve this goal, we will first analyze the technologies of production, the iconographic types and interpret the possible meanings acquired in the representations shown on the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Riggs.

This paper discusses built landscape management policies put in place during the aftermath of the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan. It is argued that the management of out-migrant associated buildings (both monumental and residential) was influenced by three divergent goals of nationhood: (1) modernization, (2) secularism, and (3) cultural cohesion. These goals pointed towards conflicting actions. Providing shelter to millions of incoming refugees required the hasty allocation of dwelling...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carrie Dennett. Lorelei Platz.

Themes involving spiritual transformation have long been noted in the material culture of pre-Columbian Greater Nicoya, with standardized ritual imagery appearing in local Sapoá period (AD 800-1250) ceramic type-classes such as Papagayo and Pataky Polychromes. A recent iconographic re-evaluation suggests that at least some varieties from these ‘independent types’ were designed to work together, to complement one another in both ritual messaging and formal function. Here we focus explicitly on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Chastain. Jianli Chen. Xingshan Lei.

The extraordinary bronze ritual vessels of Shang- and Zhou-period China were cast in multi-part ceramic molds, constructed from many individually formed mold sections. This piece-mold casting method was unique to ancient China, and an essential component of the technology appears to have been the use of a specialized type of ceramic paste to form the casting molds. This ceramic material was soft, porous, and rich in silica, making it quite unlike pottery clays in terms of composition,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Camp.

Catlow Twine is a unique and diagnostic basketry type found in archaeological sites of the Great Basin and some parts of California. It has a relatively wide geographic distribution and is thought to have over ~9,000 calendar years before present (cal B.P.) of technological continuity. Through the reexamination and recording of specific attributes and the direct Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) dating of Catlow Twine basketry from sites in Nevada, California, and Oregon, I have observed these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patrick Lyons. Don Burgess. Marilyn Marshall. Jaye Smith.

Emil Haury's 1958 synthesis of the Pueblo III-Pueblo IV period (A.D. 1265-1450) archaeology of Point of Pines Pueblo, in east-central Arizona, is the American Southwest's classic case study in how to reliably infer ancient migrations. Field school excavations conducted between 1946 and 1960 uncovered compelling evidence of immigrants from the Kayenta region of far northeastern Arizona and southeastern Utah. However, because the excavations at Point of Pines Pueblo have never been fully reported,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maline Werness-Rude. Kaylee Spencer.

It has long been recognized that ancient Maya architecture encoded sacred ideologies and replicated primordial landscapes through building forms and structural orientations. Many studies have focused on the architecture of the Southern Maya Lowlands, where rich textual sources exist and where an abundance of archaeological data aids in efforts to understand and interpret the meanings of architectural groups. We seek to augment interpretive frameworks with respect to the Northern Maya Lowlands,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Prout.

Our knowledge of Maya human sacrifice is drawn from iconographic representations and contact period Spanish sources. Unfortunately, the corpus related to child sacrifice is extremely limited. In 1971 David M. Pendergast described the burial of a child from Eduardo Quiroz Cave with traumatic perimortem holes in the parietals. Later, Brady reported on a second child with similar wounds. Both Pendergast and Brady interpreted the evidence as reflecting child sacrifice. The recovery of thousands...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jim Aimers.

Maya E-Group architectural assemblages have attracted scholarly attention for about a century, and yet our ideas about them have become more muddled through time. Since the beginning of investigations in the 1920’s these structures have been thought to have had some astronomical function, but the exact astronomical significance suggested by archaeologists has changed though time. Today there is very little agreement about their meaning and function. In this presentation I will briefly review the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alejandra Roche Recinos. Mallory Matsumoto.

In recent years significant headway has been made to understand New World marketing systems. In contrast with the highly complex and easily identifiable market systems of the Mexican Highlands, ancient Maya systems of production and distribution have traditionally been assumed to have operated at the level of the household, and thus have been overlooked. However, recent work in the Maya area has shown the likely presence of production beyond the household at possible market areas. In this paper,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Simmons. Bryan Cockrell.

Investigations at the southern Maya Lowland sites of Lamanai and Tipu, Belize have yielded diverse assemblages of metal artifacts. These metals are from the Postclassic and Colonial (12th to 17th century) occupations at Lamanai and Colonial (mid-16th to early 18th century) contexts at Tipu. As a rare occasion to look at the similarities and differences between artifacts made of the same material from different sites, this research compares the forms, contexts, and technologies of metal artifacts...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emmett Nahil. Mary Clarke.

Analyses of sculptural practices of the Ancient Maya have centered on the final stages of production, namely the identities of sculptors, the locations of production, and the techne of sculptural practice. While the contributions of these analyses cannot be contested, there remains a poorly resolved understanding of when in the process of sculpture limestone gains its cultural significance. This paper presents data from recent excavations at a quarry workshop at Xultun where a stela still...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kirsten Green.

Mortuary practices are created to convey something about the deceased individual, as well as their surviving relatives, but can also give insight into the religious, social, and political structure of the community. This paper focuses on Maya mortuary practices in Belize, and how/why those practices changed over the transition from the Formative period (2000 BC – AD 300) to the Classic Maya florescence (AD 300-800). Comparing differences of mortuary characteristics within and between...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Takeshi Inomata.

Royal palaces at the medium-sized centers of Aguateca and Ceibal appear to represent a basic template for the spatial and functional configurations of Maya palaces. They exhibit simple square forms resembling smaller residential groups of lower status, indicating their primary function as residential complexes of the royal families. Administrative and ceremonial functions were likely merged with domestic ones. These palaces also provide information on the degree of spatial mobility. While the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William J. Folan. Maria del Rosario Dominguez C.. Joel D. Gunn.

The Palaces of the Peten Campechano and the remainder of the Yucatan Peninsula represent single and composite, royal multipurpose households of varying shapes and sizes often associated with triadic relationships representing religious, civic, and military responsibilities. These relationships are manifest in structures at Calakmul, Oxpemul, Becan, Santa Rosa Xtampak, the triadic Monjas Quadrangle of Uxmal, Structure #385 of Dzibilchaltun, the triad of Noh Cah Chan Santa Cruz, El Palacio de...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mario Zimmermann.

For several years, peasant communities on the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico, have not produced high enough maize-yields to sustain populations in the area. This is despite the fact that modern-day demographics are considerably lower than population estimates for the heights of Maya cultural development during the pre-Columbian era. Some scholars have argued that maize was not the sole staple for the ancient Maya. Root and tree crops are among the candidates for alternative staples given their...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Philippe Bezy.

For the ancient Maya, the use of music was often depicted as central to ritual activity.  One of the longest lasting instruments, the shell trumpet, provides ample material for analysis.  My three-pronged interpretive approach is made possible by the shell’s use in ancient ritual contexts, its appearance in Classic era iconography, and its organic origins. Archeologically provenanced trumpets, for example, yield deposition data, while art historical methods address both unprovenanced trumpets...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Leventhal.

The study of the ancient Maya has become complicated over the past 30 years. As the ancient Maya writing has been deciphered, these texts provide an historical record of parts of the ancient social and political systems. This development has moved the study of the Maya past into the realm of historic archaeology. In addition, the study of the colonial period in the Maya area has focused upon Spanish and indigenous texts to understand this historic period but additionally to create analogical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Ortíz. Julia Perez. Ximena Chávez. Emilio Ibarra.

Each offer in the Tenochtitlan Sacred Enclosure is the representation of a microcosmos that can be understood through the analysis and interpretation of each one of its compounds. An important part of them are the vegetal microremains, floral remains that did not endure trough the pass of the time for its own organic nature but that in the Aztec period had multiple meanings that allowed them to be an frequent material of offering. The Offer 149 is an exceptional case up to the moment, not only...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Waber.

The saying "different strokes for different folks" is a literal truism in the realm of lithic analysis and experimentation where stone tools were and are used by individual people whose tool use gestures vary in any number of ways. Until very recently, experimental archaeologists have largely neglected aspects of gestural variation, such as how much force is applied to a tool's edge, and task-related gestures are most often glossed under the catch-all term "stroke". "Strokes" are counted and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Douglas Craig. David Abbott. Hannah Zanotto. Veronica Judd. Brent Kober.

Recent archaeological efforts to explain the emergence and persistence of social inequality have been hampered by a lack of information about how wealth was transmitted across generations and how it may have accumulated or diminished over time. Building on studies that have shown domestic architecture to be an excellent material expression of household wealth, we provide a method for reconstructing the amount of labor invested in house construction at Pueblo Grande, taking into account different...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Johnson.

Characterizing inter-household inequalities has long been a fundamental task of archaeology, but a fine-tuned measure of household wealth is often troubled by the inability to account for time or demographics in the archaeological record. This project tests the ways that Iceland, settled by Norse populations between A.D. 870 and 930, provides a temporally-sensitive mode of measuring household wealth through average rates of midden and architectural accumulations while also providing a context...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John O'Connor. Scott Fitzpatrick. Todd Braje. Matthew Napolitano. Thomas Leppard.

Archaeological research on islands worldwide demonstrates that initial colonists exerted substantial environmental impacts on local ecologies, ranging from the extirpation of native species to landscape modification. The degree of impact was dependent on a host of variables, including the kinds and number of introduced plant and animal species, the remoteness of settled islands, and extent of interaction between discrete landmasses. Yet, there is still much to learn about the consequences of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kellam J. Throgmorton. R. J. Sinensky.

Thirty years of research on mobility and sedentism shows that population movement occurred for reasons both ecological and social. Population movement could occur over short or long distances, could occur seasonally or generationally, and could involve both small and large groups. While archaeologists have theorized mobility in a variety of ways, they have not developed a robust body of methods for measuring and comparing mobility between households at the intrasite or intersite level. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Colleen Strawhacker. Grant Snitker. Keith Kintigh. Ann Kinzig. Katherine Spielmann.

Marginal environments present risks to food shortfall to prehistoric small-scale societies, which create and rely on social and environmental strategies to mitigate those risks. One piece to understanding the vulnerability to failing to produce enough food is defining the risk factors that may limit food procurement on a given landscape – in our case, the U.S Southwest. Using large archaeological, historical, and ecological datasets, our main risk to food production – growing season...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lela Urquhart.

Studies of ancient colonization in the Mediterranean have principally been concerned with assessing the "impact" of colonization: did the colonization processes of groups like the Greeks and Phoenicians make a significant impact on local native societies among whom they settled, and if so, in what ways? Important as such questions are, they have sometimes overlooked a more basic step: how do we actually measure the "impact of colonization" in the first place? This paper offers a response to that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aidan O'Sullivan.

Medieval wooden and stone fishweirs are amongst the most spectacularly preserved evidence for fishing practices amongst riverine and estuarine communities in Britain and Ireland. Recent archaeological surveys and excavations have traced their types of construction, forms, uses and biographies across time, and increasingly sophisticated means of dating them has enabled us to identify patterns in their repair over relatively short periods of time (i.e. years and decades). This paper will use...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yann Ardagna. Marc Maillot.

The site of Mouweis is a Nilotic city of the Meroitic period excavated by the Louvre Museum since 2007. This settlement includes a 1st century AD palace, later destroyed and reduced to a hill-shaped ruin. During the medieval period, a cemetery was created in the demolition level of this palace. Radiocarbon dating reveals a funerary occupation between of the 8th to the 14th century. Burials were mainly individual with a uniform typology and follow the same orientation as the structure of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Franklin. Astghik Babajanyan.

This paper presents observations from recent seasons of research in the Vayoc Dzor region of southern Armenia, in the context of a long-term and multi-sited program of investigations into the intersections of locally situated highland social phenomena within the broader Silk Road cultural ecumene during the late medieval period (AD 12th-15th centuries). This ongoing project builds on an understanding of late medieval Armenian participation in and co-production of the worlds of the Silk Road,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anne Birgitte Gebauer.

The paper presents a study of a small cluster of three megalithic tombs and a cult house at Tustrup, Jutland, dating from the period of the first farmers in Denmark during the Funnel Beaker period about 3300-3100 BC. The history of this group of monuments is pieced together using the architecture and the building sequence of the monuments combined with events reflected in the pottery depositions. New insights are discussed in relation to the pottery depositions taking place at the tombs as well...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Giles Spence-Morrow.

This paper examines the temporal dimensions underwriting relationships linking humans, architectural representations and the meaningful places they reference in past Andean life-worlds. I argue that for the Moche of the North Coast of Peru, acts of symbolic compression and miniaturization served to reanimate specific times, known ceremonial locales, and the social identities created and reaffirmed in these places. The ritual efficacy of architectural simulacra rests in their mimetic power to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alex Ruuska.

In this paper, I examine the materiality of memory practices as expressed in rock art associated with the Ghost Dance in the Great Basin, Colorado Plateau, and Eastern California. Building on Jeff Malpas’ (2010) claim that "place is perhaps the key term for interdisciplinary research in the arts, humanities, and social sciences in the 21st C." (Creswell 2015:1), and Susan Kuchler’s perspective of ‘landscape as memory’ in which embodied experiences "govern the mnemonic transmission of land-based...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Duncan Cook. Timothy Beach. Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach. Thomas Guderjan.

Multi-element inorganic geochemical studies across the Maya lowlands have revealed elevated levels of mercury (Hg) in soils and sediments that date mainly from the Classic period (c. 250-900 AD). Mercury pollution has now been recorded at a range of archaeological sites despite the absence of metallurgy until the Postclassic Period (after 1000 AD), or any other industry capable of significant heavy metal pollution of the environment. This paper presents the first detailed analysis of the extent...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gyles Iannone.

Much of the recent discourse surrounding the collapse of archaic states is centered on the impacts of ecoside or climate change. Driven by natural scientists and increasingly sophisticated data generation and analysis methods, such environmentally-based approaches to collapse have tended to gloss over the myriad cultural factors also involved in such severe transformations, thus inhibiting our ability to fully grasp the complexities of the collapse process in the various case studies currently...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jerry Howard. Chris Caseldine. David Abbott. David Wilcox.

Mesa Grande, one of the two largest Hohokam platform mound villages in the lower Salt River Valley, Arizona, contains an exceptionally large and diverse excavated sample of intrusive, diagnostic pottery types that have been cross-dated with tree-ring dates in other regions. Complexes of these intrusive types in a stratigraphically defined sequence at the site provide new insight into calendrical age of the mound and its associated compounds, allowing us to test recent suggestions that Mesa...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Garth Norman.

Research by ARCON, Inc. over the past two decades, using multi-disciplinary archaeology research tools and inter-regional comparative research, is bridging regional boundaries to help construct histories of ancient people. The role of cultural exchange is becoming more apparent with intellectual data for exploring the rise of high civilizations in ancient cultures. A variety of research discoveries includes ancient turquoise trade between Mesoamerica and the Southwest (turquoise trace analysis...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marsha Sims.

Research ties Mesoamerican search for ancestors to U.S. rock art. A hero in Mexican Aztec legend fought his sister, Coyolxauhqui, and the titans, decapitating her, rolling her body down the mountain, and leaving her head on the mountain. Coyolxauhqui is a floating head on Mesoamerican murals, decapitated and dismembered on the Coyolxauhqui stone. She was the moon, queen, and an avatar of their Earth Mother. She is commemorated in Basketmaker and later rock art in Colorado and Utah at 5 Faces and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Juliette Testard.

Few authors have analyzed figurative plaques from Late Classic and Epiclassic contexts even though they are considered as prestigious artefacts and exhibited as prominent pieces in Museum collections all around the world. Several examples from Epiclassic city states of Cacaxtla-Xochitecatl (Tlaxcala) and Xochicalco (Morelos) will be analyzed. Contexts, morphologies and iconographies reveal continuities of socio-political and religious practices with contemporaneous Maya sites. We will propose...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Venicia Slotten.

The ancient Mesoamerican landscape has been extensively researched archaeologically, with the field of paleoethnobotany allowing for a better understanding of what plants the ancient people valued agriculturally and in their economic, ritual, medicinal and other daily practices. Typically, archaeologists interpret the archaeological record in terms of how the ancient peoples interacted with the artifacts and navigated through the landscape during the daytime. What about nightly practices? How...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabrielle Vail. Jeffrey Splitstoser.

An important aspect of textile production involves the preparation of fibers, an activity that is represented in the archaeological record from Mesoamerica primarily through the presence of spindle whorls made from a variety of materials, most commonly pottery, but also stone, wood, shell, and gourds. Although occasionally recovered from primary contexts, spindle whorls are more often found in secondary depositions such as burials and caches, or in middens. This paper focuses on spindle whorls...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joel W. Palka.

This study explores the possibility that some Mesopotamian clay tokens were pilgrim’s tokens, which signified interaction with spiritual powers or transactions with a shrine’s religious specialists or administrators. Pilgrim’s tokens around the world have often been made of earth and clay, some as effigies of goods desired or symbols of shrines and their spiritual forces, that are carried in bags, miniature ceramic vessels, or bullae. Previous investigations indicate that earthen artifacts have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jason Ur.

Discussions of "alternative" trajectories of urban growth are often compared to "classic" models from Old World civilizations, and most often Mesopotamia. It is said that Mesopotamian cities were dense and spatially discrete from their agricultural hinterlands, in contrast to new models of low-density urbanism. In fact, the earliest large settlement agglomerations ("megasites") in Mesopotamia were discontinuous and far less dense than the mature cities of the Bronze Age (after 3000 BC). This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alyssa Bader. Julie M. Allen. Ripan S. Malhi.

Prior to the displacement caused by European colonization, the Coast Tsimshian harvested an array of terrestrial, freshwater, and marine dietary resources as they moved between coastal settlements and the nearby Skeena River valley. Conventional paleodietary analysis using faunal analysis and isotopic values has provided valuable data which, when paired with the knowledge of First Nations communities, can help reconstruct how ancestral communities utilized food resources prior to the cultural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Casey Campetti. Christopher Adams.

Though much professional work utilizing metal sensing comes from within the historic period and battlefield archaeology, the application of metal sensing techniques to precontact sites has much to offer contemporary studies of copper use in the U.S., particularly inter- and intra-site geospatial analyses of indigenous copper exploitation. Ongoing research in two U.S. regions is illustrative of the contributions metal sensing technology is making to studies of copper and copper technology. Recent...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth H. Paris. Elizabeth Baquedano. Carlos Peraza Lope.

The Postclassic period urban center of Mayapan housed numerous household craft production industries, including metallurgical production. The recovery of metal artifacts, production debris, and metallurgical ceramics from contexts throughout the city suggests a number of independent production sites. One of the most significant archaeological contexts associated with metallurgical production is the R-183 group, an elite residential group in the southeast mid-city sector. Salvage excavations in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Niklas Schulze.

Academic interest in "New World" metallurgy is more than a century old and has come a long way. New analytical technologies have allowed us to understand in ever greater detail the composition and structure of metal objects found in archaeological contexts. This makes it possible to identify raw materials, study production processes and life histories of artifacts. While our progress in questions of detail is indisputable, the opinions concerning the general development and diffusion of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chris Arnett.

Interior Salish rock art sites on the British Columbia Plateau are multi-component assemblages which include the geomorphology, the rock art and other surface and subsurface elements such as trails, manuports, petroforms, hearths, lithics, radiocarbon dates, flora and fauna. Defining the inter-relationships of these components is essential to understanding the site formation process. In addition, direct historical and cultural continuity between these sites and Interior Salish descendant...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather McDonough. Zachary Hall. David M. Hyde.

The implementation of systematic surface collection on a grid within Operation 17 at the Medicinal Trail Community in Northwestern Belize, highlights the importance of surface collection to the fuller understanding of ancient Maya socio-economics. Surface survey and collection at archaeological sites can lead to more precise interpretation of a site. However, jungle debris is often cleared from Maya sites with rakes, disrupting any surface collection before excavations begin. At Operation 17,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Luke Spindler. Krista McGrath. Matthew Collins. Penelope Walton Rogers.

Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS) is a rapid peptide fingerprinting technique capable of identifying species provenance in several archaeological materials of biological origin, and most commonly used on bone. Leather has proven resistant to analysis not only by ZooMS, but also to DNA extraction due to the tannins that are present in the material. We have used alkali (NaOH) to increase the solubility of the tannins and thereby extract them before enzyme digestion. This has allowed us...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sydney Lonaker. Julie Hoggarth. Jaime Awe.

Terminal deposits, defined here as dense midden-like assemblages that contain non-elite and elite paraphernalia (i.e. utilitarian and decorated ceramic vessels, faunal remains, obsidian blades, ground stone tools, and human remains) have been discovered at sites across central and northern Belize. Despite the research on these features, there is little consensus on what type of activities these deposits represent. In the past, archaeologists have labelled these deposits as de facto refuse,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Abigail Fisher.

In Native North America, dogs (Canis familiaris) were an important resource, used for traction, food, security, and ritual. Given their ubiquity in settlements and their tendency to consume human food waste, dogs remains can provide significant information about past human diet. Stable carbon isotope (δ13C) ratios may be used to reconstruct maize consumption, while nitrogen (δ15N) isotope ratios increase by trophic level, and can be used to differentiate between marine, freshwater, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara Petzelt.

This paper discusses the Metlakatla First Nation’s views and roles in the archaeological and related research that has occurred within their traditional territory over the past 50 years, the core of which is the Prince Rupert Harbour area. Unlike many other First Nations, Metlakatla has long embraced the opportunity to actively participate in the documentation of their ancient history, rather than merely being a subject of research. This view of archaeology has led to mutually beneficial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Blaber. Nicholas Triozzi. Anna Semon.

Recent excavations at the Fallen Tree Mortuary Complex (9Li8) on St. Catherines Island, GA have recovered over 20 shaped mica artifacts and dozens of fragments associated within three Late Mississippian adult male burials. This non-local material was purposely shaped and interred with the individuals. In this poster, I will discuss what the symbolism of the mica and examine the location and orientation of the mica discs on the individuals. In addition, I will compare the mica to several other...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy St. John.

The use of Micro Computed Tomography (CT) in archaeological science is a burgeoning field of research which has the potential to transform the ways in which we conduct materials based studies. This technology is only beginning to be used in archaeological ceramic analysis. Since micro CT uses X-rays to provide non-destructive 3D images of the interior and exterior of ceramics, it can isolate features in clay such as temper, inclusions, voids and micro-folds in a unique way. As such, it has great...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ian Kuijt.

The Near Eastern foraging to farming transition was characterized by the emergence of more powerful nuclear family and multi family households. It remains unclear, however, how this longer-term evolutionary transition was connected to small-scale daily household decision-making. Focusing on the archaeology sites of Tell Halula and Çatalhöyük, I explore archaeological evidence for the development of Neolithic multi-family households, and how they may have been connected to seasonal collective...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victoria M. Van Der Haas. Vladimir Bazaliiskii. Andrzej Weber.

This paper presents a contemporary method for investigating the dietary history of past peoples using micro-sampling dentine of molars from middle Holocene (~8300–3500 cal BP) hunter-gatherers in the Cis-Baikal region, Siberia. The dentine has been sampled into 1mm strips and each is analyzed for carbon and nitrogen stable isotope ratios. Each dentine strip represents roughly nine months of developmental life while bones samples typically average over the course of ~10–20 years. Previous...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mónica Alonso Eguíluz. Rosa María Albert. Javier Fernández Eraso.

Fumier deposits are important sources of information to better understand past livestock practices. The Neolithic site of Los Husos II (Álava, Spain), in the upper Ebro Basin, is the oldest Basque Country site where livestock practices were detected dating to 6990-6760 cal B.P. Hence, the site offers a unique opportunity to study the adaptation of early livestock practices and their expansion to the western Pyreness, as the Ebro Basin is the main route by which the new economic system...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Hazard. Christopher Roos. Julie Field. John Dudgeon.

Microfossils in archaeology are defined as the floral and faunal-derived microscopic biogenic particles that preserve long after the original organism has died and decayed. Some such examples are silica phytoliths, starches, pollens and spores, calcium oxalates, and plant cellular tissue like trichomes and stomata. This type of analysis is a valuable proxy for inferring prehistoric environmental conditions and landscape change over time, as well as direct evidence for the presence of certain...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabriella Soto.

Nearly two decades have passed since the strategic border security paradigm known as "prevention through deterrence" took root in the landscape of Southern Arizona. The aim is to deter illicit migration by strategically amassing border security forces to funnel migrants into a treacherous landscape of increased risk. Thousands of undocumented migrants have died when confronting those risks in an outcome known as the "funnel effect." This paper draws upon dissertation research that studied the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brandy Rinck.

Micromorphology samples were collected during data recovery at the Bear Creek Site (45KI839) in Redmond, Washington in order to supplement the site’s formation history. Micromorphological analysis of these samples has shed light on the taphonomic and sedimentary depositional processes at work prior to, during, and after Late Pleistocene-Holocene transition (LPH) occupation of 45KI839. This poster presents the micromorphology research design, sampling and analysis methodology, and results of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tiziana Matarazzo.

The term concotto refers to fragments or patches of hard heated clay that derive from living surfaces, walls and ovens. Concotto fragments are found throughout the Italian peninsula and date from the Neolithic to the Iron Age. Current studies express contradictory opinions about whether or not the concottos found on living surfaces represent intentionally constructed surfaces or the secondary products of the contact between hot embers and sediments. This study uses micromorphological analysis...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mathew Fox. Jennifer Kielhofer. Ye Wa.

Geoarchaeological research conducted at the Yangguanzhai Site was tasked with identifying the composition and formation processes associated with one of the most striking features of the site, the Yangguanzhai "moat." Originally, it was hypothesized that this moat was filled with thick packages of ash related to the manufacturing of pottery at the site. Therefore, micromorphology and isotopic geochemistry were employed to further examine moat sediments. Samples collected from the moat have δ13C...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ilaria Patania. Susan Mentzer. Ofer Bar-Yosef. Paul Goldberg.

The cave sites of Xianrendong and Yuchanyan are known for having produced the earliest pottery sherds yet discovered, respectively 20,000 cal BP and 18,600 cal BP. Both of these Chinese Upper Palaeolithic sites have been systematically sampled for radiocarbon dating and geoarchaeological analysis. Through micromorphology we identified clay lined fire features and ash lenses at both caves, revealing technological behaviour concerning pyrotechnology and the manipulation of clays in the Chinese...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Teresa Raczek.

Regional, landscape, and spatial analyses in South Asia are often conducted at large scales in order to encompass all potential sites that share a common material culture, polity, or economic system. As these analyses often overlap with culture history designations and simultaneously span multiple geographic and environmental conditions, they can obscure material diversity and human-environment relations. This paper carefully considers scale of analysis and argues that microregions, small areas...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Ehrich.

H85 is the largest pit discovered in the north-central area of Yangguanzhai. In 2014 the archaeological team took sherd samples from the 12 layers excavated up to that point. Where possible, the team took one sherd from each of the colors grey, red, and beige as well as both fine, levigated texture and coarse, tempered texture from each layer. Thin sections of these sherds were produced and examined under the microscope to determine the choice of temper and other steps in the preparation of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emma Yasui. Daniel Kwan.

This paper will outline trends observed in pottery technology and dietary practices of the early Holocene Shangshan Culture (11,400 to 8400 cal. B.P.) in the lower Yangtze Valley, China. The Shangshan people produced some of the earliest known fine ware, and it is hypothesized that communities engaged in the low-level production of rice, which began the process of domesticating this crucial cereal. To date, the nature of pottery use and rice consumption at Shangshan sites remains partially...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Natalia Eguez. Carolina Mallol. Cheryl Makarewicz.

Since the origins of domestication, pastoral societies have been an exceptional example of adaptation and resilience. In recent years, studies focusing on herbivore faecal remains have shown the importance of these remains and their implication for identifying socio-economic activities. Here we present a multi-proxy examination of these deposits for an accurate identification of herds penning. We use micromorphology of soil sediments and stable isotopes analysis combined with archaeology and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Hull. Nathan Goodale. Alissa Nauman. David Bailey.

Ethnographic evidence suggests that semi-sedentary hunter-gatherers in the interior Pacific Northwest inhabited aggregated winter villages on a multi-season basis and specific times throughout the year much of the group made long distance forays for resource procurement, trade, and exchange. Extensive excavation efforts at the Slocan Narrows Pithouse Village has produced an assemblage of mica lamented quartzite scrapers. This study presents findings from analysis and characterization of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shalcey Dowkes. Margaret Patton.

Beads in many forms have been used as decorative items on the Great Plains during the historic and prehistoric periods. Cluny Fortified Village (EePf-1), dating just prior to European contact, is an intrusive village unique on the Northwestern Plains. The unique artifact assemblage at the site offers information on the understudied topic of prehistoric shell bead production on the Northern Plains using local bivalves. During the past ten years, a number of shell beads, shell bead blanks, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Wholey.

In the Mid-Atlantic, steatite outcrops within the eastern talc belt, which runs from Alabama, through New England to Labrador. It is a porous, carvable stone with a mineralogical and chemical makeup that inhibits soil formation, resulting in scrub or barren landscapes that host rare grasses and wildflowers. In their natural state, these would be striking landscape features. While an array of items, such as plummets, bannerstones and pipes, were produced from steatite throughout pre-colonial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Tremayne. William Brown.

Population growth has long been argued to play a critical role in promoting cultural evolution, operating both through adaptation to population pressure and increasing social network size and transmission frequency. We present a model of mid-late Holocene Alaskan population size based on a temporal frequency analysis of 902 site occupation episodes dating between 6000 and 1000 radiocarbon years BP, with two objectives: (1) identify factors that influenced Alaskan population dynamics over this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only S. Andrew Wise.

Archaeologists occasionally find inconstant artifact assemblages between sites that appear similar. These variations in artifact frequency and diversity can hinder efforts to establish a one-to-one correlation between artifacts and cultural behaviors. However, coastal shell middens can provide important information regarding past habitation and social organization. By using shell and artifact distribution data, this research examines how Woodland cultures utilized coastal sites between 1000 B.C....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pamela Willoughby.

Magubike rockshelter in the southern Highlands of Tanzania contains a long archaeological sequence ranging from the Middle Stone Age (MSA) through historic times. This paper describes the lithic sequence from test pit 5, which contains a 2.5 m thick cultural deposit composed of recent / historic remains, an Iron Age, a microlithic Later Stone Age (LSA), a macrolithic LSA, a transitional sequence from the MSA to the LSA and 90 cm of MSA artifacts. The later part of the sequence replicates the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Canaday. Bryan Hanks. Roger Doonan.

The Middle Fork Salmon River is a designated Wild and Scenic river located within the heart of the Frank Church – River of No Return Wilderness in central Idaho. Over the last three years the University of Pittsburgh, the Salmon-Challis National Forest and the University of Sheffield have collaborated on a minimally invasive multi-method geophysical and geochemical approach for characterizing intact archaeological deposits at seven prehistoric sites impacted by recreational activities. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Madeleine McLeester. Mark Schurr.

Our understanding of the protohistoric Huber phase is limited by our small sample of sites from this complex period. We present preliminary findings from the summer 2016 excavation at the Middle Grant Creek (MGC) site at Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie in Wilmington, IL. The site is a well-preserved single component Huber phase, warm weather camp that survived historic farmsteads and the construction and abandonment of an Army arsenal. MGC expands the sample of Huber sites and provides...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrzej Weber.

Over the last 20 years, the Baikal Archaeology Project has invested much effort and many resources into research on Middle Holocene hunter–gatherers of the Cis-Baikal region in Siberia (~8300–3500 cal BP). Examination of new materials excavated by the project and analysis of previously accumulated archaeological collections produced many new insights on just about every aspect of Baikal’s hunter–gatherers. We now have a very good record of spatial and temporal variation in diet, subsistence,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Roberto Pimentel Nita. Krzysztof Makowski. Milosz Giersz.

Recent excavations at Castillo de Huarmey and Pachacamac leave no doubt that the earliest archaeological contexts associated with Middle Horizon in both sites are related to the second half of that period and coincide with the collapse of two main regional political systems on the Peruvian coast: Moche and Lima, respectively. Both systems, consolidated and politically transformed, have overcome adverse climate conditions of the sixth and seventh centuries A.D. In the case of Castillo de Huarmey...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mae Goder Goldberger. Talia Abulafia. Omry Barzilai. Israel Hershkovitz. Ofer Marder.

Manot Cave in situated within the Levantine Mediterranean region. The site has an extensive Upper Paleolithic sequence, including both Aurignacian and Ahmarian traditions. Several of the artifacts found within these assemblages belong to the Levallois technology. A small number of the artifacts, found in association with Upper Paleolithic occupational surfaces, have a double patina, possibly due to reuse. The majority are fresh suggesting the presence of a Middle Paleolithic occupation at the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only April Nowell. Carlos Cordova. Christopher Ames. James Pokines. Regina DeWitt.

This introductory paper to the session on research underway at the Shishan Marsh I site in the Azraq Oasis, Jordan presents an overview of the results of our paleoenvironmental, faunal, lithic and site formation analyses. A model of targeted and repeated use of the marsh is suggested. These results are situated within their historic and regional contexts and their implications for understanding the capabilities of Middle Pleistocene hominins are also considered.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Liping Yang. Weilin Wang.

In order to better understand the moated settlement of Yangguanzhai (ca. 5300-4800 B.P.) in the Wei River Valley of China, the archaeological team surveyed east of the moated area in 2015. A large number of pit burials with side chambers were found. The cemetery is so far the first known adult cemetery of this period (Miaodigou Phase of Yangshao Culture). Based on C14 dating and funerary goods, the cemetery is contemporaneous with the Yangguanzhai settlement. This discovery provides important...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Haws. Michael Benedetti. Nuno Bicho. João Cascalheira. Lukas Friedl.

The transition from Middle to Upper Paleolithic in western Eurasia remains a hotly debated and intensely researched archaeological problem. Recent developments in radiocarbon dating and genetics have permitted some refinements to our understanding of the spatiotemporal process but many issues remain unresolved. For the Iberian Peninsula, Zilhão’s ‘Ebro Frontier’ model of late Neanderthal survival and subsequent replacement by anatomically modern humans has held sway for over two decades....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brooke Creager.

A migration can have several different effects upon a native population as the groups interact: the decimation of one population either to famine, disease or war, the cultural integration of the two groups either forcefully or peacefully, or the continued separation of the two cultures through distance or social stratification. These effects are perhaps best understood archaeologically through an examination of the European and Native American interactions beginning in the 16th century and those...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aaron Comstock. Robert Cook.

Recent excavations at the Turpin site (33HA19) in southwest Ohio, have reestablished the importance of population movement in cultural emplacement in this region. Although the predominant model for Fort Ancient evolution in the Middle Ohio Valley posits gradual village development and relatively late (post-AD 1400) Mississippian influence, work at Turpin and other sites in the lower Miami Valleys suggests that the movement of Mississippian people acted as a catalyst for change beginning around...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Minghui Wang. Dexin Cong.

The Adunqiaolu site, located in western Xinjiang, belongs to the early Bronze Age and dates to the 19-17 centuries B.C. Archaeological evidence suggests that this group of people may have come from southern and/or southwest Siberia, north of Tianshan. Applying both cranial-metrics and aDNA analysis, this study explores regional variations in western Xinjiang and their relationships to other ancient populations. Ancient DNA analysis indicates that their genes are mainly European, specifically...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathleen Blue.

Dental non-metric data provide a means for the analysis of genetic affinities and relationships of individuals, and can therefore be used to reconstruct past migration and interaction patterns, both within and between sites. The dental traits of sixteen individuals, along with 21 individual teeth, from Cerro Magoni, an Epiclassic site in the Tula region, were collected in this preliminary analysis. Additionally, 13 individuals from two Xajay sites, El Zethe and Huesamenta, were also assessed....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ben Fitzhugh. Hiroko Ono. Tetsuya Amano. John Krigbaum. George Kamenov.

Northern people are known for epic migrations such as the Pleistocene colonization of Eurasian Arctic and Movement into North America as well as multiple migration episdoes across the North American Arctic in the late Holocene. In this paper we look at the subarctic Sea of Okhotsk region and patterns of mobility within the Okhotsk tradition from 500-1300 C.E. Using lead (Pb) and strontium (Sr) isotopes, we reveal unexpected differences in lifetime stationary residence vs. relocation of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jason Miszaniec.

Contemporary economic and subsistence fisheries are a significant resource in Norton Sound, Alaska. Artifacts and faunal remains recovered from test excavations at the Shaktoolik Airport site (NOB-072) demonstrate that indigenous peoples have been fishing in the region for at least the last millennium. We aim to trace the regional development of fishing strategies, and how they were influenced by demographic and climactic changes by comparing over ten thousand faunal remains collected in-situ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sydney Hanson. Jade d'Alpoim Guedes.

A growing tradition of archaeobotanical research, one that was pioneered by Steven Weber, is allowing us to form a picture of how millets and rice spread into Southeast Asia. Although rice continues to play an important role in the diet in this area, the use of millet has been slowly forgotten. These two different crops have been alternatively seen as a "cultural package" that coincided with the spread of farmer populations from Southern China, or adaptations to different ecological or climatic...