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

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lauren Sullivan. David M. Hyde.

Archaeological research in northwestern Belize indicates a long history of occupation beginning in the Middle Preclassic and ending with abandonment in the Terminal Classic. The collection and analysis of ceramic and lithic data on a broad regional scale and across the entire range of settlement hierarchy allow for a comprehensive examination of social and political changes that occurred across the region. Stylistic changes in the ceramics, the continuity of lithic forms, and depositional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katelyn Bishop. Samantha Fladd. Adam Watson.

Chaco Canyon, located in northwestern New Mexico, is widely believed to have formed the religious, economic, and political core of a large regional network that thrived during the Pueblo II period. However, debate continues to surround Chacoan ceremonial and sociopolitical organization. One approach to understanding the social-ceremonial organization of Chacoan great houses is through an understanding of the nature of ritual practice and the scales at which it was organized. Pueblo peoples, past...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Sanger.

Archaeologists have long been interested in studying how landmasses became "colonized." Using biological analogies, archaeologists often describe colonization as a process by which ecological niches become filled by human populations that evolve to best fit into their new environs. This paper suggests an alternative informed by Indigenous philosophies that describe a world filled with animate and powerful beings emplaced throughout the landscape. Forging relations with these beings is a critical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David González Álvarez. Tom Moore.

As a reaction against the dominant warrior chiefdom model of European Iron Age society, much of recent scholarship has emphasised the negotiated nature of power in these societies. Such approaches frequently characterise these societies as ‘heterarchical’ yet the dynamics of how communities operated above the level of the household remain relatively under-theorised. This paper reassesses the value of concepts of heterachy for two regions of Europe, southern Britain and North-western Iberia. It...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leah Marajh.

Urban resilience and sustainability have gained increasing prominence in the literature as concerns regarding water resources and climate change continue to grow. Cities, particularly those in the midst of extreme urban development, are facing a wider range of stresses that call for greater enhancement of resilience techniques. This paper highlights the work of the Socio-Ecological Entanglement in Tropical Societies (SETS) project, whose goal is to investigate resilience and vulnerability within...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zankhna Mody.

Within the complex socio-ecological systems of South and Southeast Asia, ancient sacred natural sites were created by and imbued with cultural and ideological values; these were seen as liminal spaces or threshold environments. In this context, sacred natural sites act as transitional landscapes between the human and non-human worlds in ancient and modern times. This sub-project involves examining the roles of sacred natural sites in each of these three early state formations from 800-1400 CE:...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bruce Miller.

As archaeologists seek out new ways to engage with Indigenous frameworks, people and communities, sociocultural anthropology can engage and advance the conversation in several ways. Archaeologists and sociocultural anthropologists commonly work with the same communities, on the same issues, but on different time scales. Long term research with the Upper Skagit tribe of Washington State, undertaken collaboratively with archaeologists and community members, reveals sets of social tensions of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shinya Watanabe.

In this paper we discuss the chronology of the Cajamarca culture of the Peruvian Northern Highlands to consider the social dynamics during the Early Intermediate Period and the Middle Horizon. We present the excavation data from the two archaeological sites, Complejo Turístico Baños del Inca and El Palacio that correspond to the period from the final part of the Early Cajamarca Phase to the Middle Cajamarca Phase. The Cajamarca culture during the Middle Cajamarca Phase A (A.D. 600-750) presents...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacob Lulewicz.

This paper investigates how processes of societal transformation, including the emergence of sociopolitical hierarchies and socioeconomic inequalities, are shaped by the scale and structure of social networks. Across Southern Appalachia, during more than seven centuries of population growth and sociopolitical change, two distinct regional political traditions emerged in what are today northern Georgia and eastern Tennessee. Employing data on social signaling practices as materialized in ceramic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthea Wiebe. Peter Wallace. Francesco Berna.

Manot Cave, discovered in 2008 in Western Galilee (Israel), represents one of the richest Upper Palaeolithic assemblages in the Levant. The site has produced a ca. 55,000 year old anatomically modern human calvarium, as well as Middle Paleolithic to Post-Aurignacian lithic and bone artefacts. The deepest stratigraphic sequence is found in Area D, located halfway down the steep talus. This area shows continuous stratification from dolomite bedrock to an early sterile colluvium, an archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anke M. Hein. Ye Wa. Jianfeng Cui.

This paper approaches ceramic production by combining four aspects of data: geographic background, archaeological find, ethnoarchaeological work, and material analysis. Taking the middle Neolithic site of Yangguanzhai in Shaanxi as a case study, this paper examined the preconditions and processes of pottery making in northern China during the Yangshao Period (5000-3000 BC). Materials from over ten years of excavation and survey at Yangguanzhai and the results of ethnoarchaeological studies in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Kielhofer. Mathew Fox.

This paper presents the results of soil-stratigraphic investigations and stable isotope analysis at Yangguanzhai, a Middle Neolithic site (~5500 cal. years B.P.) in the Wei River Valley of north-central China. At Yanguanzhai, there is a well-preserved sequence of alternating sediment and buried soils, indicative of multiple fluctuations in landscape stability. Human occupations are associated with three buried soils: the two lower soil horizons contain Middle Neolithic (~6000-5500 cal. yrs....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leah McCurdy.

Not all excavations reach to bedrock. In the Maya Central Lowlands, exposing bedrock can be difficult due to the longevity of occupational sequences and the sometimes confounding presence of thick, seemingly endless Preclassic marl floors. In some cases, our ability to reach and examine bedrock helps us to consider early living and ceremonial spaces, masonry and structural techniques, as well as potential emic connections of natural limestone mountains and cultural manifestations of limestone...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sheldon Skaggs. Christophe Helmke. Jon Spenard. Paul Healy. Terry Powis.

The rise of public monumental architecture in the Maya Middle Preclassic (900-400 BC) and the eventual development of divine kingship during the Early Classic (AD 250-550) constitute social processes that remain comparatively obscure. Nevertheless, they are increasingly illuminated as new empirical evidence is uncovered from research projects such as the Pacbitun Regional Archaeology Project. Ongoing work at Pacbitun, Belize, has brought to light considerable new information that can clarify...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adrienne Frie.

Human-bird relationships in Early Iron Age Slovenia are marked by apparent contradictions – birds are extremely rare in the zooarchaeological record as a whole, and completely absent from mortuary contexts that are otherwise notable for the deposition of animal remains. Yet birds are the most frequently represented animal in Early Iron Age art. Experience of birds would have been relatively constant – birds are almost always present, yet human relationships with them were likely based more on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carolyn Boyd.

Pecos River style rock art was produced in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas and Coahuila, Mexico during the Archaic beginning around 2700 BC. This style is characterized by finely executed anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figures arranged in highly-ordered, complex compositions. Pecos River style anthropomorphs are frequently portrayed with a series of dots emanating upwards from an open mouth. Zoomorphic figures of felines and deer are also represented with this pictographic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Francisca Zalaquett.

In this paper we present the advances in the organological, acoustic and contextual analysis of musical instruments excavated by Dr. Linda Manzanilla in the sectors of Teopancazco, Oztoyahualco, Tunnels and Xalla, all of them located in the archaeological site of Teotihuacan. These instruments were part of a complex system of sound communication that often accompanied the rituals and daily activities. We propose some interpretations on the use of certain instruments and their relationship with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Witt. Kristy E. Primeau.

Sound has been a long disregarded aspect of the cultural landscape, despite being an important factor in how we, as human beings, interact with the wider world. By incorporating a consideration of sound, archaeologists can more fully understand the embodied experience explored through phenomenological approaches. In this poster, we investigate the interaudibility present within the built landscape of Chaco Canyon, using a GIS tool we have developed over the past two years. Focusing on Downtown...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ian Buvit. Karisa Terry.

After nearly a century since confirming Pleistocene humans in North America, having taken a few misguided turns along the way, our discussions about First American origins remain focused on late glacial northeast Asia. While questions persist about exact timing and means, geographically, Beringia is central in terms of routes. Recent genetic literature describes a standstill or isolation when a series of distinct Native American lineages formed prior to movement south of the continental ice....

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Whittaker. Daniel Lee. Lee Sharpe. Jeffery Ferguson.

Projectile points and debitage from three Sinagua sites in northern Arizona, were analyzed using the XRF instruments at Missouri University Research Reactor. The rooms at Lizard Man Village, Fortress Hills, and New Caves were occupied between 1050 and 1250 AD. Over 300 obsidian points and debitage were analyzed using an ARL Quant’x EDXRF Spectrometer. The primary source of obsidian is the well-known Government Mt source,with a few samples from RS Hill and other sources. The nearest sources of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yadira Chinique De Armas. William Pestle.

Breastfeeding in humans is a biocultural process shaped by complex interactions of beliefs about health and nutrition, construction of childhood and parental identities, religious values, and lifestyle. While some studies have stated that the type of subsistence does not determine weaning ages in a population, these factors could have affected weaning food choices. This paper analyzes carbon and nitrogen stable isotopes in bone collagen of four pre-colonial Caribbean populations: Paso del Indio...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Searcy. Todd Pitezel. Eric Christiansen.

During survey in 2013, we identified the only known vesicular basalt quarry in the Casas Grandes region in northwestern Chihuahua, Mexico. Using XRF, we analyzed basalt from the Santiago Quarry and compared the results to the chemical characterization of formal tools (mostly mano and metate fragments) recovered at the site of Paquimé in order to determine if this quarry was one of the sources exploited by prehistoric stoneworkers during the Medio period (1200-1450 A.D.).

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lindsay Buff. Nathan Goodale. Heather Kendall. David G. Bailey. Anna Marie Prentiss.

Geochemical analysis of trace elements in fine grained volcanic rocks (FGV) using HHpXRF technology allows elemental characterization that enables matching fine grained volcanic artifacts with their original toolstone sources. Excavations of Housepit 54 during 2013-2016 field seasons have yielded a large assemblage of FGV artifacts that we attempt to match with toolstone sources or outcrops in the region. Preliminary research on characterizing artifacts recovered during the 2013 field season...

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

Under a technological organization perspective, archaeologists seek to understand how prehistoric societies organized their activities across landscapes and how variation at individual sites articulates with changes in large scale land use systems. Lithic sourcing offers a powerful tool for testing hypotheses about technological organization and land use, but its application across the globe has, until recently, been hindered by expense and methodological difficulties. In this paper, we use pXRF...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Rodning. David Moore.

Archaeologists have generally characterized the Pisgah phase in western North Carolina as the manifestation of Mississippian culture in the Appalachian Summit province, dating from A.D. 1000 to 1450, and the precursor to the Qualla phase, which dates from the 1400s through 1800s and is associated with historic Cherokee towns. The Appalachian Summit encompasses rugged topography, sprawling mountain ranges, and some of the tallest peaks east of the Mississippi River, and it is an area with some of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mannat Johal.

With a focus on writing about the medieval period in southern India, this paper will interrogate how south India came to be defined as an object of knowledge, and thus, a space for representation. Narratives on the south Indian past, from the writing of the Dravidian proof in early 19th century Madras to Nilakanta Sastri’s iconic History of South India in the year of India’s independence, have engendered polyvalent inheritances for current historiographical projects. In unpacking these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nora Franco. Danae Fiore. Agustín Acevedo. María Virginia Mancini. George A. Brook.

The semiarid Southern Deseado Massif (SDM) is highly variable in geology, geomorphology and the spatial and temporal availability of water. To the south it transitions into open lowlands and basaltic plateaus dissected by canyons that extend to the Chico River. The La Gruta 1 rock shelter in the extreme south of the SDM has provided the oldest evidence of human logistic occupation in the area, with ages between ca. 12,800 and 12,000 cal yrBP, when conditions were wetter than today. Human use...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Luis Borrero. Fabiana María Martin. Manuel San Román. Flavia Morello. Dominique Todisco.

In spite of the ca. 14,000 Cal BP or more at 41º S, the oldest human occupations in southern Chile below 52º S are not easy to explain as a result of a Pacific coastal migration. The oldest Late Pleistocene occupations recorded at Ultima Esperanza and Tierra del Fuego are all focused on the exploitation of terrestrial resources and have ties with sites located in the eastern steppes, such as Fell Cave, Piedra Museo or Cerro Tres Tetas. The oldest maritime oriented human occupations of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nathaniel Erb-Satullo.

Archaeologists often speak of production in spatial terms, contrasting nucleated and dispersed forms of crafting. However, the importance of the scale of spatial patterning in production activities (as opposed to "scale" in reference to quantitative output) has yet to be fully explored. It is impossible to relate the spatial distribution of crafting activities to a particular social organization of production without considering spatial scale. An examination of spatial distributions at multiple...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Oliver Hegge. Stephen Yerka.

The reducción of Santa Cruz de Tuti (AKA Espinar de Tuti) in the Colca Valley is a complex archaeological site in the high Andes with occupational phases representing the Inka, colonial, and republican periods. Multiple geophysical instrument surveys conducted during planning phases, as well as concurrently with a large-scale excavation program in 2016, provided critical information on site use and depositional environment. Spatial, pattern and visual analyses reveal how domestic, public, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eleni Hasaki.

More than dots on a map, the craft production loci need to be examined for the space they occupy: their size, organization, and capacity. Spatial analysis can put constraints on workforce size and scale of production, allowing us therefore to reconstruct more accurate models of craft economy. We can also attempt to correlate space occupancy with scales of craft specialization. The "chaîne opératoire" can be examined parallel to the "espace opératoire" to establish what the spatial requirements...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Serge Cassen. Pierre Pétrequin. Guirec Querré. Valentin Grimaud.

Two different groups of green stones with a distant origin are found together in the Neolithic tombs of the Carnac Region (Brittany, France): the Alpine jades (jadeitite, omphacitite, eclogite) were used as raw material for polished axes and disc-rings, while the Iberian callaïs (variscite, turquoise) for pendants and beads. The way in which these transfers took place will be the subject of this presentation, highlighting the specific features of each geographical area. With such aim in mind,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kylie Williamson. Julia Giblin. Jaime Ullinger. László Paja.

Since 2011, members of the Bronze Age Körös Off-Tell Archaeology (BAKOTA) Project have excavated 57 cremation urns from the Békés 103 site in Southeast Hungary. This exploratory study seeks to examine the percentages of cranial and postcranial elements present in microstratigraphic levels in order to better understand the spatial distribution of bones within the burial urns. As a way to explore new approaches, two sampling methods were employed for the analysis of three burials. The first...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Coco.

During the 2007-2009 excavations at Mound 34, Washington University students and Museum Society volunteers piece plotted each individual artifact associated with the copper workshop at this mound. This information allowed for an in-depth macroscopic analysis of the debris associated with this activity area. This analysis focused on the spatial analysis of the copper and other debris within the workshop. Distribution maps of the debris were created to determine the relationships between the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Linda Scott Cummings.

Cooking, food processing, and consumption all contribute anthropic activity markers traceable using archaeobotanic analyses and chemical signatures. Grid square sampling illuminates patterns for comparison with distribution of artifacts and architectural elements, revealing patterned activities that identify food storage in vessels, grinding, and cooking. Multiple lines of evidence, each providing only a portion of the record, contribute to better understanding economic activity and provide...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Felipe Gonzalez-Macqueen. Giles Spence-Morrow. Peter Bikoulis. Willy Yepez-Alvarez. Justin Jennings.

Geoglyphs are large features frequently created by removing rocks and surface dirt in order to create a large scale designs. Although often studied in isolation, much can be learned from the position of geoglyphs relative to other features on the landscape. As part of the Quilcapampa Archaeological Project, a reconnaissance survey guided by remotely sensed imagery was performed in order to document and map geoglyph iconography found on the pampa of the Sihuas Valley, Peru. To date, over 100...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Robert Bischoff.

A fundamental part of interaction is distance. Distance can be calculated in many ways. GIS applications allow the calculation of least cost paths between locations. Often the length of this path is used as the distance between points; however, the amount of time it takes to traverse a path may differ for paths with the same length that traverse different topography. In this poster, I use the distribution of San Juan Red Ware in a portion of the southwestern United States to examine the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bretton Somers.

In 2005, eight Late Classic Maya sites with the remains of wooden posts were found beneath the surface of Punta Ycacos Lagoon in southern Belize. The presence of briquetage on the surface and embedded among the clusters of wooden architectural features implies association with salt production activity. This research employed a rigorous field survey, combined with mapping, sampling, and building a GIS. Detailed analysis of the spatial distribution of wooden posts was conducted to determine if...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paula Hertfelder.

The Lincoln National Forest has produced a wealth of GIS data on archaeological sites in Southeastern New Mexico. This data has not yet been analyzed. This poster presents a predictive spatial model of archaeological sites on the Lincoln National Forest to provide information on the interaction between people and the environment and the changing use of the landscape over time. In this project, I have developed a predictive model of archaeological sites based on a statistical analysis of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tiffany Raymond. Carl Lipo.

The Yazoo Basin of Mississippi is a rich and varied landscape that has been inhabited by humans for millennia. Sediment cores and tree-ring dates have documented that populations living in the basin had to contend with massive flooding events as well as substantial environmental change over the course of the Holocene. Populations contended with these changes by shifting settlement patterns, altering in subsistence strategies, engaging in intergroup competition, as well as varying investments in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carl Lipo. Robert Dinapoli. Alex Morrison. Terry Hunt.

The famous ahu and moai monuments of Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile) are features associated with multiple relatively small-scale communities distributed around the island. These communities are marked archaeologically by repeated sets of domestic architectural classes surrounding ceremonial features (i.e., ahu and moai) that potentially served to functionally integrate local populations. Described in this fashion, this settlement pattern offers the potential to explain the substantial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Britt Starkovich. Paraskevi Elefanti. Eleni Panagopoulou.

Lakonis is a Middle Paleolithic rockshelter on the coast of the Mani Peninsula of southern Greece. It is well-known for the preservation of a Neandertal tooth in the late Middle Paleolithic layers, which is one of the few Pleistocene hominin remains from Greece. The site preserves several occupation areas spanning 120,000-40,000 BP. Lithic and faunal remains are abundant, though the faunas are highly fragmented due to heavy concretion of the sediments. During excavation, researchers defined at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Loukas Barton. Baiyarsaikhan Jamsranjav. Tuvshinjargal Turmubaatar. Christopher Morgan.

The spatial distributions of artifacts from different periods of time reveal change in the nature and intensity of human activities in different kinds of places. This is particularly useful when trying to establish how patterns of human mobility and land-use evolved during periods of dramatic environmental or economic change. The Uvs Nuur Basin of northwest Mongolia played host to both. Here, the distribution of glaciers, vegetation zones, and lake systems changed rapidly from the late...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Genevieve Lucet.

The archaeological site of Cacaxtla, in the central highlands of Mexico, had its heyday during the Mesoamerican Epiclassic period. Its architectural characteristics define it as a place for residential and government activities, in contrast with the neighboring hill Xochitecatl, where constructions typify ritual purposes. Excavations were not accompanied by scientific studies of materials for the understanding of functions of rooms, porches, and courtyards that make up the site. Therefore, it is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Guttenberg. René Vellanoweth.

The spatial patterning of artifacts and features excavated from the Tule Creek site (CA-SNI-25), San Nicolas Island, provides an opportunity to analyze the intra-site correlations between artifact types, materials, and features. Excavations at East Locus at CA-SNI-25 have yielded evidence of trade with other islands as well as evidence suggesting complex ceremonial activity, such as dog and bird burials, large hearths, stacked stone features, and multiple discrete pits. Here we use GIS...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Neil Puckett. Kelly Graf. Angela Gore.

The Owl Ridge site, located in central Alaska’s Nenana Valley, is an excellent example of a stratified, three-component camp site. The three components span the late Pleistocene/early Holocene boundary with component 1 dating to 13,110-12,730 cal BP, component 2 dating to 12,580-11,310 cal BP, and component 3 dating to 11,400-10,710 cal BP. The presence of discretely dated and stratified components provides an ideal opportunity to identify local changes in land use, in the distribution of camp...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer McElhoes. Carl Lipo.

Prehistoric ceramics found across southern California have a discrete spatial distribution. While locally manufactured ceramics are common to the south and southeast of the Los Angeles River, prehistoric ceramic sherds are rare in deposits located to the northwest. This marked distribution is potentially explained through a few hypotheses. Populations to the north may have had access to resources necessary for pottery alternatives or may have differed in their settlement patterns, mobility,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Willis.

During the summer of 2016, graduate students from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas conducted in-field ceramic analysis on Virgin Branch Puebloan sites found on the National Park Service portion of the Grand Parashant National Monument. Data collected from this project were analyzed in GIS in order to establish habitation site chronology in the region as well as address spatial artifact and settlement patterns through time as they relate to environmental variables. It is concluded that the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joseph Sparaga. Sarah K. Campbell. Laura Phillips.

Lithic artifacts recovered from the Tse-whit-zen village, a large settlement on the coast of the Strait of Juan de Fuca inhabited for 2,800 years, assist in portraying the choices made by people for adapting to the surrounding environment through tool development. Analysis of the lithic assemblage is based on a design theory approach that addresses material selection and reductive manufacturing strategies to understand efficiency, expediency, and reliability in forming the end products. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Keith Holmes. Will McInnes. Iain McKechnie. Dana Lepofsky. Darcy Mathews.

Unmanned aerial systems (UAS) have been used extensively in remote sensing in recent years because of their low cost and ease of implementation. Mapping cultural sites in intertidal areas is challenging because of the short time window in which features are exposed. UAS provide an efficient and high spatial resolution method of capturing imagery and elevation data for a variety of cultural landscapes. We have used UAS at sites along the coastal margin of British Columbia to map clam gardens,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Barlow. Hajnal Szász. Györgyi Parditka. Paul R. Duffy.

Fortified tell site excavations in the 20th century formed the basis for construction of a Bronze Age chronology in the Carpathian Basin. Typological and stylistic elements observed on these sites were used to create archaeological cultures for large areas, whose distributions changed over time. However, the use of large archaeological groups obviously masks internal regional variation, both chronologically and stylistically. Different river-valleys, as micro-regions, may have formed the basis...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathleen Hull.

Drawing on archaeological data from the greater Los Angeles Basin, this paper examines sequences of intentional ground-stone artifact fragmentation and singular or multiple-recombined fragment placement within various feature contexts. Recent studies of putative communal mourning features have indicated an initial suite of intentional artifact fragmentation and treatment practices including pigmentation or burning, but ongoing study of these and other types of features has revealed additional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Estanislao Pazmiño.

During the Pre-Columbian period, the northern Andes hosted an intense cultural interaction that led to the emergence of chiefdoms with diverse forms of political administration, power strategies, and economic integration. For the northern Andes of Ecuador, the archaeological research typically assumes a gradual development of the Cara people during the Late Period between 600 and 1525 AD. New archaeological evidence of social and natural events suggests a transitional stage between 900 and 1200...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kazuo Miyamoto.

Iron production in this paper is divided into two types; wrought iron and cast iron. Wrought iron was spread through the Eurasian grasslands to China two times; at the middle of second millennium BC and 9th to 8th century BC. At the later time, wrought iron daggers with golden or bronze handles spread to northwestern China. After wrought iron arrived in the Central Plains of China where bronze working was developed, there was the invention of cast iron technology. Development of cast iron...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Louise Iles.

Theories of the origin(s) of iron production and the spread of ferrous technology have provoked many decades of lively and enduring debate. The notion that iron production developed in one core location – from where knowledge of it spread – has been challenged by claims of early, independent inventions of iron production in Africa, India and China. However, it has proved problematic to verify the timing and contexts of these multi-origin hypotheses without placing undue emphasis on isolated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rudy Reimer.

The foundation of understanding time and the past lays in the realm of constructing cultural historical chronologies through the use of radiocarbon dating and the determination of temporally sensitive artifacts. Along the shores of the Salish Sea of the southern Northwest Coast of North America the long established cultural historical sequence has been questioned and critiqued for its utility in modern day archaeological frameworks. Yet, the foundation of many regional interpretations regarding...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard George. Claire Ebert. Brendan Culleton. Marilyn Masson. Douglas Kennett.

Subsistence economies during the Postclassic Period (ca. AD 1000-1524) in the northern Maya lowlands were shaped by a range of strategies that included agriculture, the cultivation of wild plants, hunting, trade and market exchange, and the management of animals. Stable isotope data from archaeological faunal remains offer important dietary information to reconstruct the subsistence strategies during this period. In this paper, we present paleodietary data from faunal remains recovered from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Roshanne Bakhtiary. Rosemary Cambra. Alan Leventhal.

Shellfish played an important role in the diet of prehistoric hunter-gatherers of Central California. They were the dominant visible component in the large shellmounds that once lined the San Francisco Bay shoreline. Although Bay shellfish are present at inland sites as well, little is known about the role of shellfish in the diet and lifeways of interior populations that hauled the resource in from the Bay. This study focuses on findings from CA-SCL-330, an inland Late Period site in the Diablo...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jelmer Eerkens.

Stable isotope analyses of human skeletal tissues provide estimates of paleodiet at the scale of the individual. This paper explores intra- and inter-community variation in stable nitrogen, carbon, and sulfur isotopes in human bone and teeth as insight into the prevalence of food sharing in several ancient hunter-gatherer burial populations in California. The goal, in particular, is to trace intra-community variation over time to examine how cooperative foraging and food-sharing strategies...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marian Hamilton. Lee Drake. Wirt Wills. Emily Jones.

Stable isotope analysis of archaeological material can reveal aspects of diet, mobility, resource exchange, and social structure in ancient civilizations. Chaco Canyon, New Mexico is a World Heritage site in northwestern New Mexico with peak activity and habitation around 1000AD. The nature of resource management by those inhabiting the Canyon has been long debated. Here, we present carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and strontium isotope data from archaeological faunal remains collected from from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cheryl Makarewicz.

Vertical transhumance provides livestock with consistent access to quality graze throughout the year and likely contributed to the intensification of livestock husbandry in the Near East over ten thousand years ago. Here, carbon (δ13C) and oxygen (δ18O) isotopic time series obtained from sequentially sampled domesticated and wild herbivore teeth recovered from late Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (ninth millennium cal BP) settlements, each located in the sharply divergent elevations of southern Jordan,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only J. Alyssa White. Rick J. Schulting. Peter Hommel. Vyacheslav Moiseyev. Valeriy I. Khartanovich.

The diet of prehistoric hunter-gatherers in the Lake Baikal Region has been extensively studied using stable carbon and nitrogen isotopic analyses. This paper extends this work, reporting new carbon and nitrogen stable isotope and AMS radiocarbon dating results from the cemeteries of Verkholensk (n=45) in the Upper Lena micro-region; Ulan-Khada II–V (n=19) in the Little Sea micro-region; and Fofanovo (n=22) in the Selenga micro-region. The latter analyses represent the first stable isotopic data...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Jew. Taylor Dodrill. Scott Fitzpatrick.

For thousands of years and on a global scale, shellfish have been a key resource for peoples living in island and coastal environments. Not only were they critical food resources, but can act as records of paleoenvironmental conditions. In this study, we evaluated whether the crocus clam (Tridacna crocea) could satisfactorily record ambient water temperature via the incorporation of oxygen isotope ratios into the calcium carbonate matrix during shell growth. Modern Tridacna crocea were collected...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kuei-chen Lin.

In earlier studies, scholars have focused on the measurement of vessels’ dimensions to assess the degree of standardization. It should be noted however that not all dimensions are culturally salient or equally important. Moreover, when manufacturing processes can be decomposed into multiple stages, cultural idiosyncrasies that have been shaped through either institutionalized or unconscious ways might affect and be sought in any of these stages. This has called for analyses on ceramics by using...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Wisely.

Starch grain analysis is a growing field in California archaeology, with the potential to significantly add to our understanding of prehistoric peoples. Using a non-destructive extraction method for field sampling bedrock mortars, I was able to extract microscopic plant residues from the mortar surface for analysis. The subsequent identifications were made using my ethnographically-informed comparative collection of modern native plants. The results of this research indicate that the function of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tao Dawei.

This research aims to investigate the human foodstuffs and lifestyle during the Western and Eastern Zhou Dynasties in the core area of the Central Plains using starch grain analysis of human dental calculus. Plant microfossils, starch grains and phytoliths, which were found in most of calculus samples from Guanzhuang site, were from millets, bread wheat, rice, adzuki, tubers and acorns. Diversity of starch grains and phytoliths in morphological characteristics extracted from dental calculus...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leonardo López Luján. Belem Zúñiga Arellano. Francisco Solís Marín. Carolina Martín Cao Romero. Andrea Alejandra Caballero Ochoa.

Recent excavations carried out by the Templo Mayor Project in Tenochtitlan’s sacred precinct uncovered a significant number of calcium carbonate plates, which, in spite of their advanced degree of deterioration, can be identified as consisting of the endoskeletons of sea stars. These organisms belong to the Asteroidea (from the Greek aster: "star" and eidos: "in the shape of") class, most of which exhibit radial symmetry and have thin, discernibly pentagonal bodies. Sea stars inhabit marine...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ross Campbell. Russell Cutts. David Braun. Jack Harris.

Clarifying evidence for anthropogenic fire in the archaeological record has been subject to contention and vagueness. This uncertainty centers not on evidence for fire, rather what constitutes it being human-controlled. New research pursuing this question suggests that a peculiar angular fragment, termed thermal curved-fractures (TCF), are the byproduct of knapped materials (flakes, cores, bifaces) exposed at length to high heat. We present here results of experiments expanding our...

DOCUMENT Citation Only C. L. Kieffer. Jack Baker.

This analysis includes data from 50 archaeological mortuary assemblages variously attributed to sacrifice, warfare, and standard mortality processes. The research compares two sites, both attributed to sacrifice, to those produced by the two alternative processes of warfare and standard mortality and explores the question of whether these assemblages may be differentiated from them based on the age distribution of deaths. The analysis incorporates a novel feature in that preservation bias is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hollis Miller. Erin Gamble. Darryl Holman. Ben Fitzhugh.

This paper introduces a method for probabilistically narrowing carbon 14 date ranges on wood charcoal samples by computing the likelihood of selecting a specific tree-age in a random sample of charcoal. Archaeologists and others often build chronologies on fragments of wood that are of unknown age prior to the death of the tree. Here we examine a way in which these sources of error could be mitigated through statistical analysis of tree growth rings. As a case study we analyze specific tree...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kylie Quave. Sarah Kennedy. R. Alan Covey.

Diet and cuisine are key practices in the daily negotiation of status and identity, particularly when studied at the household level. In the Maras region of rural Cuzco, the developing Inka state and a rival polity known ethnohistorically as the Ayarmaka maintained autonomous economic, social, and political practices. While other groups in the Cuzco region exchanged goods and shared some cultural practices with the Inka, the Ayarmakas did not. In the 15th century, the Ayarmaka suddenly abandoned...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daryl Fedje. Duncan McLaren. Quentin Mackie.

Over 35 years ago Al Bryan and Ruth Gruhn were promoting the concept of a very early ‘Stemmed Point Tradition’ associated with ‘simple’ flake and core tools. They saw this ‘Far West’ area construct as being of similar age to Clovis and possibly even older. Al and Ruth were keenly interested in the assemblages of stemmed points and ‘expedient stone tools’ recovered by Fedje and others from a series of sites in the Eastern Slopes region of the Canadian Rocky Mountains in the 1980s, an interest...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carolyn Freiwald.

Bioarchaeologists often are faced with the challenge of managing field excavations and lab analyses of skeletal remains at the same time, along with student and staff training and curation of osteological remains. I present results from recent fieldwork at the Classic Maya sites Actuncan and San Lorenzo, Belize that were excavated using a method designed for non-osteologists. This includes complex burial deposits that were re-entered, secondary burials, and comingled and disturbed remains that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steven Emslie.

In June 1978, two young graduate students met while working for the U.S. Forest Service in Flagstaff, Arizona. At the time, I was organizing the 2nd Ethnobiology Conference to be held at the Museum of Northern Arizona in honor of two founding fathers of ethnobiology, Alfred Whiting and Lyndon L. Hargrave. Steve and I soon became friends and colleagues, spending many evenings over beers, and our conversations often centered on our mutual interests in interdisciplinary studies for which...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Xin Zhonghua.

Xiaguanzi site in Maoxian County, located at the junction of the upper reaches of Min and Fu Rivers, is an important node on the channels of culture transmission between North and South China. From 2014 to 2015, Neolithic remains and stone-constructed tombs were excavated. The Neolithic remains include pottery, stone and bone artifacts, leather objects, animal bones, plant seeds, house remains, tombs, and ash pits. Although there no painted pottery occurred at Xiaguanzi, the pottery found here...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mike Parker Pearson.

Stonehenge is part of a larger complex of Late Neolithic (3000–2450 BC) sites and monuments on Salisbury Plain, including a major settlement complex with monumental timber circles at Durrington Walls. Evidence for occupation from this period covers over 8 square miles. In particular, the Durrington Walls settlement covered 42 acres, built in the same period as Stonehenge’s main stage of construction. This settlement was occupied only for decades, or even just a few years, by people with a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cory Cuthbertson. Christian Hoggard.

Results from a recent experiment demonstrate that morphological standardization is an indicator of complex cultural transmission and cognition. A novel methodology integrating geometric morphometrics and Multiple Factor Analysis was employed to assess global shape variance in four experimental handaxe assemblages made by novice knappers trained under four different simulated social learning environments (emulation, imitation, silent teaching and verbal teaching). The higher the fidelity of their...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Terrah Jones. Rachel Moy. Hans Banard.

This paper outlines the preliminary investigation of a collection of diagnostic and undiagnostic ceramics recovered from the site of Mai Adrasha, located in the Shire region of Ethiopia. Mai Adrasha is one of the largest and arguably most significant early town sites west of Aksum dating to the pre-Aksumite to Early Aksumite periods (12th century BCE-2nd century CE) located in the Western Tigray. The site consists of a cemetery and a domestic area characterized by a collection of stone walls and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Siobhan Hart. George Homsy.

This paper discusses the use of GIS Story Map applications for discerning shared values and community capacity building in a small, diverse, deindustrialized urban neighborhood in Binghamton, New York. Most local sustainability and revitalization projects focus on homogeneous communities that have shared stories and understandings about the neighborhood’s past and present. But in the economically marginalized and diverse neighborhoods of America’s smaller rust belt cities, narratives of decline...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Hedden. Daniel Horgen.

The Davenport Danish Hall was considered eligible for the NRHP under Criterion A for its "association with the Danish ethnic population in Davenport, and with the history of city politics, specifically the impact of the Socialist Party in the 1920s." This structure was scheduled for demolition to allow for the construction of a new apartment complex as part of the redevelopment of downtown Davenport. As part of the mitigation, a small 30 x 50 ft parcel behind the structure was scheduled for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Jeske.

The distribution of Oneota sites in Wisconsin has long been recognized as clustered within distinct areas referred to as Localities. At least seven localities are now generally accepted by Oneota researchers in Wisconsin; several others appear to exist in northern Illinois. However, recent research at the Lake Koshkonong locality shows that it stands as a distinctive outlier among all of the other localities. It is unique in terms of landscape patterns, subsistence strategies, distance from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Callaghan.

The Maldives Islands, situated off the south west coast of India, form a chain trending from north 6.930° to south 0.700° latitude, an extent of approximately 850 km. The chain divides the Indian into east and west as well as marking the divide between the seasonal monsoon weather patterns. Present evidence suggests that the island chain was occupied as early as the 5th or 4th century BC with close ties to India. The islands became strongly culturally and commercially connected to both Asia and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ron Lavi. Lauren Davis.

Area E is located close to the upper end of the main talus, at the NW side of the cave. It is built of sediments which originated outside the cave, mainly the local Terra-Rossa soil that was washed into the cave with rainwater, mixed with limestone rocks, some of them originating in the cave itself from decaying and falling roof and wall parts. Two main sedimentary units were observed so far: Unit 1 – Colluvium made of soil with limestone rocks in varying sizes. This colluvium contains very...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Pugh.

Nixtun-Ch’ich’ in Petén, Guatemala was settled shortly before 1000 BC. Sometime between 800 and 500 BC, the settlement was reconfigured into a city with an urban grid—a form until now unknown in the Maya lowlands. As a geometric form, grids regiment a series of lines into a harmonious rhythm over a larger area. Urban grids are formed not by single-dimension lines, but by streets, which are public spaces containing traffic, communication, exchange, and social interaction. Thus, urban grids are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sara Juengst. Manuel Angel Mamani. Karissa Deiter.

Juvenile mortality and morbidity is a sensitive marker of overall group health, as juvenile individuals are more susceptible to circulating endemic diseases and nutritional stress. Thus, reconstructing relative frailty of the juvenile population at Mawchu Llacta provides important data about daily life at this colonial site, in a relatively understudied transitional period of Peruvian history. In this paper, we present the results of preliminary skeletal analyses of burials excavated from the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scarlett Chiu. Nicholas Hogg. Yu-yin Su. Shih-Ya Chang.

In previous research, employing a dataset composed of motifs recorded from 60 Lapita sites spread across the southwestern Pacific, we argued that a general trend of making highly similar, but not identical, motifs can be seen when motif repertoires of different island groups are compared. We thus proposed that the elements of surprise or amusement, generated from making something similar yet different from what the intended audience expected to see, was employed to stress shared traditions while...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zachary Hruby.

Among the myriad types of votive offerings created by the Classic Maya, many contain chipped-stone obsidian and flint materials. These caches often consist of debitage, cores, flakes, blades, and sometimes so-called "eccentrics", which are elaborately chipped ceremonial items that sometimes take the form of god effigies. The contexts of these deposits can include the stairways, centerlines, and corners of important structures, below stelae and other monuments, and in the center of royal or elite...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Vaughan Grimes. Alison Harris. Ana Duggan. Stephanie Marciniak. Hendrik Poinar.

Recent archaeological and biomolecular investigations of the burial assemblage from the Maritime Archaic cemetery at Port au Choix-3, Newfoundland, reveal intriguing patterns of variability. New bone collagen stable isotope evidence supports significant dietary variation between individuals, and artifact-based analyses appear to indicate the site functioned as a meeting ground for different Maritime Archaic ethnic groups from within Newfoundland and the Atlantic region. When combined with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christophe Snoeck. Joanna Ostapkowicz. Rick Schulting. John Pouncett. Philippe Claeys.

Several wooden artefacts were found at Pitch Lake, Trinidad, one of the world's largest asphalt 'lakes', and a recent dating programme has shown that they range from ca. AD 600 to 3000 BC. This paper reports on the investigation of their provenance through strontium isotope analysis, with the aim of establishing whether the artefacts were made locally or were imports from other regions of Trinidad or even beyond the island. A major challenge of working with wooden artefacts found in Pitch Lake...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristina Solis.

Models of hunter-gatherer territoriality are derived from the ethnographic record but have rarely been directly evaluated with archaeological data. Mortuary sites on the Texas Coastal Plain have long been thought of as a product of hunter-gatherer territoriality. Strontium stable isotope ratios from human tooth enamel can be used to estimate the origin of individuals and can evaluate evidence for territoriality. This paper will report the results of strontium stable isotope ratios analyzed from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Margaret-Ashley Veall. Erika Ribechini. Thibaut Deviese. Mark Pollard. Peter Mitchell.

The characterization of hafting adhesives, the glue of composite tools, by chemical analysis and microscopy provides a means by which we may evaluate the organic components of technologies. In southern Africa, the well-preserved assemblages of the Later Stone Age (LSA) present a unique opportunity to evaluate the procured raw materials related to tool manufacture, with a focus on the ingredients of these plastic components. This paper presents the findings of a multi-site study of hafting...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Molly Kaplan.

Beginning in 2006 as a response to California Senate Bill 297, the Unidentified Persons Project is the first statewide attempt to apply modern DNA analysis to cold cases in San Bernardino County. In 2014 the project became an accredited field school through the Institute of Field Research and proceeded to have two consecutive field seasons in the summers of 2014 and 2015. This paper will present a student’s perspective on the most-recent 2015 field season and will discuss both the rewards and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Kirk.

For much of Europe, castles represent a point of cultural heritage and national pride. Yet, even though the study of castles has long been of interest to scholars, few researchers have moved beyond intraregional analyses to examine interregional trends in the manifestation of these monuments. Traditional archaeological investigations examining cross-cultural differences have been hampered primarily by language barriers and differences in how researchers approach questions pertaining to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yongsheng Zhao. Wen Zeng. Shangwu Jiang.

The kneeling facet is formed on the metatarsal heads because of perpetual kneeling over a long period of time. It was observed in several sites in China. We analyzed the metatarsus of individuals of the Bronze Age from four sites in Shandong Province, China: (1) Daxinzhuang, (2) Liujiazhuang, (3) Chengziya and (4) Houzhangda. We found that the kneeling facet is ubiquitous in bronze age individuals. No significant difference of the frequency is observed either between the sexes or among the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicole Kulaga.

CA-LAN-229 is a prehistoric archaeological site and an ethnohistoric Chumash village, Talepop, in the interior Santa Monica Mountains in southern California with evidence of human occupation stretching nearly 9000 years. There are both chronometric and ethnographic lines of evidence which indicate a punctuated occupation from 5000 BC up until the 1800s. The longevity of the occupation of the site provides a rare opportunity to study and test chronologies. The site is also distinctive because of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meenakshi Vashisth.

Bairat is a region located in the present day, Viratnagar tehsil of Jaipur district in Rajasthan. So far it is known for yielding two Ashokan inscriptions in the 19th century and being identical with the mythological Viratnagara of Mahabharata. This paper develops a larger understanding of the history of Bairat by studying its material culture which came into light after post-Independence excavations and explorations. To understand the settlement from about 7th century BCE upto 3rd century CE, I...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chong Yu.

This research is based on all published zooarchaeological study on Chinese Neolithic and Early Neolithic sites and mainly focuses on the animal subsistence economy in the same period. With the advent of quantitative analysis, refined models can now be built and analyzed from all the published data. The application of big data studies on animal remains provided information of range and relative importance of taxa and their possible change through time-scale and region which may reflect an ancient...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Sosa. Nicolas Jew. Renè Vellanoweth.

This study examines lithic debitage and artifacts on exotic raw materials from the Tule Creek Village (CA-SNI-25), a late Holocene site (3500 cal BP to the Mission Era) and one of the last occupied villages (500 BC – 1700 AD) on San Nicolas Island. In contrast to the shell bead trade off the island, little is known about what materials were brought to the island. Excavations yielded over 100 lithic artifacts from two significant components at CA-SNI-25 with the majority consisting of imported...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Douglas Kennett. Brendan Culleton.

The newly established PSU AMS Radiocarbon (14C) Facility provides high-precision measurements of 14C content in a wide range of carbon-bearing materials. Our primary mission is the study of human-environment interactions in the past and present with the goal of working with archaeologists in the context of inter-disciplinary environmental research. The facility operates a NEC 1.5 SDH 500kV Tandem Pelletron accelerator optimized for relatively small samples, requiring only 700µg of graphitized...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alan Madsen. Sean Dolan. LeAnn Purtzer.

The frequency and severity of wildfires in northern New Mexico over the past several decades have increased, and wildfires often impact archaeological sites. In May of 2000, the Cerro Grande Fire burned approximately 48,000 acres of land in northern New Mexico including 7,650 acres within Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). Following the Cerro Grande fire, wildfires continue to pose a threat to the Los Alamos community, LANL facilities, and cultural resources. In 2001, LANL implemented the...