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

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edward Henry. George Milner. Natalie Mueller.

Adena-Hopewell enclosure complexes have inspired much conjecture and some well-supported inferences concerning the rise of Middle Woodland ceremonialism, interaction, and social organization in the Eastern Woodlands. After examining Hopewellian interaction at Tunnacunnee in Northwest Georgia, Dick Jefferies turned his focus to Adena-Hopewell mound and enclosure sites in Central Kentucky. Dick’s examination of the Winchester Farm Enclosure in the early 1980s with George Milner was the first...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steve Markofsky.

The complex boundary regions between deltas and deserts pose particular difficulties for archaeological enquiry. In these regions, the dynamic interactions between aeolian and alluvial processes result in continuously changing hydrosocial landscapes that manifest over a range of spatio-temporal analytical scales. The wealth of tools, methodologies and theoretical approaches offered by the burgeoning field of remote sensing can help to deconstruct complex and often visually obstructed human...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Loughmiller-Cardinal.

Among the various sources of information about what foodstuffs comprised the Classic Mayan diet, we lack resolution on daily, domestic, and the various ritual and event foodstuffs. Beyond the archaeologically recovered macrofossil and faunal data, the identifications of drugs and ritual foodstuffs are less well established. Speculative and presumed behaviors that surround these goods tend to bias methods of analysis towards known substances and preconceived interpretations, thereby potentially...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Kwan.

Ceramics from the early Holocene Shangshan Culture, in Zhejiang Province, China, have been subjected to thin section petrographic analysis in order to characterize clay groups, view production patterns, and aid in the development of a complete understanding of the Shangshan technological tradition. Analysis has revealed a pattern in the local production of ceramic vessels likely related to the transformations in cooking methods and dietary patterns that coincided with new evidence for the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lynne Goldstein.

Having been a professional archaeologist for a very long time, I have used a variety of different tools. Since 1988, I have actively employed digital tools for archaeological research, teaching, and public engagement. This work has primarily been based in the Midwestern US, and has included both prehistoric and historic sites. In this paper, I highlight three examples and discuss the epistemological implications of the digital tools. The first is a Wisconsin projectile point book prepared almost...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Ortman.

Archaeologists are used to thinking linearly, where sample measures can be well-characterized by a mean, a standard deviation or a proportion. Settlement scaling theory requires us to think exponentially, where all these summary measures change with the scale of the settlement from which they derive. This sounds like a big problem, but once one gets used to it many traditional concerns about the quality of archaeological data turn out to not be all that important, and the archaeological record...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lauren Kohut.

One of the more promising applications of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in archaeology is the potential to incorporate aspects of human perception and experience of the landscape. Visibility analysis has been applied extensively to archaeological contexts, and models of movement, acoustics and other sensory experiences have recently received greater consideration. But despite the promise of moving beyond measurements of geographic space, most applications of experiential modeling continue...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lorna-Jane Richardson.

As research momentum gathers alongside the adoption of digital technologies into everyday life, the terms ‘virtual reality’, ‘online’, and ‘cyberspace’, increasingly fail to recognize the degree to which the adoption of digital technologies, and the material objects through which the digital is accessed, have been domesticated and made normal. The entanglement of social communication networks in the variety of digital environments provided by archaeological organisations is often seen as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah E. Adcock.

In this paper, I explore the intersection of empire and environment in imperial and post-imperial contexts using the collapse of the Hittite empire and its aftermath in central Turkey around 1200 BC as a case study. More specifically, I mobilize zooarchaeological evidence from the Hittite capital of Hattuşa and from Çadır Höyük, a rural town, in order to discuss how we might distinguish between political, economic, and climatic factors in our interpretations of the relationships between empire...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephanie Strauss.

Almost a century after William H. Holmes published the first study of the incomparable Tuxtla Statuette, the La Mojarra Stela was recovered from the Acula River in Veracruz, Mexico. In the three decades that followed, the hieroglyphic script that pours over these objects has been scrutinized and debated, named and renamed, both deciphered and declared undecipherable. This paper reflects on the status of Isthmian studies and explores the intricacies of Epi-Olmec visual culture as it is understood...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kenneth Feder.

In the Martian Chronicles, author Ray Bradbury describes the ruins of an ancient Martian city in this way: "Perfect, faultless, in ruins, yes, but perfect, nonetheless." The notion that archaeological sites are perfect, precisely because of an appearance of decay, resides at the center of a worldview in which the archaeological record is inherently mysterious, removed from any connection to the mundane world of hunting camps, farmsteads, and industrial complexes of ordinary human beings. In this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katie McHugh Bonham. Christyann M. Darwent. John Darwent.

Osseous tools and debitage collected from three middens at the Shaktoolik Airport site during excavations in the summers of 2014 and 2015 were analyzed using the chaîne opératoire rather than a typological approach to assess site use over time. Relative frequencies of raw materials, tool types, and production debris were analyzed from different periods. The Early Thule/Proto-Yup’ik portion (ca. AD 1200) of the assemblage came from a midden associated with a men’s house (qasgiq), and is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thania Ibarra. Aurelio López Corral.

Textile production was one of the most valuable social and economic activities in prehispanic Mesoamerica. In this study, we inquire into thread production in the site of Tepeticpac, Tlaxcala, one of the main altepemeh of Late Postclassic Tlaxcallan, using a technological, ethnoarchaeological and experimental analysis. In particular, we evaluate key attributes of archaeological spindle whorls in the spinning process, including weight, shape and moment of inertia. With the collaboration of three...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joshua Wright. Naomi Standen.

A wide range of Medieval settlement has been identified in the watershed of the Shar mörön river, a territory of grassland and narrow river valleys in the heartland of the nomadic Khitan and their Liao state (907-1125 CE). These settlements range from village landscapes to imperial capitals. This paper will introduce three urban settings of the Liao state: (1) A mercantile center, (2) a local administrative hub, and (3) an imperial capital city along with their immediate hinterlands. Through a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Hunstiger.

Dorsal flake scar directionality is used in lithic analysis to infer methods of core reduction and flake production. This has been done in two dimensions. This study analyzes flake scars at the assemblage level in three dimensions. I use both experimental assemblages (bifacial, blade, discoidal, and levallois) as well as archaeological samples from Tabun Cave, Israel, an important reference sequence (partly defined by scar patterning) for the Levantine Paleolithic. Experimental samples...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chip Wills. Beau Murphy. Heather Richards-Rissetto.

There are two large mounds on the south side of Pueblo Bonito that were extensively trenched in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Data from the re-excavation of three trenches are combined with new geospatial and remote sensing information to create a three dimensional reconstruction of mound history. Although low walls were built around parts of each mound at some point, there is no evidence that the mounds were ever enclosed by architecture. The mounds consist mostly of household...

DOCUMENT Citation Only J. Scott Cardinal. Jennifer Loughmiller-Cardinal.

For several decades, middle ranged theories in archaeology have generally been understood and applied as a set of rhetorical and analogical linkages between the archaeological record and interpretive hypotheses of behaviors. Epistemologically, however, "middle range" has broader implications than this relatively narrow archaeological application. As a relative positioning, middle range denotes establishment of logical linking arguments between evidence and inferred or hypothetical context...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tingting Wang. YaoWu Hu. Benjamin Fuller. Dong Wei.

The westward expansion of human millet consumption from north China has important implications for understanding early interactions between the East and West. However, few studies have focused on the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the vast geographical area directly linking the ancient cultures of the Eurasian Steppe and the Gansu Corridor of China. Here a Bronze Age isotopic study in China is presented about the key site of Tianshanbeilu, in eastern Xinjiang. The vast range of stable carbon...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hans Harmsen. Christian Madsen. Henning Matthiesen. Bo Elberling. Jørgen Hollesen.

Documenting and evaluating the rate of deterioration at coastal archaeological sites presents a number of fundamental challenges in the Arctic. In Greenland for example, increasing soil temperatures, perennial thaws, coastal erosion, storm surges and pioneer plant species such as dwarf willow and dwarf birch are observed as increasingly detrimental to the long-term preservation of archaeological deposits and features found scattered along the country’s west coast and extensive inner fjord...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kirsty Squires.

Cremation was one of the primary funerary rites employed in early Anglo-Saxon England (fifth to seventh century AD). Open-air pyres were used to cremate the dead alongside an array of pyre goods, including personal objects and faunal gifts. The resultant remains were subsequently collected and interred in pottery urns. Despite the fact that this mortuary rite has been subjected to extensive research over recent years, archaeologists often overlook the challenges faced by communities that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Sampeck. Tyler Howe. Russell Townshend.

First Landscapes is a digital conservation project with two major goals: to protect and preserve First Nation/Native American heritage in culturally situated manner, and to make information accessible and usable in ways determined by stakeholders. This project organizes and presents results of several seasons of archaeological fieldwork as well as historical documents, maps, ethnographic records, and imagery by and about Cherokee people curated in several institutions across the United States....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Deborah C. Merrett. Hua Zhang. Lixin Wang. Hong Zhu. Dongya Y. Yang.

The unworn and minimally worn anterior teeth of 48 individuals from Neolithic and Bronze Age levels of the Houtaomuga site in Jinlin Province, China were examined macro- and microscopically for location on the labial surface of lines of Enamel Hypoplasia relative to the cementoenamel junction. From estimated ages of enamel formation across the tooth crown surface, ages of occurrence of stress exposure were calculated. Variation in timing of growth cessation and recovery from birth to 6 years, as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Suzanne Eckert. David Hill. Judith Habicht-Mauche.

In recent years, patterns of decorated pottery production and exchange, as revealed through mineralogical, chemical and isotopic characterization analyses, have been central to modelling the inter-regional dynamics of late precontact social networks in the American Southwest. However, the role of the Acoma region within these networks remains poorly studied and largely unknown. In particular, questions remain about the significance of the Acoma or Western Keres region as a potential "bridge"...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Goldstein. Matt Sitek.

Locumba represents a key intermediate location for consideration of the timing and affiliation of Tiwanaku colonization of the Moquegua, Sama, Caplina and Azapa valleys. Models of Tiwanaku state colonization, diasporic enclaves, and a "daisy chain" of secondary and tertiary colonization from initial provinces in Moquegua are considered. Ongoing systematic regional survey in the 2015 and 2016 seasons of the Locumba Archaeological Project has defined 74 site sectors, including 16 sectors of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Francisco Sanchez.

La utilización de restos de diatomea fósil referida en las fuentes históricas como tizatl o tizatlalli, sin duda, fue una práctica cultural de larga historia en las poblaciones del valle de Toluca. Existe evidencia que nos sugiere la continuidad de una larga tradición cromática desde, por lo menos, hace aproximadamente 3500 años. Esta ponencia se centra fundamentalmente en torno al uso de engobe blanco en los materiales cerámicos Coyotlatelco, procedentes de varios sitios localizados en el...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steve Langdon.

The Tlingit heen sati ("stream master") was responsible for establishing and maintaining respectful relations with salmon as a trustee for his clan. The portfolio of obligations included both pragmatic duties controlling access and harvests and ritual responsibilities, such as greeting the arrival of salmon each year with welcoming ceremonies, practices anchored to the Salmon Boy mythic charter that identified the fundamental similarity of humans to salmon as persons. Another dimension of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samantha Fladd. Claire Barker. E. Charles Adams. Dwight Honyouti.

The Homol’ovi Settlement Cluster (HSC) holds a significant place in Hopi history as a source of immigrants and a destination for emigrants. In addition to representing an important location along the migration route for groups from the South and East, these villages also housed people who temporarily emigrated from the Hopi mesas. As such, the HSC provides a unique perspective on the processes of population and social movement that contributed to the current form of Hopi society. Using the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Martin. Blair Tormey.

Ground-penetrating radar (GPR) results can factor into the decision to excavate in the search for a clandestine grave. Most published research and case studies focus on the successful location and recovery of human remains, while relatively few examples have been published showing negative results. This presentation highlights a cold case where the data interpretation led to excavation, but did not produce the target sought. Information from a confidential informant led investigators to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Haisley. Ashley Parker. Christopher Parker. Brian Codding.

Variation in territory size, population density, and residential mobility among small scale hunting and gathering societies tends to co-vary with territorial behaviors. Specifically, groups living in larger areas, at lower population densities with higher mobility are less likely to exhibit territorial behavior than their counterparts in smaller areas. Based on models from behavioral ecology, we suggest that this variation is due to underlying levels of environmental productivity: where...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sylvia Batty. Rebecca Friedel. Leah McCurdy.

Maya archaeology has seen a steady shift to the integration of community heritage interest and ownership in the design, execution and outcomes of research and preservation efforts. This poster describes a heritage outreach project focused on archaeology literacy development among grade school children in the community of San Jose Succotz, Belize, adjacent to the Xunantunich archaeological reserve. We authored a fully illustrated book entitled To the Mountain (2016) for the Succotz community,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Terry Powis. Jon Spenard. Adam King. Nilesh Gaikwad.

For the past two decades, considerable archaeological attention in the Maya area has been paid to ritual cave practices and absorbed residue analysis of pottery, yet these two areas of research have not intersected. In this paper, we discuss the results of the kinds of liquid residues identified in monochrome and unslipped pottery vessels from caves around the site of Pacbitun in west central Belize, where extensive research in Classic Maya elite behavior has taken place. While we know the elite...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lawrence Loendorf.

Pictographs and a few petroglyphs of tobacco plants, tobacco gardens and tobacco headdresses are found at a dozen sites across Montana and Wyoming. Very similar images painted on Crow Indian Tobacco Society pipe bags, moccasins and other clothing strongly suggest the pictographs and petroglyphs were made by the Crow. High concentrations of tobacco pollen at one site suggest it was the location of a tobacco garden

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Sattler. Thomas Gillispie. Carrin Halfmann. Angela Younie.

Three precontact individuals inadvertently discovered in the village McGrath, Alaska provide a novel understanding of human history of the Upper Kuskokwim River region of Eastern Beringia. Collaboration between the McGrath Village Council, MTNT, Inc. and Tanana Chiefs Conference enabled a community research endeavor that has yielded a radiocarbon age estimate of c. 600-700 cal BP, isotopic dietary reconstruction suggesting a strong reliance on anadromous salmon, rare dental traits including a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dougless Skinner. Kristen Barnett.

The Togiak Archaeological and Paleoecological Project (TAPP) is a collaborative project driven by the Togiak community of southwest Alaska and their interests in documenting past lifeways at the Old Togiak Village. During the summer of 2015 The University of Montana conducted field work at the site using surface and sub-surface mapping to guide a non-invasive core sampling technique across the village, led by Dr. Kristen Barnett (Bates College). Thirty-five core samples were collected from a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ross W. Jamieson.

In the 1870s Manuel J. Cobos founded the El Progreso plantation agricultural operation on the Island of San Cristóbal in the Galapagos. It is known that he used "scrip," or company-issued cash, to force workers to only spend their wages at the company store. Archaeological recovery of hard rubber tokens from several plantation contexts brings up many questions of economics and labour relations surrounding this remote location which was also tied to the global economy through steam power,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ella Beaudoin. David R. Braun. Jonathan S. Reeves.

Although studies of lithic technology have been ongoing for over a century our knowledge of what tools were used for is still poorly resolved. Detailed analysis of microscopic damage has been the major focus studies of tool use. However, these studies are often limited to a subset of tools that have not undergone post-depositional damage and can be studied microscopically. Recently new approaches to damage patterns on the edges of simple flaked tools have been used to develop assemblage scale...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marco Peresani. Davide Delpiano. Kristen Heasley. Nicola Nannini. Matteo Romandini.

Studies of the way Neanderthal groups used knapping technologies and organized their economy and land-use are sparse in Europe and even scantier in the Alps, so only in some regions can cyclical and seasonal residential movements be inferred from data on the exploitation of ungulates with variable levels of migratory behavior. Two of the most widespread methods used in stone knapping were the Discoidal and Levallois. However, analyses of these lithic artifacts are not yet sufficiently integrated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kenneth Holyoke. Susan Blair. Ramona Nicholas.

Previous studies in New Brunswick have described traditional terminology and place-names (Blair, nd.; Ganong 1896; Rayburn 1975) as well as traditional lifeways and practice (Perley et al. 2000) along the Saint John River, or, the Wolastoq. These studies recognize the intimate relationship between the river and its people, and the language that describes the connection to the river and its dynamic landscape. Certainly, this applies to a perception of resource locales along the river, from where...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gunvor Lindstroem.

A sanctuary of the Hellenistic period was recently discovered at the village of Torbulok in southwest Tajikistan. Its discovery was based on a random find of a large limestone vessel, identified as a perirrhanterion – a vessel for Greek purification rituals. The excavations, started in 2013 by a German-Tajik team, gave insights into the structure of the sanctuary and confirmed the dating to the 3rd and 2nd century BC, as Bactria was part of the Hellenistic world. The unearthed installations and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kevin Nolan. Talon Silverhorn. Glenna J. Wallace. Joseph Blanchard. Garet Couch.

This is an abstract from the "Collaborative and Community Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2020, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) started planning for the state’s 76th state park focused on the late-eighteenth-century Shawnee town of Chillicothe on the Little Miami River. ODNR was committed to working collaboratively with the three Shawnee Nations to design the park and its interpretive content. Over the last two...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wetherbee Dorshow.

This paper summarizes objectives, strategies and preliminary findings of ongoing research at Chaco Canyon led by the University of New Mexico and the Puente Institute, and funded by the National Science Foundation. The paper focuses on the use of advanced geospatial technologies for field data collection, analysis, and visualization. Project datasets to be discussed include airborne and terrestrial lidar, stereo panoramic photogrammetry, kite/balloon mapping, GIS-based full-motion video,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Donald Holly.

Archaeologists have long been interested in understanding and modelling subarctic hunter-gatherer subsistence strategies. Traditionally, much of this work has relied on the ethnographic record for analogy and sought to situate forager decision making processes in terms of the calculus of optimal foraging and adaptations to the natural environment. While useful, these approaches risk flattening pre/historic subsistence strategies to the point of timelessness and minimizing the social and cultural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only José-Miguel Tejero. Reuven Yeshurun. Omry Barzilai. Israel Hershkovitz. Ofer Marder.

The Early Upper Palaeolithic in the Levant plays an important role in understanding the emergence, dispersal, and adaptations of the first anatomically modern human populations in Eurasia. The exploitation of osseous raw materials for technical and conceptual behaviours is recognized as one of the several innovations that have occurred both in the Levant and in Europe during this time. Previous works demonstrated that the complex and innovative working of osseous materials in Europe is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily C. Taber. Virginia L. Butler.

Considerable research has been conducted on archaeofaunal food remains as a proxy for consumer practices in Euro-American historical archaeology. Such research often incorporates price-driven meat rankings, in which the historical cost of a meat cut determines its rank. Archaeological fish remains also present an opportunity to examine how historical communities engaged with fish that could be acquired through subsistence practices, leisure activities, or market purchases. However, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kaoru Akoshima.

The paper examines theoretical problems concerning characteristics of lithic micro-wear traces in the Paleolithic. Use-wear studies already experienced 40 years of research since the discovery of micro-polish varieties which reflect worked materials with wide applications to site structure analysis. However, global standardization of identification criteria still needs comparative efforts, especially on raw material variability and behavioral diversity among regional settlement and subsistence...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Colin Quinn. Alice Wright. Benjamin Duvall-Irwin.

Copper was an important raw material throughout the prehistory of the Eastern Woodlands of North America. The role of southern Appalachian copper in social, economic, political, and ideological systems across the Eastern Woodlands has received little attention from anthropological archaeologists, particularly compared with copper from more famous procurement zones in the Great Lakes region. In this paper, we present the first steps of a new collaborative research project designed to understand...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Seth Quintus. Jeffrey Clark.

Star mounds, named for their star-like shape, have been an enigmatic feature class in the Samoan Archipelago. Researchers have posited several potential functions for these monumental architectural features, including grave and territorial markers, but their primary function appears to have been as surfaces for pigeon catching. But, excavations of these features have been few and data limited. Here, we review old as well as recent data on star mounds relating to their physical attributes (size,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Lorey.

Archaeologists and researchers in heritage-based disciplines frequently study the complex interactions between human societies and natural environments. All too often, however, research proceeds from the premise that natural patterns, stressors and events promote direct cultural changes or adaptations on the part of human societies. Instead of perpetuating this linear and causal understanding of the relationships between nature and culture, this paper develops a new, holistic framework that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Diehl.

Ostrich eggs have been a valuable resource for Sub-Saharan populations for thousands of years, offering a rich nutritional source as well as a means of transporting water. While burned ostrich eggshell (OES) fragments are common at sites, it is difficult to determine whether they were subsistence refuse or the disposed remnants of canteens. Current tools for analyzing OES burning conditions involve expensive and time consuming isotopic analysis or scanning electron microscopy. This research aims...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Casey Barrier.

The development of large, complex settlements and the organization of associated institutions and social groups are major topics of research for anthropological archaeologists. The realization that pre-Columbian inhabitants of the central Mississippi Valley instigated complex social arrangements at urban scales makes Native North America a site of research that can contribute to the comparative study of urbanism. In this paper, previous and ongoing work near the site of Cahokia is discussed. A...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Harrower. Joseph C. Mazzariello.

The Empire of Aksum was one of the earliest and most influential African complex polities, yet remains one of the world’s most scantly documented ancient civilizations. The Eastern Tigrai Archaeological Project (ETAP) surveyed a 196-km2 area between the ancient capital city of Aksum and the Red Sea over four field seasons from 2005-2008. This work documented 137 archaeological sites, including 7 ancient towns larger than 6 hectares, and contributes a substantial body of data on geographies of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yi-Ling Lin. Yuling He. Zezhen Pan. Daniel Giammar.

Through chemical analyses of soils, bones, and organic residues, archaeologists can identify anthropogenic impacts on environment at archaeological sites. In this research, we are interested in understanding if and how bronze production had impact on the environment during Bronze Age China. Soil samples from Hanwangdu East, a Middle Shang period site at Anyang, were analyzed by using inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). The purpose of this project is to 1) evaluate if ICP-MS is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cameron McNeil. Edy Barrios. Bryce Brown. Richard Terry. Shanti Morell-Hart.

During the Late Classic period, the ancient community of Río Amarillo was actively engaged in the politics of the city of Copan, whether willingly or not. Some have suggested that the fertile bajos of the Río Amarillo East Pocket may have produced food for the city to its west, ameliorating shortages that could have arisen due to its rising population. Archaeological research conducted by the Proyecto Arqueológico Río Amarillo, Copan (PARAC) since 2011 has recovered information regarding both...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sandy Budden-Hoskins.

Archaeologists have, until recently, tended to study pots in what I view as an outside/in or etic manner. We have looked at size, form, decoration and touched on the manner of making only insofar as a pot being hand-built, wheel-thrown or cast. However, by developing a profoundly emic understanding of potting, as performance, we have a tool that can allow us to to view the entirely social and shifting cultural nature of a particular genre of pots. In 2007 I developed a skill methodology that has...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erlend Johnson. Ellen Bell. Marcello Canuto.

In this paper we contend that Copan fundamentally transformed the political structures and social institutions of centers in outlying areas as it expanded and integrated these regions. Evidence from our areas of study, the Cucuyagua and El Paraiso valleys, suggest that these regions had long lived autocthonous populations prior to Copan’s expansion into these regions in the Late Classic period. Using evidence from other non-Maya sites in Western and Central Honduras we contend that while varied...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claire Heckel.

During the late-19th and early- 20th centuries, professional ethnographers/archaeologists and amateur collectors amassed more than 3,000 artifacts of dress and adornment from 17 cultural groups that are now part of the "Plains" collections at the American Museum of Natural History. These objects constitute a material record of conventions of dress that were inconsistently recorded at the time of artifact collection. Drawing on archaeological and ethnographic records, historical documents, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samantha Ellens.

In a time when global travel was fairly restricted, citrus lime consumption extended across the Atlantic, regularly appearing in British advertisements and utilized in the global perfume and beverage markets. Following abolition, in 1834, limes and lime by-products became the chief export of islands like Montserrat and Dominica. In the case of Dominica, lime production gradually developed, and by 1875, many lime estates were yielding exceptional profits. The L. Rose and Lime Company was one of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Colin Grier. Grant Keddie.

In this paper, we address the extent to which Northwest Coast societies, and specifically those of the Salish Sea, were engaged in, participated in, or were connected to an external world beyond their own perceived borders. We consider four elements of the problem. First, we examine ethnographic data pertaining to the spatial extent of the known world, and trace its borders. We then consider the flow of exogenous and exotic materials into the Northwest Coast over time, and assess the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Greig. Elizabeth Matisoo-Smith. Richard Walter.

Dogs were introduced to the islands of Australasia and the Pacific during human migrations and colonisations, but the timing and dispersal routes are unclear. To investigate these Oceanic dog introductions and movements, we generated complete or near complete ancient mitochondrial genomes from archaeological dog specimens from Thailand, Island Southeast Asia and Pacific islands, and from modern dingoes. When combined with additional published complete mitogenome sequences from modern dogs from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ian Milliken. Jerome Hesse. Suzanne Griset. Doug Gann.

Located at the confluence of the Rillito and Santa Cruz Rivers in Tucson, Arizona, archaeological excavations discovered an ancient agricultural field and canal irrigation system that contained human footprints belonging to an estimated 7 adults and 2 children, and 1 set of canine prints. These fields and footprints date between 1,000 and 500 B.C. This exceptional discovery drew worldwide media attention and required an innovative and collaborative approach to data acquisition and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Silvana Rosenfeld.

Chavín de Huántar is a complex ritual site widely recognized for its connections to other regional centers. While much of this regional interaction is understood based on common ceramic styles and designs as well as the presence of non-local material, much less is known of the actual mode of transportation. Llama caravans most certainly played a key role in the movement of goods across space during Chavín times. Were llamas for caravans raised in the proximities of Chavin? Were caravan llamas a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adelphine Bonneau. Réginald Auger. Bernard Gratuze. Jean-François Moreau.

Hundreds of pounds of glass beads were imported among other goods by European traders to exchange with First Nations communities and to acquire fur, during the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. Once traded, these beads were used as bracelets, necklaces, cloths ornament, etc. or bartered with other Native groups. Nowadays, thousands of these beads are found on archaeological sites in Canada and can be a privileged tool to investigate trade networks in North America. As a starting point, the Saguenay...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joanna Wells. Kathryn Krasinski. David Yesner. Fran Seager-Boss.

The Dena’ina and Ahtna developed a sedentary socioeconomically-stratified lifestyle with material inequality by the time of European contact. The development of permanent villages indicates a shift into a complex society with qeshqas (leaders) who had better food, larger houses, and more wealth. Semisubterranean depressions at Cottonwood Creek, ranging from 802 years cal BP to modern age, are remnants of storage and house pits still present on the landscape. Geochemical testing of sediments has...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adrian Burke.

Northeastern North America contains numerous lithic sources that are found in a variety of geologic and geographic settings. These materials vary widely in their knapping quality, color, texture, translucency, and block/cobble size. Access to these sources can also vary greatly, from underwater to the top of mountains. Aboriginal traditional knowledge allowed people in the past to navigate and use these varied sources. I present data from ethnographic and ethnohistoric documents that provide an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anne S. Dowd.

Obsidian and other lithic sources in the Yellowstone region of Wyoming and nearby Montana or Idaho were used up until contact with Euroamericans and information from oral traditions, ethnohistory, ethnoarchaeology, and toponymy provide data on the significance of certain raw material choices made by Native Americans such as the local Shoshone. Why did chipped stone weapons and tools persist even after new metal technologies were introduced? How did the choices of raw materials signal Native...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristina Bowie. Jillian Harris.

While Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools completed its mandate in December 2015, pursuit of the truths and movements towards reconciliation of past residential school practices continue. Efforts to identify missing former students and locate unmarked cemetery, grave and burial sites are continuing at the former Kuper Island Industrial School on Penelakut Island. This work is structured as both a collaborative and community based archaeology and is being...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patrick Julig.

Ancient quarry extraction locations on elevated bedrock outcrops continue to be used in the modern era for traditional activities such as constructing bent wooden sweat lodges and wooden shelters for fasting and meditation, which are built and maintained in modern times, over at least several decades. Other special "powerful" locations such as a cave in a Bar River Formation quartzite adjacent bluff are visited and used for spiritual activities by local First Nations members. As part of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Donna Glowacki.

Our understandings of how socio-complexity developed and the role households played in those developments are often hampered because we lack adequately fine-grained chronological data to identify when and how the relationships among households change. A detailed analysis of architecture and 260 tree-ring dates at Spruce Tree House cliff dwelling has produced a new reconstruction of how the village grew and changed over time at a decade-by-decade level. The village was occupied during the 1200s –...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dong Guanghui. Fahu Chen.

The Hexi Corridor of Northwest China was an important area for cultural exchange between west and east parts of the Eurasia during both historical and prehistoric times. Here we present new dataset of archaeobotanic, zooarchaeological and bone isotopic analysis, and radiocarbon dating from late Neolithic and Bronze sites in Hexi Corridor, and discuss the history of trans-continental cultural exchange in Hexi Corridor before Han Dynasty (202BC-220AD). Our results revealed the chronology of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kunlong Chen. Jianjun Mei. Thilo Rehren. Congcang Zhao.

The production of ritual bronze vessels is an internationally recognised feature of Bronze Age China, contrasting strikingly with other early civilizations across the world. Their manufacture exploded in the Shang period (16th to 11th centuries BC), when bronze metallurgy spread across the whole territory of present-day China. However, while the production of ritual bronze vessels predominated in the Central Plains, resent research is showing how surrounding regions exhibited strong local...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Vicki Szabo. Brenna McLeod Frasier.

Historical, literary and archaeological evidence suggests frequent use of marine mammals by the Norse across the medieval North Atlantic and Eastern Subarctic, circa 870 – 1500 CE. Written records indicate the importance of cetacean species in Norse economies from Norway to Newfoundland, but especially in medieval Iceland. Archaeological assemblages from Iceland reveal an abundance of worked and waste cetacean bone, most of which are morphologically undiagnostic. As such, details on the economic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Diane Lyons.

The transfer of pottery making skills and knowledge is well studied in Africa using the chaîne opératoire methodology. Chaîne opératoire is understood as a social practice in which technological choices are guided by social choices that potters learn as members of a potter community. The complement of technological choices of this group of potters creates a unique technological style. Africanists use technological styles to study the history of potter communities through time and space. But...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yael Rotem.

The EBA Southern Levant experienced a dramatic pathway to complexity, creating a small-scale urban society. The transition from EBI to EBII periods was characterized by urbanization processes, in which sweeping changes in social structure, political landscape, and economic networks occurred. While the majority of research centered on the nature of the fully urban society in the region, there is no consensus for the specific mechanics and causes of the emergence of these early towns, and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yo Negishi.

It has long been claimed that the Jomon-era cultural and ritual system was probably replaced by a new early farming cultural system (Yayoi Culture) brought by immigrants from the Korean peninsula. Recently, however, Japanese archaeologists have been working to determine the variability of ritual practices in each region of the Japanese archipelago. This paper analyzes the transformational process of ritual items (e.g., clay figurines and stone implements) of the Tohoku (northeastern part of main...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Whitney Lytle.

The concept of transformation is expressed by innumerable cultures and has been explored by archaeologists across the globe. The ritual act is often represented in Maya iconography as rulers and religious practitioners exhibiting their power through the ability to change into their animal uays. However, like individuals, spaces can undergo a process of ritual transformation. This paper examines the subject of transformation and how it is demonstrated through imagery and space within a Classic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Koji Ozawa.

In 1942, all people of Japanese descent living along the western coast of the United States were forcibly removed from their homes and imprisoned in 10 incarceration camps. Decades after the incarceration a congressional commission found that racism, wartime hysteria and a lack of leadership led to this unjust imprisonment. The scholarship surrounding the archaeology of the incarceration centers has grown over the past twenty years, with several ongoing studies conducted by universities and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Ng.

Archaeological studies of Chinese railroad sites in the American West tend to be site-specific and rarely position material assemblages in a global or diasporic context where both people and goods moved back and forth across the Pacific Ocean. This paper examines how transnational frameworks can help archaeologists better interpret the material culture found at Chinese railroad sites by drawing on the fields of Asian American studies and historical archaeology.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Trevor Van Damme.

Entanglement theory highlights the dynamic relationship between actors and the objects they create. Recent application of entanglement theory within the framework of post-collapse societies holds much promise for highlighting the role of human actors as agents of resilience. Following the collapse of the palace system in Late Bronze Age Greece (c. 1200 BCE), there were shifts in the overall settlement pattern as a result of increased mobility and innovative technologies (e.g., iron). Within...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justine Issavi.

The Neolithic tell site of Çatalhöyük is composed of clusters of structures interspersed with open or external areas that contain extensive deposits of midden, as well as evidence for several other activities. James Mellaart (1967) initially identified these areas as courtyards while the current project has variously evaluated these spaces through frameworks of discard, food, and sharing practices. A general understanding of external spaces at Çatalhöyük sees them transformed from relatively...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Todd VanPool. Christine VanPool.

In the 13th and 14th centuries, a new political and religious capital expanded its influence in the North American Southwest. This settlement, called Paquimé or Casas Grandes, was the focus of pilgrimages that reflected and reinforced the social dominance of the elites living at the community. However, caches of millions of ocean shell, instances of human sacrifice, and other aspects of the archaeological record indicate that Paquimé itself was likely considered a living entity that helped...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sissel Schroeder.

When confronted by the presence of non-local ceramics and stone tools, variations in artifact styles, the spatial distribution of settlements and settlement hierarchies, and evidence thought to indicate intergroup conflict, archaeologists typically turn to the general concept of "interaction" to explain these material residues. Furthermore, interaction scenarios sometimes are premised on the notion of inequities in resource access. When cultural behemoths like Cahokia are implicated in scenarios...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Floris Keehnen.

This paper discusses the cultural implications of European materials recovered from early colonial indigenous spaces on the island of Hispaniola. The exchange of exotic valuables was vital for the emergent relationships between European colonists and indigenous peoples during the late 15th- and early 16th-century Caribbean. As the colonial presence became more pressing and intercultural dynamics more complex, formerly distinct material worlds increasingly entangled. Archaeologists have long...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Smith. Vernon J. Knight, Jr.. Julie G. Markin. Keith Stephenson.

The nature of Swift Creek design style has been a research focus of the lead authors for a number of years. In this poster, we broaden the discussion to include the full range of carved paddles, originally identified by W. H. Holmes as integral to the South Appalachian pottery tradition. Within the context of the stylistic principles of Swift Creek, as previously defined, we chart paddle stamping from its earliest beginnings ca 600 BC to the ethnographic present. Our concerns include...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tamara Whitley.

The Carrizo Plain National Monument (CPNM) contains some of the most significant Native American heritage sites in the United States. In recognition of this, a cultural landscape, which includes habitation sites, camps, quarries and pictograph sites, has been designated as the Carrizo Plain Archaeological District National Historic Landmark. In addition to these physical features, the Carrizo Plain is imbued with intangible values that embody a sacred landscape for affiliated tribes. The Bureau...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hirokazu Kotegawa.

En el sitio arqueológico Estero Rabón, se encontró un fragmento superior de trono olmeca en 1996. Actualmente está resguardado en el pueblo que asienta encima del sitio pero también se había olvidado en la comunidad académica. A través del Proyecto Arqueológico Estero Rabón, este trono fue analizado detalladamente para reconstruir la imagen total de él, ya que actualmente se ha perdido parte inferior del trono. En el inicio de este estudio se pensó que tenía una imagen parecida al trono de otro...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Todd Braje.

For over 12,000 years, hunter-gatherers of coastal California harvested abalone as an important subsistence and raw material resource. Archaeological evidence from the Northern Channel Islands suggests that human-induced reductions of local sea otter populations may have triggered a trophic cascade beginning 8000 years ago and released abalone and other shellfish from predation pressure, helping to sustain intensive human harvest for millennia. With the arrival of the Spanish in AD 1542 and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabriel Van Der Pluijm.

Archaeological research in Nicaragua has yielded an abundance of human osteological material. Excavations at sites like Monkey point on the Caribbean coast and RURD-UNAN in Managua have uncovered impressive and extensive human inhumations. These sites are among the only four sites in Nicaragua were an extensive osteological study has been done and published. Yet many more unpublished literature mentions or has documented osteological remains. What is the real extent of the uncovered osteological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Morley Eldridge.

Large-scale excavations at GbTo-13 and GbTo-54 near Casey Point, Prince Rupert Harbour, revealed house remains whose differential contents of exotic features, goods, and wealth or status-signalling artifacts strongly suggest that one household ranked above others. All labrets and all mountain goat horn cores were associated with a single house. Even the households lacking these prestige goods have more wealth items than at almost any regional assemblage. The extraordinary amount of bracelets...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kirsten Bos. Åshild J. Vågene. Jane Buikstra. Anne C. Stone. Johannes Krause.

Due to its arid climate the Atacama Desert has an exceptional preservation of ancient biomolecules. In an archaeological context, this allows for genetic analyses of both past human populations and the infectious diseases they experienced. Pre-contact Peruvian cultures are among the first New World populations to show skeletal indications of tuberculosis, and recent molecular analyses have revealed that three individuals were afflicted with a rare zoonotic form of the disease acquired from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Suzanne Fish. Paul Fish.

The variability among Hohokam platform mounds and their related architectural complexes, the predominant form of public architecture during the Classic period, has now been well documented through ongoing field studies and archival research. Recognition of that variability encompasses multiple dimensions linked to perceptions of leadership, social structure, territorial configurations, civic and ritual affairs, and external relationships. The Tucson regional sector in southern Arizona is no...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kimball Banks. Linda Scott Cummings. Signe Snortland. Maria Gatto.

Wadi Kubbaniya is the largest wadi extending from the Western Desert to the Nile in Upper Egypt. The Combined Prehistoric Expedition devoted four seasons in the late 1970s-early 1980s investigating Late Paleolithic (20,000-12,000 BP) settlement-subsistence in the wadi. The Expedition documented one of the most complete occupational sequences for this period in Upper Egypt. Because of excellent preservation, the Expedition was able to reconstruct the vegetation and identify floral resources...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Martin Berger.

In 1932, Alfonso Caso and his team found a human skull decorated with turquoise mosaic tesserae during their well-known excavation of Monte Albán’s Tumba 7. To this day, this is the only artifact of this type to have been found in a documented excavation. Nevertheless, at least twenty turquoise mosaic-decorated human skulls are currently held in museums and private collections. Many of these have been considered forgeries, others are considered authentic. Within this group, there are clear...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Danielle Phelps.

The burial assemblage found in the tomb of Tutankhamun, a pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty (circa 1330 BCE) of ancient Egypt, is one of the most renowned collection of artifacts to survive from antiquity. But does it fit within the normative mortuary practices of the Eighteenth Dynasty? A closer and more comprehensive examination of the material culture found in the tomb of Tutankhamun indicates that several normative patterns were followed; however, many of the artifacts suggests atypical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Mathews. John Gust. Scott Fedick.

Since the mid-1990s, members of the Yalahau and Costa Escondida projects have focused on historical archaeology in northern Quintana Roo. Our research has examined the remnants of the chicle (chewing gum), sugar cane and small-batch rum industries from the late 1800s. Although these sites are relatively recent, the production equipment and other artifacts have been picked through by later occupants, making it challenging to be able to reconstruct the historic record. In an attempt to overcome...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robin Lyle.

Many instances of turkey and dog burials have been documented in the prehistoric American Southwest. Some are simple burials or discarded remains but some examples bear characteristics of deliberate sacrifice, arrangement and elaborate ritual interment. Excavations directed by D. M. Dove from 2008 through 2012 in Early Pueblo II period contexts at the large Champagne Spring site in Dolores County, Colorado, revealed two unprecedented examples of this latter type. On or near the floors of two pit...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Danny Zborover.

In this talk I will present a contextual and iconographic analysis of two unusual, yet almost identical, figurines of lavishly dressed warriors, reported from different sites in the Chontal Highlands of Oaxaca. While variations on mold-made solid figurines of armed individuals were common in Late Classic Oaxaca, the particular attributes of these figurines are more analogous to militaristic iconography emerging from Postclassic Central Mexico. Taking the figurines’ iconography and regional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan Willison.

Funerary objects from three seventeenth century burial grounds were statistically associated with biological sex categories to discern what, if any, burial items were related to the sex of an individual. A handful of material objects proved to be almost exclusively associated with either sex; what also appeared from this analysis was the discovery of two burial assemblages that possessed a mixture of what are believed to be solely male or female burial goods. Utilizing archaeological and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aurelien Tafani. Kewin Peche-Quilichini. Robert H. Tykot.

The construction of large stone fortresses, the casteddi, is a defining phenomenon of the Bronze Age period of the Mediterranean island of Corsica (France). However, the function and the precise chronological setting of these structures are still debated. The summer 2015 preventive intervention at the fortress of Cuccuruzzu has revealed some new information on the socio-economic context of ceramic production during the Final Bronze Age (1200-850 BC). The typological study of the material...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Linda Brown.

For contemporary Tz’utujil Maya ritual practitioners living in the highlands of Guatemala, the night is a particularly potent time and one to which they are inherently linked. Individuals often learn of their destiny to become ritual practitioners when they are first contacted by ancestral beings, known collectively as nawales, at night during dreams. Thereafter ancestral nawales and ritual practitioners enter into mutually beneficial social relationships that are mediated through sacred objects...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mitchell Grothaus. Zebulon Hart. Timothy Hare.

During our 2015 and 2016 field seasons, we mapped and created 3D models of numerous excavation sites in the region surrounding Mayapán in the Northern Yucatán. Complete horizontal excavations of several rural house groups were conducted. We used unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs/drones) to carry photographic equipment to collect both vertical and oblique photos as well as videos. The resulting images were processed in photogrammetric software to generate orthorectified airphoto mosaics and 3D...