Unraveling Social Dynamics through Archaeological Science

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amelie Guindon.

The Midi Toulousain area shows a distinctive organisation of its rural ceramic crafts during the early modern period. Three production centers made pottery, imitating each other’s decorative styles and techniques. Distribution patterns are keys to understanding the social and economic factors that underlie regional competition in production and marketing. We believe that Midi Toulousain pottery production fits into the much larger socioeconomic sphere of the French Atlantic. This pottery was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gregory Braun.

The patterned deposition of certain objects, often in association with materials or structures that are seen to have symbolic associations, is an act of memorialization seen in many Neolithic and broadly shamanic societies throughout the world. This paper uses petrographic and contextual data to explore how objects manufactured with certain material qualities may have served as symbolic referents to memories related to Ontario Iroquoian ritual and social practices, both at the object level, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Reginald Auger. Adelphine Bonneau. Zocha Houle-Wierzbicki. Geneviève Treyvaud.

Our paper discusses the approach used to determine the location of burials in an equatorial environment where organic preservation is nil. Before using the space of the plantation cemetery to preserve the memory of the enslaved who lived at the plantation we had to demonstrate the extant of the cemetery using soil analyses. Memory of that period is a fleeting souvenir among local residents and we want to use archaeology to address issues with which they are confronted in order for them to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Golitko.

Archaeometric studies of archaeological materials by their nature examine social process—for instance learned technological traditions, socially mediated access to raw materials, or the social act of exchange. Models and methods drawn from social network analysis have gained popularity as a means of more formally modelling social relationships, and hold promise as a missing link between laboratory data and the social dynamics archaeologists wish to understand. However, archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Miller.

Faience (composition, frit or siliceous paste) was widespread, special, and yet everyday across much of Eurasia for well over a millennium, yet hardly known today. These materials were made with many different recipes and production methods, but there is an unusual, apparently unique, variation in faience composition for some objects in the Indus. Some siliceous paste objects include steatite fragments, invisible on the surface and requiring laboratory analysis for detection. These could be...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christian Gates St-Pierre.

Tattoos are embodied experiences, ideas, and meanings expressed by groups and individuals. Many Iroquoian populations of Northeastern North America from the Contact period were known for practicing body transformations of this sort. Moreover, the archaeological litterature abunds with cases of Iroquoian bone objects interpreted as tattooing objects. However, such functional interpretations are often proposed without any clear demonstration. In this paper, we present the results of an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maxime Aubert.

The recent discovery of cave paintings in Sulawesi dating to at least 40,000 years ago has altered our understanding of the origins and spread of the first painting traditions. This suggests that either rock art developed independently in Europe and Southeast Asia at about the same time, or that our species invented this trait prior to its initial expansion from Africa. Here I will discuss the implication of this discovery as well as new evidence from Borneo with the aim to deepen our knowledge...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrea Dolfini.

According to Kristian Kristiansen, archaeology is now undergoing a major paradigm-shifting phase akin to the ones that defined the discipline in the mid-1800s and mid-1900s. He dubbed it ‘the third science revolution’, for fast-developing scientific methods, chiefly A-DNA and stable isotope analyses, sit at the core of the current changes. Arguably, similar if less visible changes are occurring in material culture studies. These are fostered by the marrying of new theoretical approaches (e.g....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Yerkes. Attila Gyucha. William Parkinson.

Investigation of social dynamics at Neolithic tells, Szeghalom-Kovácshalom and Vésztő-Mágor, Hungary, included surface collection, geophysical and geochemical surveys, targeted excavations, micromorphology, stable isotope studies, compositional analysis, and contexual analyis of 14C dates, cultural materials, and burials. Both sites were established ca. 5200 B.C., cal., and they are located on the same branch of the Sebes-Körös River, seven km apart. However, they have different dimensions and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Tykot. Kyle Freund. Andrea Vianello.

In the western Mediterranean, obsidian was an important lithic material, coming from four Italian islands and found at archaeological sites up to several hundred kilometers away. Analytical studies of many thousands of artifacts have identified their specific geological sources, and revealed chronological and geographic changes in their selective use through the Neolithic and Bronze Ages (ca. 6000-1000 BC). These data are used to assess economic and social dynamics regarding access to and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only María José Culquichicón-Venegas. Aleksa Alaica.

Assessing social dynamics in the past through archaeometry is more readily possible by constructing questions that more actively engage with issues beyond subsistence and technology. As archaeologists we are capable of reaching these higher-level interpretations of the past. In this paper, the use of camelid age profiles will bring insights into the kinds of value placed on the camelid body and the kinds of constrains and affordances that camelid herds would have placed on the Late Moche...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brad Loewen. Christian Bélanger. Marie-Claude Brien. Charles Dagneau. Alex Lefrançois-Leduc.

Dendrochronology is widely used as a dating tool in archaeology. In North America, the wood record is especially associated with colonial dynamics when farmlands were cleared, rural buildings were erected and young cities drew upon timber resources from expanding hinterlands. In the Saint Lawrence Valley, colonisation began in the early seventeenth century and developed in waves, as prime agricultural lands were saturated and became launching pads for secondary colonisation into marginal regions...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brad Loewen. Christian Bélanger. Marie-Claude Brien. Charles Dagneau. Alex Lefrançois-Leduc.

Dendrochronology is widely used as a dating tool in archaeology. In North America, the wood record is especially associated with colonial dynamics when farmlands were cleared, rural buildings were erected and young cities drew upon timber resources from expanding hinterlands. In the Saint Lawrence Valley, colonisation began in the early seventeenth century and developed in waves, as prime agricultural lands were saturated and became launching pads for secondary colonisation into marginal regions...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sandra Lopez Varela.

Mexico’s government attempts to eradicate poverty through infrastructure building and welfare policies have changed the social dimension of griddle and basket making at Cuentepec, in the State of Morelos Mexico. For generations, the house embodied the knowledge of making griddles and baskets, evoking people to remember fragments of the social practices of distant pasts and collectively lived histories. The act of remembrance is compromised with the building of welfare landscapes. Memory is...

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

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

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Hasenstab.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are typically used in Archaeology to analyze the patterning of sites in a region. Part of this patterning is the result of past human social behavior. Such patterns are manifested in the spatial arrangement of sites on the landscape. These patterns and arrangements can be analyzed using certain GIS methods. This paper presents GIS methods sensitive to analyzing prehistoric social dynamics. Demonstration of the methods is shown by way of example as well as...