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

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Fay. George Calfas.

Through its many global missions, the United States Army has had an unfortunate history of failing to recognize and allocate sufficient resources to protect cultural heritage sites in active military zones. This pattern has begun to change, especially as a result of incidents that have occurred during the War on Terror. The Engineer Research and Development Center of the US Army Corps of Engineers is currently designing an interactive map program providing information on possible locations for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine Thompson. Nancy Knapke. Brice Obermeyer. Diane Hunter. Nekole Alligood.

This is an abstract from the "Collaborative and Community Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Initiation of community engaged scholarship is not an event. It is often a long-term developmental process, requires recursive planning and assessment, and often engages multiple communities. We present a case study of a research project that grew into a community and collaborative archaeological endeavor that balances engagement between two...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Diana Diaz.

Perceptions of southern California’s San Fernando Valley have long pertained to its relationship to adjacent Los Angeles, with the region over time characterized as either agricultural hinterland or faceless suburbia. Such stereotypes overlook the numerous historical associations and resources of the region, in the process subverting the identities and "communitas" of valley residents. In 2016 courses taught in the Department of Anthropology at California State University-Northridge (CSUN) have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alyce Sadongei.

The use of museum collections by tribal researchers began as a result of cultural and political efforts. The combined movement of cultural resurgence and political expression culminated in the passage of NAGPRA which provided entrée for a variety of tribal researchers and practitioners to engage with cultural objects and archival information. Since the passage of NAGPRA, tribal researchers have primarily been focused on the eligible categories of museum collections for repatriation. However,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yuitza Rojas Fernández.

In the northwest corner of the capital city of San Juan, Puerto Rico, formal urban blocks were proposed and constructed in the 19th century in an area known as Ballajá. As part of a larger investigation, documentary research was carried out, and quantitative and qualitative data was analyzed to study the presence of women using the 1910 census. Germane to that investigation, were specific variables such as professions, trades, race, nationality, age and civil status, therefore providing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chelsi Slotten.

The emergence of sexual orientation stigma or "queerphobia" within Christianity has a deep history that can be traced through historical and archaeological sources. Previous researchers in Mesopotamia argued that "queerphobia" did not exist in ancient times, yet biases against non-normative sexual orientations are continuously debated among contemporary theologians. This paper explores how sexual orientation stigma came to exist in modernity, arguing that the emergence of this phobia parallels...

DOCUMENT Citation Only BrieAnna Langlie.

In the 15th century, the Inca built the largest pre-colonial empire in the western hemisphere. In southern Peru near Lake Titicaca, an ethnic group known as the Colla violently resisted conquest by the Inca for several years. Because of their military prowess, the Inca named one quarter of their empire, Collasuyo, after this group. The Colla’s ability to resist Inca subjugation was facilitated by their decentralized economy evident in their construction and management of a new agricultural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sandra Olsen.

Petroglyphs and inscriptions have been investigated in the Arabian Peninsula at least since 1879, when Lady Anne and Wilfrid Blunt crossed the An Nafud desert and stopped at the now famous site of Jubbah in northern Saudi Arabia. Since that time explorers from England, Belgium, Germany, the US, and the Saudi Department of Antiquities, have recorded images from north to south. Archival materials, including field notes, photographs and letters are available at various institutions, but there is no...

DOCUMENT Citation Only R. Scott Hussey.

Establishing estimates of European Christians enslaved in North Africa during the Early Modern Period (1500-1800) is highly contested among scholars. On one hand, historian Robert Davis argues that more than a million Europeans were captured, enslaved, and left unransomed in North Africa in the Early Modern period. On the other hand, Nabil Matar suggests that both the historical accounts and Davis’ estimates are exaggerated, in part because of a lack of physical evidence and the ambiguous...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dawn Rutecki.

Understanding past peoples – those living in different places, spaces and times – requires archaeologists to reorient how we see and experience the world. We have the ability to move beyond recording the physical traces of past lives to get to the central goal of our discipline – understanding how people lived, participated in and tied themselves to communities, and connected to larger systems. Instead of forming stagnant images of the past, we need to remember the dynamism of choices made and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katrina Eichner.

This paper focuses on the cultural slippage that occurs in frontier zones where competing worldviews create conditions for alternative, innovative, and layered performances of intersecting identities. As spaces of translation, frontiers are the ideal location to study entangled identities. Inhabitants of these queer landscapes constantly negotiate the multiple lived realities of often conflicting ideologies. I propose the use of third-space as a framework for understanding the fragmentation and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dorie Reents-Budet. Annabeth Headdrick. Ronald Bishop.

Teotihuacan-style censers from the Pacific Coast of Guatemala are seminal markers of "international" interaction and ideology during the Early Classic Period (250-550 CE). But the paucity of archaeological data for this artifact class and the lack of recent in-depth analysis of their iconographic narratives leave unexplored a potential body of material concerning interaction, identity, and ideological shifts in this gateway region of southern Mesoamerica. Data from archaeological investigations,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stuart Smith.

Anthropological theories of cultural interaction, in particular entanglement, can help shed light on how individual choices drove intercultural interaction between Egypts and Nubias in the context of a colonial borderland. This paper explores how recent archaeological work in Nubia is breaking the simple Egyptian-Nubian dichotomy that has characterized previous discussions of interactions between the two African cultures. Taking their cue from Egyptian ideology, Egyptologists have often depicted...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jill Neitzel.

Recent work by physicists on "entangled histories" offers archaeologists an alternative perspective for studying prehistoric culture change. The conventional wisdom of archaeology’s contribution to the broader discipline of anthropology is its ability to study change over long spans of time. In recent years, archaeologists have done this using increasingly precise dating techniques combined with processual, multi-scalar, and comparative approaches. The concept of entangled histories expands this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Biehl. Arkadiusz Marciniak.

Prehistoric communities need to be seen as firmly embedded in their ecosystem and landscape where the nature is a very real factor in the decision making processes. The human-environmental relationship is complex and non-linear, which different societies shape it in variable ways. Responses to nature are always of social character made of a number of intertwined explicit and implicit elements. They ultimately have far reaching consequences for the condition of any group including a survival in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson.

Often depicted as a time of local but powerful chieftains, mounted elite warriors and spectacular boat inhumation burials, the Vendel period preceded the Viking Age in Swedish history writing. While contacts with Central Europe and beyond were extensive the societal structure in Scandinavia was still small scale, spread out and built on personal relations. But times were changing and from the mid 8th century several new features evolve: the emergence of town like structures, changes in scale and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alfredo Saucedo.

Laguna de los Cerros enclavado dentro de la región Olmeca, ha figurado al lado de tres grandes centros: San Lorenzo, La Venta y Tres Zapotes, aunque su posición en la jerarquía regional durante el Preclásico nunca se equiparó a ninguno de ellos. San Lorenzo y La Venta se han considerado como las grandes capitales del sur de la costa del Golfo, representativas del Preclásico temprano y medio respectivamente. En este sentido, Laguna de los Cerros tuvo una ocupación continua e importante durante...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Diana Bustos-Ríos. Ana Itzel Juárez-Martin.

El centro de México ha sido una región de convergencia y tránsito de ideas y mercancías desde la época prehispánica. Los grandes centros urbanos del Clásico y del Posclásico se caracterizaron por un constante trasiego que alcanzó desde el actual centro de México hasta Centroamérica. La intensidad de este intercambio desde épocas muy tempranas consolidó el complejo cultural mesoamericano principalmente identificado por la iconografía. Sin embargo no sólo las ideas y las mercaderías viajan,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Fisher. Michelle Elliott.

Though the next century will bring great environmental challenges the impact of global warming pales in comparison to the dramatic environmental changes associated with European Colonialism, beginning in the late 15th century. Chief among them is the Conquest of the Americas involving the breakdown of millennial-aged systems of land engineering and tenure, compounded by depopulation, and the introduction of the Euro-agro suite. Throughout Central Mexico the initial century of Conquest...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carlos Cordova. April Nowell. Christopher Ames. James Pokines. Amer Al-Suliman.

The Greater Azraq Oasis Area occupies a hyper-arid area of the Syro-Arabian Desert. Geomorphological and paleoecological evidence suggests that at times during the Pleistocene the region experienced moister conditions than at present. This particular study centers on the environment surrounding the Middle Pleistocene hominin occupation dated approximately 250,000 BP. Archaeological and archaeozoological remains from this occupation have provided significant information about the wide range of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Van Buren.

Air pollution caused by pre-industrial metal production in the Andes has been reported by scholars using data collected from lake sediments and ice cores. An important source of this pollution, which consists primarily of lead dust, is Potosí, Bolivia, a mining center that produced large quantities of silver during the early colonial period and, perhaps, during prehispanic times as well. This paper examines the environmental effects of indigenous silver production by investigating the operation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alvaro Montenegro. Scott M. Fitzpatrick.

Archaeological evidence for early population dispersals from Sunda to Sahul extends back to at least 50 kya in Australia and between 42–40 kya in Timor-Leste and Sulawesi. An increasing number of sites dating to between ca. 41–14 kya on these and other islands such as Halmahera suggest that modern humans were becoming more proficient and spatially expansive than once believed. What were the prime variables environmentally, socially, or climatically that may have influenced these movements during...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cheyenne Laue.

Computer modeling is an increasingly important aspect of evolutionary anthropology and archaeology. Computer models of change in cultural and technological forms are often highly revelatory of the ways in which large-scale evolutionary patterns arise from the local interactions between individuals. As such, the results of these models may have broad implications, both within the anthropological sciences and without. This paper details simulation results from an agent-based model of cultural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Philippe De Smedt.

Geophysical prospection methods are coming of age as a standard part of the archeological toolkit. Archaeologists, especially in Europe, are increasingly reliant on geophysical data in both developer-led and research archaeology. More recently, archaeological geophysics is bridging the gap between site and landscape through motorized survey strategies. This upscaling particularly highlights a number of methodological difficulties inherent to geophysical prospecting. A first follows its...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Taylor.

Although nomadic horse pastoralism remains an important way of life in eastern Central Asia, the origins of horse herding in the region and their relationship to key social developments are poorly understood. Recent work indicates that late Bronze Age people of Mongolia's Deer Stone - Khirigsuur (DSK) Complex herded horses, and used some of them for transport by circa 1200 BCE. This paper presents evidence that DSK people practiced equine dentistry and veterinary care, removing or modifying...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cassidee A. Thornhill.

The introduction of Equus caballus (modern horse) into North America during European-American contact altered Native American life on the Plains. The horse influenced a variety of cultural practices including the distance at which resources could be exploited, the amount of material goods that could be transported and war practices. Considering the importance of the horse it should be expected that horse remains would be prevalent in the archaeological record. Despite the impact of the horse on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Anderson.

Practitioners of esoteric religious traditions express profound interest in the ancient world as a source of wisdom. Yet the view of the ancient world forwarded by these groups is often one that archaeologists struggle to understand. It is a worldview that blends perceived ancient traditions from a variety of cultures into a new milieu that results in practices such as Kemetic Yoga and beliefs in Atlantis as a spiritual home for all humanity. This paper will focus on a case study of the beliefs,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gligor Dakovic. Bonnie A. B. Blackwell. Dušan Mihailovic. Mirjana Roksandic. Anne R. Skinner.

In southern Serbia, Pešturina contains three Mousterian layers, with late Pleistocene faunae. The site overlooks a tributary to the Nišava River southwest of Niš near the Sičeva Gorge. In all three sedimentological layers, the large mammalian faunae suggest a mixed environment with temperate forest, rocky cliffs, and steppe within walking distance from the cave. Fragmentation patterns and butchering marks plus the lithic tools indicate that some faunal remains were human kills. A...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel ten Bruggencate. S. Brooke Milne. Mostafa Fayek. Robert Park. Douglas Stenton.

Difficulties in physically or chemically distinguishing between chert from closely situated quarries have made a multi-scalar approach to chert provenance analysis necessary in some regions. We present the preliminary results of a multi-scalar chert provenance project focused on the eastern Canadian Arctic. On a regional scale, we examine ICP-MS trace element results for chert from two quarries and five archaeological sites on southern Baffin Island. Chert from the quarries and archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrea Torvinen.

The northern frontier region of Mesoamerica is partially defined by its ceramic traditions (i.e., red-on-buff, incised-engraved, and resist); however, observed variation in the types belonging to decorated wares suggests these types are likely local materializations of a regional ideology. Testing this hypothesis requires first determining the provenance of decorated ceramics recovered from a northern frontier site and then exploring the intrasite distribution of local and nonlocal ceramics...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arianna Nagle.

Archaeological remains of sea urchins along the Northwest Coast have not been a subject of concerted archaeological research, but has the potential to provide new insights into Indigenous marine subsistence practices, and the complexities of pre-contact First Nations’ ecological roles within the marine ecosystems they inhabited. The focus of this report is to investigate the importance of red sea urchin (Strongylocentrotus franciscanus) size in the archaeological record at the sites of DfSh- 7...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Seth Winstead. Katherine Miller Wolf. Hannah Plumer.

For bioarchaeologists, biological sex estimation based off of skeletal indicators is a crucial element when creating a biological profile for human remains. While there are several ways for estimating sex, primarily involving examining cranial and pelvic morphology, one useful method that remains underutilized is metric analysis of bones from the hands and feet. Since males and females are sexually dimorphic, the ability to discriminate biological sex from hand and foot bones is possible and is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Umberto Lombardo.

Estimates of population density in pre-Columbian Amazonia have been based on calculations of the carrying capacity of the environment, generally classified as varzea, terra firme and savannah. These estimates, however, have been criticized because they overlook the fact that i) the Amazonia environment is far more diverse in terms of soils, vegetation and climate than this simplistic classification and ii) pre-Columbians increased, both intentionally and unintentionally, the productivity of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jorge García Sánchez. María Elena Suárez Cortés. Destiny Crider.

El presente trabajo se enfoca en un estudio comparativo que se enfoca en los atributos formales de la cerámica proveniente de contextos arqueológicos en tres sitios epiclásicos de la región local de Tula, Hidalgo conocidos como La Mesa, Tula Chico, y el Cerro Magoni. El objetivo del estudio es obtener un primer acercamiento a las pautas de interacción entre los sitios y entender el panorama social que prevalecía en la región local. En este ensayo, consideramos las particularidades del tipo...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Misaki Fukaya. Nobuyuki Ito.

La cronología cerámica de Chalchuapa fue presentada en 1978 y actualmente se utiliza para reconocer los períodos chalchuapanecos. Sin embargo, se precisa la revisión de la cronología del mismo sitio, ya que en 2014 con gran cantidad de los datos por radiocarbono y análisis cerámico, se presentó una nueva cronología de Kaminaljuyu, la cual tiene una referencia importante con Chalchuapa. En el área de El Trapiche, Chalchuapa, con la tipología y estratigrafía se ha analizado la cerámica del período...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Socorro Alvarez. María Jesús Novelo Pérez. Lilia Fernández Souza.

Sihó, sitio arqueológico localizado en el occidente de Yucatán, fue ocupado en distintos momentos de los períodos Preclásico y Clásico, aunque su ocupación más importante ocurrió durante el Clásico Tardío y Terminal. Es a este momento que corresponden gran parte de los edificios monumentales del asentamiento. La Universidad de Yucatán ha desarrollado en este sitio excavaciones que han permitido la recuperación de cerámica de diversos estratos socioeconómicos, tanto en contextos tipo elitario...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nancy Mahoney.

Why do people collect artifacts? This paper summarizes the results of twenty interviews with artifact collectors and tribal members regarding the non-professional collection of artifacts of American Indian heritage in Montana. The results of this research are relevant to the current debates regarding the ethical considerations surrounding collaborations among professional archaeologists and artifact collectors. In particular, this research highlights divergent perspectives regarding the meaning...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Naoto Yamamoto. Kumiko Horikawa. Takako Shimohama.

Many ancient baskets have been excavated from the wetland sites of the Japan’s prehistoric period in the Hokuriku district, Central Japan. 65 baskets have been excavated from 10 prehistoric sites and date from c.3600 cal BC to c.250 cal AD. Also 14 impressions of basketry were found on the bottom of deep bowls from 8 prehistoric sites. Two points are clear from the analysis of these basketry materials: (1) in terms of construction materials, a Inugaya (in Japanese; Cephalotaxus harringtonia), a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zoe Walder-Hoge.

This study will conduct ethnoarchaeological interviews of Eastern Tigrai rural consultants on traditional farmer knowledge, risk management and fire ecology. The data will enable the integration of farmer knowledge within an historical ecology framework to understand human-environment interactions taking place during the Pre-Aksumite and Aksumite periods (>800 BCE- CE 700). A previous palaeoenvironmental study examined extensive charcoalized wood and burned matter in the region, however an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Debora Zurro. Myrian Alvarez. Ivan Briz. Joan Negre. Jorge Caro.

Hunter-gatherer sites constitute often challenging research contexts within the discipline of archaeology; identifying and even defining whom Tierra del Fuego constitute an optimum arena for studying anthropic markers in hunter-gatherers sites for two reasons: a) good preservation of archaeological remains; b) a rich ethnographic record about hunter-fisher-gatherer societies who inhabited this region. The aim of this work is to present the first results of an intrasite spatial analysis, based on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Russell Greaves. Karen Kramer.

Ethnoarchaeological investigations in the Yucatec Maya community of Xculoc recently included inventorying the location and uses of a range of small-large water sources. This karst landscape has no surface rivers, ponds, or lakes. Currently, the community uses a deep well at the former hacienda in this location. However, at least 60 years ago most families that coalesced into this village were distributed in relation to smaller reliable water sources near the current community location. Field...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Virginia Ochoa-Winemiller.

Using an ethnoarchaeological approach, this paper explores the nature of the domestic built environment of rural Yucatan. Data from four Maya communities is used to assess the various mechanisms involved in the design and use of household architecture and test the assumption of cultural continuity in Maya housing from the ancient past to modern times. Geographic Information system-based analysis revealed spatial variations in number, shape, and construction materials of structures. Assessment of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Donald Blakeslee.

Documents associated with the Juan de Oñate expedition of 1601 allow identification of the proto-Wichita (Quiviran) town that he visited. Described by natives as taking two or three days to walk through, the Spanish saw only parts of it. Still, they counted 1,700 to 2,000 houses in the southern end of the community, which was described as about two leagues (five miles) long. Above that point, the Spanish traveled away from the river for another three leagues, and when scouts returned to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Roberto Valcárcel Rojas. Menno Hoogland.

Northeastern Cuba, particularly the modern-day province of Holguin, is one of the areas of the Caribbean with the largest number of indigenous sites yielding European objects. In the sixteenth century, most of these sites maintained direct or indirect links with Europeans, while others were transformed into permanent colonial spaces by the Spaniards. The study of European objects found at these sites suggests that some of these items were acquired through exchange or as gifts. However, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katie Richards.

Alkali Ridge Site 13 is one of the largest and earliest Pueblo I sites ever found in the American Southwest. Located in southeast Utah, the site was originally excavated by J.O. Brew in the early 1930s. Brew’s final site report includes brief descriptions of most major artifact types found at the site, but largely ignores the abundant botanical remains discovered there. Even though little research has been conducted on the macrobotanical remains, recent residue studies on pottery have shown...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kate Trusler.

A number of researchers have inferred socioeconomic status using zooarchaeological data in contexts suggested by artifacts to reflect a particular status level. Cuts of meat that are of relatively high yield ("utility") should be more economically valuable than low yield parts. A model of carcass-part utility assumes that people of high socioeconomic status will preferentially acquire greater relative frequencies of high yield parts than people of low status. The model is applied to the Roman...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Camilla Sturm.

The emergence of walled town settlements of the late Neolithic middle Yangzi River region are widely associated with the development of a complex form of social organization. While significant attention has focused on the structure and organization of individual walled settlements, little is known about the nature of social and economic interactions between communities. To address this issue, I combined geochemical analysis of pottery with formal social network methods to investigate changes in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Radu Iovita. Johannes Pfleging. Jonas Buchli.

Use­wear analysis relies on the strength of the analogy between microscopic wear patterns produced in laboratory experiments and those present on archaeological tools. Unfortunately, the physical processes that control the production of these patterns, both in the lab and in the past, are subject to complex interactions. One approach to reducing this complexity is to isolate factors (duration, material properties, or dynamics) that influence wear patterns and try to identify their...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Sawyer. Katelyn Coughlan.

Establishing intra-and inter-site chronologies for the dwellings and workshops at Monticello’s Mulberry Row has been a focus of study for decades. While broad temporal outlines are clear, we argue here that further progress depends on gaining better analytical control of a key issue: time averaging of archaeological assemblages. In this poster, we present our iterative process to develop methods to estimate variation in time averaging between these assemblages at different levels of aggregation....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pranavi Ramireddy. Julia Giblin. Jaime Ullinger. László Paja.

In well-preserved osteoarchaeological samples, numerous anthropological methods are employed to determine age at death, biological sex, diet, and pathologies. However, with cremated human bone (cremains), determining demographic information is complicated by fragmentation and post-depositional damage. A simple way to assess variability in demographics, taphonomy, and burial treatment in cremains is to measure total bone weight and volume, which can then be examined in light of sex, age-at-death,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Tarkanian. Elizabeth Paris.

Mesoamerican metal objects have been studied in-depth in terms of alloys and production techniques, but little work has been carried out on the foundry materials used in the pre-Hispanic casting process. In modern foundry practice, synthetic waxes, paraffins, or processed European honeybee wax (from the Apis genus) are commonly used as pattern materials. One possible ancient Mesoamerican pattern material is the wax of the stingless bee Melipona beecheii, a species known to be cultivated by the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrea Thomas.

The Early Agricultural period (2100 BC-AD150-500) in the Southwest begins with the presence of maize and ends with the advent of ceramic vessel use. It is assumed maize was dried out and stored for future consumption. Once dried, maize required extensive processing to gelatinize the endosperm starch, or transform the polysaccharides back to a digestible monosaccharide, through techniques such as: parching, steeping, grinding, and/or boiling (Hard et al. 1996). Little, however, is known about the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Rust.

In the past, abundant ceremonial evidence found at La Venta and other Gulf Coast Olmec sites has spawned widely ranging views on the emergence of complex society in Mesoamerica. Evidence of dense local riverine settlement was gained from my survey at La Venta and surrounding sites in 1986-7, revealing household sites both on La Venta and surrounding villages on abandoned river courses. The chronological sequence has been guided by over 50 radiocarbon dates recovered from a series of domestic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Spengler.

In the early 1980s Naomi Miller changed the way paleoethnobotanists in several parts of the world approached the interpretation of their data. With her research into whether the ancient seed eaters of southwest Asia were human or herbivore, she opened an ongoing debate over what impact the burning of animal dung had on archaeobotanical assemblages and how researchers can differentiate between human and animal food remains. As the number of systematic paleoethnobotanical studies across Central...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Guy Hepp.

The emergence of sociopolitical complexity, and its connections to other developments such as changing subsistence and domestic mobility, has been a central theme of archaeology for over a century. Mesoamerica has been no exception to this trend, and scholars of pre-Columbian Mexico and Central America have scrutinized socioeconomic correlates of changing political integration and centralization. One concept central to this research has been that of hereditary hierarchical inequality. In fact,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Ramsay. Geoffrey Hedges.

The Early Bronze Age site of Khirbet Iskander is located on the central plateau, south of Madaba, Jordan. Excavations at the site have focused primarily on the fortified Early Bronze Age III (EBIII) city remains and the transition to the Early Bronze Age IV (EBIV) agricultural settlement. The well-known and much debated collapse or abandonment of the early cities at the end of the EBIII has been documented at many sites in the Levant and is evident at Khirbet Iskander as well. Excavations of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christian Mesia. Sadie Weber.

Excavations carried out at the Wacheqsa sector at Chavín de Huantar identified archaeological contexts from the Middle Formative (1200 – 900 cal BCE) and Late Formative (900 – 550 Cal BCE). In this paper we present preliminary results of starch analysis carried on in culinary equipment (ceramics) retrieved from domestic occupations from the Middle and Late Formative periods and a large midden, originated from the discard of feasting remains during the Late Formative period. Microbotanical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fiorella Fenoglio. Israel Lara Barajas.

El semidesierto de Querétaro guarda en su interior una gran cantidad de información que nos indica la presencia de grupos sedentarios desde épocas muy tempranas. Ejemplo de ello lo constituye el entierro de Peña Blanca, uno de los contextos más interesantes que se han recuperado en el Estado en los últimos años. Otros hallazgos nos permiten vislumbrar las dinámicas culturales que establecieron estos grupos caracterizados a partir del estudio de sus sistemas de enterramiento, los cuales destacan...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Hampton. Anna Marie Prentiss. Thomas A. Foor.

At the Bridge River site, British Columbia, evidence for intra-household cooperation appears to center within a time of village growth during late Bridge River 2 (ca.1500-1300 cal. BP) before collapsing into familial-based competitive behavior during Bridge River 3 (ca. 1300-1100 cal. BP). This shift from cooperation to competition occurs in tandem with a rise in inequality as the community experienced a Malthusian ceiling. Building on previous multivariate statistical approaches, further...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charles Spencer. Elsa Redmond.

Between 1995 and 2014, we directed 11 seasons of horizontal excavation in and around the main plazas of two Formative Period sites, El Mogote and El Palenque, near San Martín Tilcajete in the Oaxaca Valley. Our results indicate that major changes occurred in public architecture and elite residence between the Early Monte Albán I phase (500-300 B.C.) occupation at El Mogote and the Late Monte Albán I phase (300-100 B.C.) site of El Palenque. In view of the evidence of fundamental cultural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Takashi Sakaguchi.

Cross-culturally, wooden items such as bowls, ladles and spoons play an important role as ritual offerings to deities and ancestors. Thus, they are keys to understanding feasting and ritual activities, and can provide archaeological signatures of these activities. This paper explores evolution of feasting among Jomon societies focused on the analysis of wooden artifacts. The analysis is based on three sources of information: 1) temporal and spatial distribution; 2) stylistic analysis; and 3)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Wright. Scott MacEachern. Stanley Ambrose.

African landscapes have undergone radical ecological transformations since agriculture was introduced and spread across the continent. In some areas, it appears that grassland was encouraged at the expense of forests and woodlands, for agriculture and to provide fodder for livestock. To this point, most of the evidence for such practices has come secondarily from ocean or swamp cores, not directly from archaeological contexts. In this paper, we present a scenario for landscape evolution and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Toby Evans.

Sahagún called the Aztec palace a place of wisdom, and in the mature Aztec empire, sages of all kinds gathered in the tecpans and were members of elite families. The power of ruling families was based, in part, on their more sophisticated education, including divination and curing, and palaces as centers of knowledge served their communities. We know this from descriptions of contact-era imperial palaces, and we also know that these impressive places were the products of the evolution of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hannah Matulek. P. Nick Kardulias.

The original peopling of the Americas has puzzled researchers for decades. While some evidence points to a single wave of migration, still other data suggest two or more waves. Their reasonable estimated arrival dates range from 14,500 to over 20,000y.b.p., although some scholars push back their arrival even farther. Drawing from archaeology, genetics, historical linguistics, and physical anthropology, the peopling of the Americas debate encompasses research from a wide range of experts. In this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nathan Downey. Alan Farahani. Stephen Acabado.

The rapid expansion of the Old Kiyyangan Village (OKV) in Ifugao, Philippines was accompanied by population increase and a shift in crop production—from taro to wet-rice. Archaeological excavations at OKV have also uncovered larger-than-expected quantities of wood charcoal that likely represent burning episodes associated with this shift. Preliminary analysis of the distribution of wood charcoal indicates that specific locations within the OKV were for anthropogenic burning practices. Moreover,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Szigeti. Virág Varga. Viktória Kiss. Attila Gyucha.

Metal is a unique raw material which societies in some parts of southeastern Europe have been exploiting since the Middle Neolithic (5500/5400-5000/4900 BCE). As previous studies in various parts of the world suggest, the acquisition and circulation of metal objects, as well as the ability to work metal have been important in the development of prehistoric societies. In our study, we compared the distribution of metal artifacts during the Hungarian Copper Age (4500/4400-2800/2700 BCE) and Bronze...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mariana Sanders. Gerardo Gutiérrez. James Córdova.

Rock art is now recognized as a key component of cultural expression in prehistory and a variety of new techniques have been developed to offer more insight into this area of archaeological expression. Here, we present our findings from the use of portable x-ray fluorescence (pXRF) analysis at cave sites in the state of Guerrero, Mexico. The authors offer a scientific basis for deriving inference regarding the process of rock art creation in several caves located in eastern Guerrero through the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heidi Noneman. Christine VanPool. Andrew Fernandez.

Extensive ethnographic evidence of tribochemical globular pitting in brewing vessels exists throughout Africa and Mesoamerica. Current hypotheses, however, do not extend this brewing tradition into the Casas Grandes region until after Spanish Contact. Sherds of pottery vessels collected from the Casas Grandes region (AD 1200-1450) exhibit extensive pitting, which some researchers suggest is due to the fermentation of alcohol and production of hominy. To evaluate these hypotheses, we utilized...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Noll.

Archaeologists have chemically distinguished the vitreous stone of the Rogerson Formation of southern Idaho, northeast Nevada, and northwest Utah as the Browns Bench Toolstone Source. Recent geologic research into the Rogerson Formation reveals that the deposits are much more variable than archaeologists recognize. Multiple potential toolstone beds with unique properties are present within the formation. This material is referred to as ignimbrite by geologists though some of it has the visual...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin DuBois. Tony Waldron. Kate Bowers. Carolyn Rando.

In the field of forensic science, the investigation that follows an explosive attack is one of extreme importance. There are, however, few universally accepted methods for the location and recovery of human remains after an explosion, especial in the cases of an IED or suicide bomb attack. This explains the paucity of available research and guidance on the subject. The research presented here aims to improve practice both in terms of recovery of the victims and in determining the characteristics...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Snyder.

In this paper I use a combination of experimental replication, microscopic use wear analysis, and morphological analysis to investigate questions about the differences in hafting technology between Clovis, Folsom, and Midland projectile points. The transition from Clovis to Folsom culture is still poorly understood, and changes in hafting technology are part of the transition. In addition, the question of why fluted (Folsom) and unfluted (Midland) projectile point forms are found in the same...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pascale Meehan.

Recent archaeological research at the site of Monte El Santo, Oaxaca, Mexico examines how the rural community of Monte El Santo responded to the political collapse of the Río Viejo polity during the Early Postclassic Period (800-1100 CE). The collapse ushered in important changes for the coastal inhabitants of the Lower Río Verde Valley- the site of Río Viejo experienced a sharp decline in population, and a newly formed population center at San Marquitos grew to rival Río Viejo in size. While...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Conard.

This paper examines low density Paleolithic sites from several geological contexts within a diachronic framework. The case studies consider what unifying elements and differences exist in Lower, Middle and Upper Paleolithic contexts and addresses their causes with regard to the nature of sedimentation, raw material availability and technological needs. Where preservation permits links will be made between assemblages of lithic, faunal and botanical artifacts at the contexts studied to help...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Semon.

Late Mississippian (AD 1300-1580) ceramic typologies on the Georgia coast broadly group pottery based on 1) temper (coarse grit) and 2) surface decoration (incising, stamping, and rim decoration). Recently, Late Archaic and Mission period pottery studies focused on small-scale ceramic variations, which reflect micro-styles, were successful in identifying patterns related to past pottery communities of practice. Using a similar approach, I present data on three Late Mississippian village ceramic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alex Morrison. Melinda Allen.

The colonization of the islands of East Polynesia was one of the most rapid and expansive migratory events in human history. While extensive research focuses on determining the chronology of East Polynesia colonization, far less attention has been placed on elucidating the processes that influenced this migration. The Ideal Free Distribution Model of human behavioral ecology has proven useful for exploring a range of issues regarding colonization and mobility in varying ecological contexts...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chelsea Smith. Chris Yarnes.

Advancements in gas chromatography/combustion/isotope ratio mass spectrometry (GC/C/IRMS) have allowed researchers to examine isotopic compositions for individual amino acids (AAs) comprising protein-based tissues. This method, known as Compound Specific Isotope Analysis (CSIA), has the potential to overcome certain limitations associated with bulk tissue (e.g., bone collagen) isotopic analysis. Specifically, CSIA allows information about organismal ecology to be generated from discrete samples...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alice Samson. Jago Cooper.

The major moments of cultural exchange in global accounts of encounter have happened across the oceans and therefore island communities have often been first to experience contact and shape the nature of this encounter. This is certainly the case in the Caribbean where the island Taino were the first to encounter Europeans in the New World. The archaeology of Mona Island provides insights into both the origins of indigenous Taíno identities and religious communities, and the processes of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Sterner. Robert Ahlrichs.

During the Late Archaic to Early Woodland transition, caches of blue gray chert bifaces were deposited throughout the Midwest, often in association with burials. Their utility between manufacture and deposition has long been the subject of speculation, but never compellingly demonstrated. Comprehensive use-wear analysis of these bifaces demonstrates that they were, in fact, used prior to deposition. Unfortunately, use-wear data in isolation tells us little about the actual role these bifaces...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Destiny Crider.

Chemical characterization of ceramics using Neutron Activation Analysis (NAA) in Central Mexico has proven to be an important analytical approach for assessing exchange, especially between sub-regions within the Basin of Mexico and neighboring areas. Recent efforts based upon Epiclassic and Early Postclassic Period decorated ceramics have extended the sampling to the ceremonial centers and settlements of Tula Chico and Tula Grande, the resulting chemical analysis defined a more robust...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jana Meyer.

Pottery Mound (LA 416) is a Pueblo IV village site located on the Rio Puerco in central New Mexico southwest of the modern city of Albuquerque and was occupied from the mid-14th to mid-15th centuries. This site is most notable for its abundance of local and non-local ceramic types and elaborate kiva murals (Schaafsma 2007). Excavations at Pottery Mound took place during several University of New Mexico (UNM) field schools under direction of Frank Hibben and later Linda Cordell between the 1950s...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sage Schmied.

The Barkley Sound region of Vancouver Island has a rich archaeological record that is important to the Nuu-chah-nulth people. Due to changing sea levels, places that were once exposed are now underwater, meaning that the earliest possible occupations cannot be excavated. We excavated in the intertidal at Hup’kisakuu7a because of the possibility of finding evidence of human occupation between 5500-7000 cal years BP when sea levels were just a few meters below modern. From the excavations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Balco.

Archival research and subsequent test excavations at the site where the Yahoola High Trestle once stood in Dahlonega, Georgia, has explored the construction, use, and abandonment of an important component of America’s first gold rush. This structure supplied high-pressure water to hydraulic mining operations in the area, facilitating sophisticated mining techniques to extract gold from the surrounding landscape. This paper presents the results of archival research and archaeological testing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Juan Sereno-Uribe.

Archaeology is the way to understand our most ancient past. Trough the study of material remains, we can understand how people from one civilization or another lived. Materials are the object of study for the archaeologist; in the working places of archaeologists, it is common to find a lot of pottery shreds, litchis objects, clay figurines, and more artefacts that speak about the past. In this poster, we are going to talk about an objet, one that it is so important that no other objects would...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Savanna Buehlman-Barbeau. Kristin Carline. Jennifer De Alba. Erik Marsh.

The first field school in the Uspallata valley, Mendoza, took place in 2016 and was organized by the Institute for Field Research (IFR). Its goals were to clarify the use of the landscape over the last two thousand years by people with an economy that incorporated hunting, gathering, small-scale agriculture, and possibility llama herding. Research was near one of Mendoza’s best known archaeological sites, Cerro Tunduqueral. This site’s dense rock art has been known for decades, but little is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Burcu Tung.

A microcosm in itself, The Çatalhöyük Research Project has, in one way or another, intellectually, emotionally and physically altered the lives of its members. The project ethos, in turn, has changed through time with the dynamics that surround research and managerial practices of the individuals making its body. Further the project has been part of a local landscape enduring sociopolitical changes within Turkey. As a member of the Çatalhöyük Research Project since 1997, in this paper, I reflect...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacqueline Fox. Skyler Claunch. David M. Hyde.

Previous excavations at Group A of the Medicinal Trail Community indicated a long occupation of the area, possibly dating back to the Middle Preclassic. In an effort to identify the earliest occupational phase at the group, we excavated the Middle Courtyard plaza platform of Group A to a depth of just over two meters below surface. Results of the 2016 field season brought greater understanding of the extensive amount of energy expended in building from the original foundation of the structures...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Evan Parker. George J. Bey III. Tomás Gallareta Negrón. Betsy Kohut.

Paso del Macho is a Middle Preclassic village settlement located in the eastern Puuc region of the Yucatán Peninsula. Excavations of mounded architecture, the main plaza, and ballcourt of the site have established a chronological range beginning in the early Middle Preclassic and ending by the Late Preclassic. The earliest architecture at the settlement includes at least three small raised platforms associated with Ek ceramics, the earliest pottery complex in Northern Yucatán. Following this,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zachary Stanyard. Torin Power. Nathan Hayman. Griffin Larson. David M. Hyde.

Excavations of a circular depression and adjacent mounds at Group F have revealed functional data to support the hypothesis that this area was used as a processing center for agricultural material. The evidence stems from excavation of the depression itself, as well as two chich mounds on the northwest and northeast sides. The limestone bedrock of the depression appears to have been manually shaped for use, as indicated by cobble fill found roughly a meter down in an excavation trench bisecting...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alejandro Morales. Gerardo Gutiérrez. Michelle Goman. Israel Hinojosa-Balino. Mary E. Pye.

Cacalopetepexi Cave, located near the town of Chiepetlan, is notable for its depictions of what appear to be deer being chased by humans done in white paint. Excavations in the cave uncovered evidence of use in the Late Postclassic-Early Colonial periods. An unexpected find at the back of the cave was an enigmatic deposit of calcium carbonate filled with chert debitage and animal bones, which returned radiocarbon dates around 9800 cal BC.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jesse Morin. Tood Kristensen. John Duke. Andrew Locock. Courtney Lakevold.

Non-local nephrite (jade) artifacts are reported from archaeological sites in northern and central Alberta and are derived from nephrite tool producing areas in southwest British Columbia. This is evidence of trade extending more than 800 km distant across the Rocky Mountain divide. We provide results from a variety of non-destructive techniques (portable X-ray fluorescence, X-ray diffraction, and near-infrared spectrometry) to determine the geochemistry and mineralogy of nephrite ground stone...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kitty Emery. Antonia Foias. Erin Thornton.

Anthropologists often describe food as the cement that holds people together both by symbolizing shared values and by the practice of sharing food. But in Maya archaeology, "food" is also often assumed to have been acquired locally and consumed primarily at the family level, therefore having a limited role in creating and maintaining alliances except in special circumstances. In contrast, our recent interdisciplinary research at the Classic period Motul de San José polity, Guatemala, argues...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yuko Shiratori. Timothy Pugh.

Exemplary centers are physically schematized archetypes which represent and communicate social realities and political orders. Such exemplary centers are quintessential places, as they represent identity and memory. Migrating populations frequently reconstruct exemplary centers that replicate homelands through materials and images demonstrating their identity. Such "architectural quotations" help the migrants to legitimate social and political positions in the new locations. Members of groups...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam Watson. Patricia Gilman. Douglas Kennett. Peter Whiteley. Stephen Plog.

Birds are key actors in Pueblo narratives of emergence and symbolize the six sacred directions in Pueblo cosmology and in some instances religious sodalities and societal divisions; bird feathers are powerful offerings to the supernatural, carrying prayers to the gods who in turn use them for adornment. Simply put, birds are central to modern Pueblo cosmology and social and religious life. Similarly, iconographic representations and the ritual treatment of avian species such as the Scarlet Macaw...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Madeleine Yakal.

Trade and interaction are linked to the development of social ranking among premodern societies, indications for which are seen on mortuary practices, particularly on the existence of exotic burial goods. Our excavations at Old Kiyyangan Village (OKV) in the northern Philippine highlands feature in-utero and infant ceramic jar burials with associated grave goods, primarily beads. The investigations reported in this presentation looks at the relationship between both the quality and quantity of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jaime Awe.

As a number of researchers who have focused attention on Maya – Spanish interaction along the Belize colonial frontier have noted, the relationship between these two contrasting cultures was anything but amicable. As a result of this bellicose relationship, few material goods of European origin were traded into frontier settlements. The only exception were a few objects that were brought in by overzealous friars as gifts to the "heathen" Maya they sought to convert to their Christian faith. And...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa Janz.

During the early and middle Holocene the deserts of Mongolia and northern China were characterized by arid grasslands and numerous lakes and wetlands. Specialized wetland exploitation defined land-use during this period, but more detailed data on subsistence is not clear. The prevalent use of microlithic technology and the lack of architectural structures underscores the presumption that these groups were highly mobile hunter-gatherers, but increasing evidence reveals that pastoralism spread...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sofia Pacheco-Fores. Christopher Morehart. Elise Alonzi. Gwyneth Gordon. Kelly Knudson.

Radiogenic strontium (87Sr/86Sr) isotope values reflect local geology and have long been used in analyses of paleomobility within Mesoamerica. Research has focused on reconstructing individuals’ residential histories by comparing strontium isotope ratios in individuals’ tooth enamel and bone with local baseline values generated from soils, plants, or local fauna. While a great deal of work has been done developing baseline values across the Maya region, work in central Mexico is predominantly...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tressa Munger. Lindsey Romig. Amelia Cisar. Noah Fisher. Kristen Carlson.

Summer of 2016 excavations at the Late Paleo-Indian campsite, Bull Creek, in the panhandle of Oklahoma resulted in unique bone tool discoveries. Within a bone pile butchering feature, containing ribs and a vertebral column, a mandible tool was found in situ wedged into the head of a rib. The mandibular notch appears to have been used to pry the rib heads from the spinal column with the coronoid process and condylar process imbedded around the rib head. In addition to the mandible a scapula tool...

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

The analysis of damage patterning on lithic artifacts has the potential to distinguish between pre-depositional use of artifacts and post-depositional taphonomic processes, providing important evidence for particular hominin behaviors. Previous study has suggested that damage accrues in a non-random fashion in archaeological assemblages. Limited work has been done using the quantified variable of edge angle to account for patterns of edge damage. This study focuses on assemblage-level patterns...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Charlton. Jane Humphris.

The Royal City of Meroe, situated 250km north of Khartoum in the Republic of Sudan, was a capital of the Kingdom of Kush from the 4th Century BC. Famed for its pyramids and other monumental architecture, Meroe was also home to extensive bloomery ironworks exemplified by numerous slag mounds scattered across the site. Superficial investigation of furnace and slag remains were undertaken in the 1980’s and raised numerous questions about the technology. New archaeometallurgical research was...