Society for American Archaeology

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Milton. Kurt Rademaker. Peter Leach.

Rapidly evolving modern technology has resulted in powerful tools for preserving and visualizing archaeological materials. Extensively recording a site with digital technologies enables new explorations of site discovery and recovery processes while concurrently providing a permanent, detailed record of the material. Here, Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene maritime sites in coastal Peru are reconstructed at various scales. Drone photography and GIS are utilized to collect high-resolution...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Darrin Lowery.

With respect to the peopling of the New World, recent research has focused on linking genetics with the archaeological record. Given historical analogies, there were probably multiple accidental or intentional settlement attempts or migrations into the Americas, which ultimately failed. These failures would have left an archaeological record, but no "legacy" genetic signature among the successful New World settlers. The lecture will address this issue based on recent research at several possible...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa Catto. Virginia L. Butler. Kathi A. Ketcheson.

Archaeologists widely incorporate websites into public archaeology projects and rely on them as primary vehicles for connecting with the non-archaeologist public for many reasons: they are relatively inexpensive to create, adaptable to most any content, and potentially accessed by a global population. While websites have great potential for advancing public understanding of the human past, to date there has been little consideration of what makes a “good” public archaeology website. Our project...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan Laurich. Wyatt Benson. Natalie Patton. Chrissina Burke.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Zooarchaeological analysis provides details on the processes used to create and modify bone artifacts and the potential use of these materials by past peoples. This poster provides the results of faunal analysis, usewear analysis, scanning electron microscopy, and experimental archaeology to examine bone artifacts from Wupatki National Monument. The data...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Erdman.

Ritual offerings are inherently communicative; they are created or selected for the meanings they convey to the giver, other viewers, and the intended recipient(s). With this concept in mind, objects deposited in the Source of the Douix, a freshwater spring in eastern France, were recently examined to understand how people use offerings for communication in ritual practices. During exploration of the spring’s subterranean karst system, cave divers observed human-made objects in the water....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Juliet Morrow.

This is an abstract from the "Paleo Lithics to Legacy Management: Ruthann Knudson—Inawa’sioskitsipaki" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Use of ochre occurs from Paleolithic times to the present. I am interested in when and how humans first used it symbolically. The color red has symbolic importance that crosscuts cultural boundaries in African, Australian, and Native North American societies. Ochre lumps, particularly red ochre, and powder indicate...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Holly Wright.

This is a pdf copy of the PowerPoint slides used for this presentation in the SAA symposium. ARIADNE is a four-year EU FP7 Infrastructures funded project, made up of 24 partners across 16 European countries, which hold archaeological data in at least 13 languages. These are the accumulated outcome of the research of individuals, teams and institutions, but form a vast and fragmented corpus, and their potential has been constrained by difficult access and non-homogeneous perspectives. ARIADNE...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Drosos Kardulias. Jordan Schmidt. Andrew Savidge. Amber Swigart. Aaron Gonzalez.

This is an abstract from the "Digitizing Archaeological Practice: Education and Outreach in the Archaeogaming Subdiscipline" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. “The Age of Silence” is an ongoing “Dungeons and Dragons” campaign in which players’ final challenge will be decolonization amid apocalyptic war, either leading a cultural revolution, or joining the forgotten beneath the ashen waste. Realistic material culture is central to the campaign, with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Johnson. Thomas Stafford. G. James West. Heather Thakar. Katherine Bradford.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. What may be the earliest dated human skeletal remains so far discovered in North America come from the Arlington Springs Site on Santa Rosa Island, California. To corroborate the 13,077-12,656 2-sigma cal BP age of this ancient Native American, stratigraphic investigations were undertaken to place this discovery in its chronological and paleoenvironmental...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Holly Norton.

The 1733 St. Jan Slave Rebellion in the Danish West Indies was an ephemeral event, from an archaeological perspective. Lasting only 8 months and diffused across the 20-sq mile island, the rebellion lacks a traditional archaeological signature even from battlefield methodologies. However, it is useful to apply archaeological questions to topics that are difficult to approach through dirt and shovel. This paper will discuss the application of GIS methods to analyze the slave rebellion from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hayley Mickleburgh.

Archaeothanatology is increasingly important in the study of mortuary practices, as it allows us to study aspects of mortuary behaviour that were traditionally hard to assess. However, the archaeothanatological approach entails a detailed and very time-consuming excavation and documentation methodology that requires thorough training. Increasingly refined excavation and documentation methods have clear advantages for our understanding of the mortuary record, but there is a danger of rendering...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jesper Nielsen.

In no other culture in ancient Mesoamerica do we find butterflies represented as frequently as in the iconography of the central Mexican metropolis of Teotihuacan (c. 0-600). Appearing in mural art, painted on stuccoed tripod vessels and in the shape of clay adornos attached to incense burners, these winged creatures undoubtedly held a special place in Teotihuacan worldview and religion. Interpretations of butterfly symbolism at Teotihuacan is often based on analogies with Late Postclassic Aztec...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jerod Roberts. Victoria Roberts. Carolyn Boyd.

The Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas and northern Mexico houses some of the most complex and compositionally intricate prehistoric rock art in the world. Presently, there are over 300 archaeological sites reported to include rock art in Val Verde County Texas, with a vast majority not being revisited since they received their site designation 30 to 50 years ago. In January 2017, Shumla Archaeological Research and Education Center launched the Baseline Rock Art Documentation Project: a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kate Trusler. Gwen Martin-Apostolatos. Wayne Lorenz. Jessica Bernstetter. Amie Green.

This is an abstract from the "Water and Sanitation Management in the Mediterranean " session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Substantial urban development is linked to the first century CE in Pompeii and Herculaneum, as well as throughout the Bay of Naples. An important component of this development included the construction of the Aqua Augusta, or Serino Aqueduct as it is known today. The associated lead pipe network supplied pressured water for private...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kate Trusler. Gwendolyn Martin-Apostolatos. Wayne Lorenz.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Drinkable water and the strategies used to get it are at the heart of every sustainable society, and Roman Pompeii is no exception. Pompeii’s remarkable water distribution system shapes the very character of the city from its network of water towers to its overflowing fountains. By the 1st century CE the Aqua Augusta, or Serino Aqueduct as it is known today,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stanley Bond.

This is an abstract from the "New Perspectives on Heritage Protection: Accomplishing Goals" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Archeological Resources Protection Act (ARPA) and 54 U.S.C. 307103 (Title 54) exempt archeological site location data and other site information from the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The digital age, however, provides site looters with a new range of tools to discover archeological site locations on federal and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Antonia Barbosa.

Geometric enclosures found over a 400 sq. km area in Western Amazonia were built in patterned ways that involved depth, width, and morphology of monumental ditches excavated in a clay soil matrix. Pattern eventually included care for solar orientation. A study of 419 geometric enclosures showed that around 60% of them were clearly oriented according to the sun’s trajectory and its maximum distance from the Ecuador, e.g. the solstice. One of the working hypotheses is that the agricultural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Juan Jijon. Marcos Labrada.

This is an abstract from the "Working with the Community in Ecuador" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Tabuga, pequeña comunidad agrícola del norte de Manabi corresponde a un importante sitio arqueológico de la cultura Jama-Coaque (500 ac - 1650 dc). Ante años de expolio por huaqueros, del bloqueo del acceso al mar por el narcotráfico y de la falta de interés por la autoridades locales, la comunidad de Tabuga ha decidido enfrentar estos obstáculos...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alex Kara. Antonia Foias. Kitty Emery.

Here I present "Arqueologos", a new plugin for the QGIS desktop GIS software designed for archaeologists. While there have recently been many applications of 3d graphics for the digital reconstruction of archaeological features and artifacts, 3D technology has yet to significantly impact how archaeologists interpret their excavation data. This is especially true for individually insignificant ceramic, lithic, and other small artifacts that, when aggregated and studied across space, arguably form...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anabella Coronado. Adriana Linares.

Esta ponencia detalla la reciente investigación participativa en las comunidades de Santa María Nebaj, San Juan Cotzal y San Gaspar Chajul, localizadas en el Departamento de El Quiché, Guatemala. La investigación socialmente comprometida comienza con la elaboración de un atlas regional que reconozca y actualice el listado "oficial" de sitios arqueológicos para su protección. Entre las herramientas metodológicas más valiosas destacan los datos provenientes de historias orales que sobreviven...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claudia Martínez Cadena.

El estudio enfocado en la arqueología de la infancia nace con la necesidad de conocer el papel desempeñado por los infantes en la sociedad. Es a partir de este enfoque que se han ido perfeccionando los diferentes métodos y técnicas para investigar la infancia en el pasado. Los niños pertenecen a uno de los sectores de población más vulnerable social y biológicamente, es por ello que en los trabajos arqueológicos se comienzan a considerar como objeto de estudio, sobre todo cuando se busca conocer...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Francisco García-Albarido.

La colonización de los Andes representó una oportunidad de enriquecimiento individual para peninsulares, criollos y nativos. Esto se logró mediante el mercantilismo forzoso de productos europeos y americanos, promovido por mercaderes limeños y tempranamente ejecutado por los corregidores (entre otros). El reparto de mercaderías a precios excesivos generó el endeudamiento forzado de las comunidades nativas. En muchos casos, los curacas también buscaron beneficiarse de esta práctica, colaborando...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lourdes Budar. Gibrann Becerra.

This is an abstract from the "Regional and Intensive Site Survey: Case Studies from Mesoamerica" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Desde el año 2008 arqueólogos de la Universidad Veracruzana han realizado el estudio sistemático del corredor costero que se encuentra en la parte noreste de Los Tuxtlas. Bajo cobertura total del terreno, se ha recorrido una extensión de 300 km2, desde la Laguna de Sontecomapan al norte, hasta la Laguna del Ostión al sur,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rogelio Rascón.

El área geográfica denominada Sierra Sur es una de las 8 regiones que comprende el estado de Oaxaca. Desde épocas muy antiguas, las sociedades aquí establecidas han presentado un desarrollo paralelo a los demás grupos culturales que caracterizaron la superárea denominada Mesoamérica. Hasta hace algunas décadas, se pensaba que dichos grupos estuvieron aislados, lejos de la influencia de grandes centros rectores como Teotihuacán, o en su caso Monte Albán. Durante el desarrollo correspondiente a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Camila Orbegozo Hernández.

This is an abstract from the "Afro-Latin American Landscapes" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Desde el inicio de la trata transatlántica las poblaciones africanas y sus descendientes en América fueron inferiorizados e invisilizados en múltiples aspectos. El sometimiento y esclavización de estas mujeres, hombres, niñas y niños, pretendía despojarlos de su humanidad y convertirlos en bienes útiles. Sin embargo, nunca dejaron de ser personas ni...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Luis Pantoja. Guadalupe Zetina Gutiérrez. Ernesto Becerril Miró.

This is an abstract from the "La Práctica Arqueológica en México en Tiempos de Crisis: Escenarios, Problemáticas Claves, Actores, Acciones y Propuestas" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Son muchos son los riesgos en los que el Patrimonio Arqueológico en México se encuentra expuesto: el crecimiento de asentamientos humanos, las industrias que usan, transforman y reutilizan el territorio, así como el vandalismo, el saqueo y coleccionismo. Desde el...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jorge Rios.

La zona arqueológica de Mitla ha sido en los últimos años una fuente de información arqueológica y paradigma de la conservación y manejo. Su desarrollo paralelo a las políticas publicas culturales del Estado Mexicano ha derivado no solo en un sitio arqueológico abierto al público sino una serie de eventos sociales y culturales registrados en libros y artículos, que hablan de una interacción de la comunidad local de manera profunda con su patrimonio. Este trabajo pretende mostrar el desarrollo de...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adrian Badilla.

El Delta del Diquís en el sureste de Costa Rica se ha postulado como un centro diferenciado en la producción de bienes (cerámica, oro, esculturas de piedra) durante el Periodo Chiriquí (800 – 1550 d.C.) como parte de una sociedad jerárquica. La arquitectura y la configuración interna que presentan los sitios reflejan manifestaciones particulares donde destaca la construcción de montículos de tierra compactada con mampostería de cantos rodados y ornamentación de rocas calizas. Las estructuras...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paola Michel Flores.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. El abordaje de los vestigios arquitectónicos que escapan a la temporalidad mesoamericana suelen estar a cargo de múltiples disciplinas como la Historia del Arte o desde la Arquitectura, en particular desde su vertiente de Restauración, sin embargo, la Arqueología con sus herramientas teórico – metodológicas también tiene aportaciones qué hacer sobre ese...

DOCUMENT Citation Only AnaBeatriz Balcarcel.

La Gran Acrópolis Central es el corazón del sitio arqueológico El Mirador, el cual presenta diferentes grupos de edificaciones de variada complejidad. Uno de ellos es el Grupo Balam con arquitectura del Preclásico Tardío. Se investigó los aspectos físicos, espaciales, funcionales, sociales e ideológicos a través de una secuencia arquitectónica minuciosa. El estudio permitió conocer no solamente los materiales y sistemas constructivos, las remodelaciones arquitectónicas, el arte en estuco...

DOCUMENT Citation Only He Xiaolin.

This is an abstract from the "Craft and Technology: Knowledge of the Ancient Chinese Artisans" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Shang Dynasty-era site of Taijiasi was excavated from 2014 to 2017. Excavations revealed many remains of bronze casting and bone-tool manufacture. This paper focuses on the arrangement of the two different kinds of handicraft. Along with analysis of other house and sacrificial remains, archaeologists can investigate the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sam Nixon. Simon Kaner.

Most studies of Silk Road connections between East Asia and Europe focus on exchanges between China and the Roman and Byzantine worlds. In Japan however the eastern Silk Road terminus is regarded as Nara where the Imperial Palace gathered a wealth of treasures from Central Asia. At the other end of Eurasia, silk and Buddhist images discovered in northwestern Europe testify to the Silk Road’s significance beyond its commonly-accepted western terminus. This presentation seeks to insert these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Raul Zambrano. Camila Capriata.

Lately, several research projects have been taking place in the Lurin valley, central coast of Peru, in archaeological sites dating to the Late Intermediate Period (s. XVII-XV) and the Late Horizon (s. XV-XVI). This work has been complemented with recent studies focused on the presence of a segment of the Qhapaq Ñan and its importance as an articulating axis between these settlements during the Late Horizon. Preliminary results of these research studies have allowed us to reevaluate hypothesis...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mavis Greer. John W. Greer.

This is an abstract from the "The Role of Rock Art in Cultural Understanding: A Symposium in Honor of Polly Schaafsma" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Knowing the past through rock art interpretation has been a hallmark of Polly Schaafsma’s rock art studies. She has advocated and practiced her stance that the meaning of rock art is not a guessing game but is instead the result of data collection and analysis completed within a theoretical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Lynch.

Social media is a hot topic of discussion and innovation among archaeologists. Although we've improved our ability to digitally reach wider audiences, "social media" is not a single entity. Each platform is different: purposes, user bases, and means of connection vary widely. As archaeologists, we must be proactive about fully understanding these differences, in order to find the most effective ways use each platform and reach a greater public. This paper provides an example of one way to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only María Andrea Celis Ng Teajan.

Desde el descubrimiento de una ofrenda masiva de objetos rituales hallada fortuitamente en un arroyo, el sitio Arqueológico de Arroyo Pesquero enclavado en el área nuclear olmeca ha generado una serie de discusiones acerca de la autenticidad de piezas dispersas en museos y colecciones privadas. Las piezas más representativas son máscaras y hachas de piedra verde con una iconografía propia de la cultura olmeca. Sin embargo, una parte del material del sitio se ha subestimado. Por Medellín Zenil...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dana D. Kollmann.

Patricia Calloway was reported missing from Henderson, Kentucky on March 3, 1993. She was last seen in the company of her brother-in-law, Gene Calloway. On October 17, 2012, arrest warrants were executed for Gene and his wife Debra for the felony counts of homicide, kidnapping, tampering with evidence, and retaliation against a participant in a legal process. Debra was convicted, but Gene died while awaiting trial. Prior to his death, Gene prepared a crudely drawn map of the body disposal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claudia Brittenham.

This is an abstract from the "Polychromy, Multimediality, and Visual Complexity in Mesoamerican Art" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Chichen Itza was a city of unprecedented visual complexity in ancient Mesoamerica, a place where innovations in architecture, mural painting, and sculpture, as well as experiments with new media such as gold and turquoise, created an urban landscape unlike any other. In this paper, I will examine the interactions...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kim Richter.

The Huasteca has long been portrayed as an isolated, peripheral culture of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. However, recent archaeological and art-historical research challenge this view. The artistic evidence from the Huasteca points to a prolonged cultural dialogue with neighbors along the Gulf Coast, as well as to stylistic and iconographic affinities with Central Mexico, Oaxaca, and the Maya region. Archaeological excavations, especially at the site of Tamtoc, in San Luis Potosi, have revealed a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caitlin Earley.

At the site of Quen Santo, Guatemala, a hilltop center overlies an elaborate cave complex. First documented by Eduard Seler, the caves at Quen Santo have also been explored by modern-day archaeologists. Missing from modern analyses of Quen Santo, however, is a consideration of sculpture from the site: Seler recovered almost thirty stone monuments, most related to themes of death, ritual, and the ancestors. In this paper I explore the sculptural corpus of Quen Santo for the first time, arguing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew D. Lints. John W. Ives.

While the Promontory caves are well known for their preservation of perishable cultural materials, the red-ochre pictographs inside Promontory Cave 1 have attracted less attention. The conditions within the cave provided a ‘safe haven’ for organic artifacts, but the pictographs themselves have varying degrees of visibility, from quite good to poor. Archaeologists have relied solely upon descriptions made by Julian Steward during his 1930s work. Advancements in digital imagery and rock art...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan Leight.

Art-making is an essential element of Mesoamerican culture. Asserting the primacy of the art object as a site of inquiry can provide a fascinating framework for organizing, imagining, and interpreting the past. This paper considers art objects produced during the Late Classic (ca. 600-900 CE) by the Maya Ik’ polity in Petén, Guatemala. The elaborately painted surfaces with naturalistic figures, realistic color schemes, and detailed hieroglyphic inscriptions about artists, patrons, and regional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laurie Webster.

Finely woven yucca cordage sandals appeared in the northern Southwest 2000 years ago as a fully formed craft tradition and continued in use until the early A.D. 1200s. Their complex, labor-intensive weave structures, ornate toe finishes, and elaborate iconography suggest that these sandals played important social and symbolic roles in communities of the San Juan region for more than a millennium before disappearing from the archaeological record in the mid-thirteenth century. In this diachronic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claudia Brittenham.

This is an abstract from the "The Movement of People and Ideas in Eastern Mesoamerica during the Ninth and Tenth Centuries CE: A Multidisciplinary Approach Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We often talk about the connections between Chichen Itza and Tula, but these two great cities were far from alone in the ancient Mesoamerican world. In this presentation, I will explore artistic and architectural similarities between Chichen Itza and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan Leight.

Teotihuacan was a major cosmopolitan city located in the Basin of Mexico during the Classic Period (100-700 CE). The artwork has long fascinated but bewildered scholars, and despite the emulation of Teotihuacan’s recognizable artistic styles across Mesoamerica, we still understand relatively little about their artistic styles today. This paper aims to examine the conch shell motif from artwork at Teotihuacan, particularly visible in extant mural paintings. It will focus on investigating the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Norma Valentin.

The use of animal fur in ancient Mesoamerica is well known due to the historical records, sculpture and painting. Archaeologically, it has been inferred by some evidence, as the presence and absence of certain animal bones and the cultural traces they present (abrasions, cuts and perforations, for example). In the offerings of the Sacred Precinct of Tenochtitlan, Mexico, there has been found a large number of skeletal remains of four classes of vertebrates (fishes, reptiles, birds and mammals)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sam Challis. Andrew Skinner.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the South African colonial period, settler incursion was met by indigenous resistance, sparking a series of brushfire conflicts. In the borderlands of the colony, “Bushman” bandits conducted an insurgency against colonists, facing as they did so significant traumatic stress. Being horse-borne was part of their identity, as was their association with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa Trever.

This is an abstract from the "The Legacies of Archaeologists in the Andes: Second Symposium, the Institutionalization and Internationalization of Andean Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the modern history of American archaeology, the relationship between art and science has often been an uneasy one. But in northern Peru in the 1950s, archaeologists, artists, and poets enjoyed a remarkably close camaraderie that has seldom been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mikael Fauvelle.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Located on the Pacific Coast of Chiapas, Mexico, the site of Fracción Mujular is best known for its corpus of carved stone monuments. First investigated by Carlos Navarrete in the 1960’s, the site is characterized by multiple stelae and carved altars. Several of Fracción Mujular’s stelae contain circular glyphs which seem to associate the site with the nearby...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jenifer Lewis. David Witt.

This is an abstract from the "Sins of Our Ancestors (and of Ourselves): Confronting Archaeological Legacies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Arthur Caswell Parker was one of the first of his kind as an indigenous archaeologist. As a Seneca scientist with roots on the Cattaraugus territory where his grandparents lived, he had a foot in two worlds that may have aided with collaboration and research. However, his career started at a time when the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Moriarty. Antonia Foias. Ellen Moriarty.

More than a decade of research in the Motul de San José area has produced a rich corpus of household middens and domestic artifact assemblages reflecting a wide range of social statuses and occupations at a diverse set of local centers. This body of data permits a detailed bottom-up consideration of patterns of production, consumption, and distribution for a wide range of goods within and between member communities in the Late Classic Motul polity. This paper examines the evidence for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Cook Hale. Nathan Hale.

This is an abstract from the "Liquid Landscapes: Recent Developments in Submerged Landscape Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Working from the known to the unknown is a core concept in archaeological prospection and is particularly important in submerged landscapes studies. These landscapes are harder to access and have experienced, potentially, more dramatic changes since they were last occupied. We share here the results of a study in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dorothy Lippert.

This is an abstract from the "The Future of Bioarchaeology in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bioarchaeologists assert the responsibility to give voice to the dead, but the dead exist in many different definitions. As ancestors, they are part of an existing human community, as objects, they are part of a created community of collections. They can also be sources of data for researchers seeking to expand knowledge about human existence....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Platt.

This is an abstract from the ""Re-excavating" Legacy Collections" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The collections excavated in the 1970s at 87 Church Street in downtown Charleston, South Carolina play a crucial role as part of a repertoire of sites deployed to understand Charleston as a critical urban center and waypoint in the eighteenth-century American southeast. However, a full site report does not exist for these early excavations, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zachary Cooper. Scott Ortman.

This is an abstract from the "Peopling the Past: Critically Evaluating Settlement and Regional Population Estimates with New Methods and Demographic Modeling" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A common method of estimating population is to multiply a settlement area by an occupational density. Empirical studies show that occupational density generally increases with settlement size but estimating occupational density when structural remains are not...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Ordinario.

This presentation explores the possibility of predicting house pad footprints in the Old Kiyyangan Village, Ifugao, Philippines by looking at the density of artifacts in upper levels of excavation units. Knowing the artifact density in upper levels would help future excavations at the Old Kiyyangan Village site when digging new units. I hypothesize that there would be a higher artifact density between 30-50cm below datum in each trench which are on the edges of a house platform. In addition, I...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dennis Lewarch.

Using assemblages in over 4,000 4-x-4-m surface collection units from eight Aztec period sites in the Coatlan del Rio Valley of western Morelos, Mexico, I analyze the valley-wide distribution of plain ceramics, decorated ceramics, lithic artifacts, spindle whorls, and figurines in over 300 household middens to define functional artifact sets analogous to the "bundles of goods and services" of economic geographers. Cluster analysis, multidimensional scaling, and network analysis quantify flow of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sherman Horn.

The temporal position of the Middle Preclassic (c. 900 – 350 B.C.), situated between the earliest permanent settlements and hierarchically organized Late Preclassic polities, makes it a critical period for understanding the development of complex societies in the Belize Valley and the Maya Lowlands. From 2004 – 2009, the Belize Valley Archaeological Project’s excavations produced a trove of information on the Middle Preclassic occupation beneath Plaza B in the epicenter of Cahal Pech....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mariana Muñoz-Rodríguez. Steve Ashby. Lena Holmquist.

The hair comb is one of the most commonly recovered bone artifacts from early medieval sites in Northern Europe, particularly in Viking-Age Scandinavia. Beyond the bone hair comb’s association with technological innovation, it acts as a powerful proxy for urbanism, human migration, and long-range trade in Viking-Age towns. Yet despite this prevalence, the bone hair comb remains understudied in recent years and few multi-site syntheses have been undertaken. Existing studies have focused on the...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Melissa Frederick. Grace Gronniger.

The St. Louis Veterans Curation Program has close to 50 investigations currently being processed in our lab. One of these investigations is from the Smithville Lake Project area in the Kansas City District. This investigation alone contains materials from 27 different sites including the Yeo Site (23CL199) and dates from the late 6th to 7th century A.D. The site was excavated by Kansas State University archaeologists ca. July 1976 and this past year, veteran technicians began processing the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John O'Connor.

The colonization of Polynesia was a motivated dispersal of culturally related human populations on a massive geographic scale. The settlement of distant oceanic islands involved the development and sharing of technological information specific to local environments, including exclusively stylistic aspects of artifact design. A reassessment of artifact comparisons from a neo-Darwinian evolutionary perspective continues to provide information regarding social interaction among island communities....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wade Tidwell.

The Actuncan Archaeological Project has conducted ten field seasons of research at this ancient lowland Maya site in Belize, Central America and inventoried all artifact classes including ceramics, lithics, marine shell, jade, daub, etc. from excavation contexts. One of my research goals was to consolidate this information into a relational Access database so that project members could more easily analyze artifacts across contexts and time periods. The database allowed me to construct...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kaitlyn E. Davis. Scott Ortman.

Initial applications of settlement scaling theory focused on measures derived from the built environment, such as house density and settled area. Although this is appropriate, the theory actually focuses on the role of social networks in socioeconomic rates, and thus connects to a variety of artifact-based measures of such rates. In this paper, we develop these connections using data from the Rio Grande Pueblos of New Mexico. We first compare pueblo room areas to show that socioeconomic outputs...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mia Carey.

Have you recovered thousands of artifacts, but none from the time period of interest? Have you spent weeks or months in the field, with absolutely nothing to address your research questions so you keep digging? This is the phenomenon of negative data. While this can be a scary thing, it is okay. Archaeologists suffering from artifact addiction have developed an unhealthy obsession with the recovery, analysis, and interpretation of material culture. This addiction can result in delayed reports,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meg Winnick.

This is an abstract from the "NPS Archeology: Engaging the Public through Education and Recreation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archeology education initiatives can benefit from 3D technologies to develop further engagement between archeological artifacts and the public. In the summer of 2018, the National Park Service in collaboration with the National Council of Preservation Education crafted a project to help NPS write guidelines for parks...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Terry Ozbun. John Fagan.

Reading the ancient language of lithic reduction technologies from archaeological assemblages of flakes and flaked-stone tools requires practical knowledge of key physical attributes and their interrelationships. Lithic literacy begins with understanding the basic anatomy of flakes and flake scars formed according to the laws of fracture mechanics. Variability in the expression of this basic anatomy directly reflects characteristics of the lithic material, mechanical actions applied, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeffrey Davis. Julie Hoggarth. Jaime Awe.

Throughout the Maya Lowlands, archaeologists have identified Terminal Classic deposits associated with the final activities in ceremonial spaces. These features include concentrations of cultural material deposited in the corners of plazas and courtyards. At the site of Baking Pot, Belize, the Belize Valley Archaeological Reconaissance (BVAR) project has identified several of these terminal deposits. This presentation will shed light on the types of artifacts being deposited during these final...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ying Nie. Dong Wei. Hua Zhang. Dongya Yang. Hong Zhu.

This paper explores artificial cranial deformation from two archaeological sites in China. Jilintai cemetery (2500 – 2000BP) is located in Yili region, northwestern Xinjiang, and Yingpan cemetery (2000 – 1500BP) is located in Yuli county, northeastern Xinjiang. A total of 253 crania (202 from Jilintai and 51 from Yingpan) were examined in this study. Crania were measured according to the Standards Book, and 11 angles and 6 indices were calculated. Statistical analyses include discriminant...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Flexner.

This is an abstract from the "Contested Landscapes: The Archaeology of Politics, Borders, and Movement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Islands have long appeared to Western eyes as naturally bounded entities. It has been proposed that they represent ‘natural laboratories’ for understanding natural and cultural evolution. At the same time, islands are recognised as contact zones, for example historian Greg Dening has outlined the significance of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kasey Cole. Frank Bayham.

Artiodactyl representation in the archaeological record can be a particularly sensitive indicator of past human-environmental interactions due to their status as a high-ranking prey item. In this study we explore terminal prehistoric and protohistoric patterning of artiodactyl exploitation in the archaeofaunal record in Northeastern California. Specifically, this study examines previously published zooarchaeological data derived from residential sites situated along the Pit River in conjunction...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elsa Tomasto-Cagigao. Luis Jaime Castillo.

The study of occupational stress markers was an attractive investigation field some years ago, due to the alleged possibility for the identification of ancient activities through skeletal changes. Nevertheless, a critical vision of the issue evidences that this relation is not so easy to establish, because bone biology is complex and also because different activities may produce similar changes. This does not mean that this type of studies should be abandoned. On the contrary, it is a call for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David McCormick. Gilberto Cruz. Erika Gómez. Oswaldo Chinchilla.

This is an abstract from the "The Urban Question: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Investigating the Ancient Mesoamerican City" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Various contexts in the sector of El Baúl, at the site of Cotzumalhuapa have been the subject of recent excavations to better understand the lithic industries of this urban center. These sectors were chosen for excavation due to the large surface scatters of lithic material indicating areas...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marcos Martinón-Torres. Maria Alicia Uribe Villegas.

This is an abstract from the "The Movement of Technical Knowledge: Cross-Craft Perspectives on Mobility and Knowledge in Production Technologies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Technological and stylistic regularities in material culture are often used to define archaeological ‘cultures’, and variously interpreted as resulting from communities of practice, learning traditions and/and imitation, together with consumer or patron demands....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Éloi Bérubé. Shanti Morell-Hart. Sophie Reilly.

Since 2013, the McMaster Paleoethnobotanical Research Facility (MPERF) has explored questions surrounding the relationship between humans and plants, including plant cultivation and collection, consumption and social uses of flora, and interactions between people and landscape. Active projects address human-plant dynamics throughout different regions of Mesoamerica, South America, and Ontario, at time periods ranging from the Late Pleistocene through historic periods. With recent support from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Svend Hansen.

The Neolithic way of life arrived in the Caucasus at the beginning of the 6th Millennium B.C. Recent excavations in Arukhlo in the Republic of Georgia, not far away from the capital Tblisis, shed light on the occupation of the place between 5800 and 5400 BC. The buildung activities on the site were several times interrupted by digging deep ditches through the village. In the presentation it will be argued that Arukhlo and probably other places were centres of ritual activities.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Warren.

This is an abstract from the "Alfareros deste Inga: Pottery Production, Distribution and Exchange in the Tawantinsuyu" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As the violent threat posed by the marauding Chiriguanos emerged in the terminal decades of Tawantinsuyu, the Inkas and their local allies made a concerted push to turn the southeastern imperial frontier into a strategically fortified zone and enhance their ability to repel the lowland invaders....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Masucci. Hector Neff.

The late prehispanic coastal Ecuadorian societies subsumed as Manteño -Guancavilca, are imagined as seafarers of the Andean region. On balsa rafts they plied a coast dotted with ports; participants in a trading empire. This traditional model of political-economic integration is being challenged with emphasis on regional autonomy and ethnic diversity. It is proposed that the analysis of the "ordinary" Manteño -Guancavilca vessels can contribute to this debate. Large, coarse paste, roughened...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Manion. Geoffrey McCafferty. Carrie Dennett.

In 2008, housing development on the shore of Lake Xolotlan in a suburb of Managua discovered an extensive cemetery dating to the Late Tempisque period, ca. 1­300 CE. Dozens of individuals were recovered, along with a rich array of grave goods. A new phase of development in 2014 has been closely monitored by the Nicaraguan Institute of Culture. In July heavy machinery exposed a number of additional skeletons and a team from the University of Calgary volunteered to assist in the excavation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fanya Becks. Alan Leventhal. Rosemary Cambra.

This paper will be presenting the preliminary results of analyses of archaeological soils collected from within burial contexts at the Yukisma Site between 1993 and 1994. The Yukisma Site is a mounded cemetery site located in what is now Milpitas California, and was used as a burial ground from AD 540-1687. This cemetery was disturbed by construction in 1993. Over 243 individuals were recovered, and later reburied by the Muwekma Ohlone Indian Tribe of the San Francisco Bay Area. While the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Cook Hale.

This is an abstract from the "Palaeoeconomic and Environmental Reconstructions in Island and Coastal Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Submerged prehistoric sites left behind by coastal groups have the potential to answer multiple critical questions concerning human activities, but locating, excavating, and interpreting such sites brings with it challenges unlike those encountered in coastal settings that remain (for now) terrestrial....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kenneth Sassaman. Asa R. Randall. Neill J. Wallis.

Archaeological contexts of the American Southeast are rife with ash deposits that go beyond the residues of mundane burning activities. Burials and other pits at Stallings Island have layers of wood ash sandwiched between charcoal and shell; some rockshelters of the Cumberland Plateau contain successive layers of ash, each capped with earth; freshwater shell was mixed with ash to fill a massive pit on Silver Glen Run; and in north-central Florida, a dried sink filled with peat was burned to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sandra Barnum.

The most prominent New Deal work-relief program with regard to archaeology was the Works Progress Administration (renamed in 1939 as the Work Projects Administration; WPA), which existed from 1935 to 1943. Functioning through sponsoring universities, historical societies, and other agencies, the WPA supported major field and laboratory projects. In Nebraska, almost all of the New Deal archaeological projects were carried out with WPA-funded labor. Between 1936 and 1941, the University of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only George J. Micheletti.

The ceremonial architecture of Pacbitun’s epicentral plaza was recently discovered to have underwent a drastic early Late Classic (AD 550 – 700) transformation. The assemblage, originally designated as a Southern Lowland architectural archetype known as an E Group complex, was uniquely modified physically and adopted an intensive mortuary practice that seemingly altered the group’s function. The inclusion of several Late Classic elite interments suggests that Pacbitun’s ceremonial assemblage had...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Nelson.

Ethnographic sources indicate that fire and its alternate forms—smoke and ash—are powerfully symbolic substances for many historic period southeastern Indian groups. The remains of fire are frequently deposited in ways that amplify its power, or alternatively, attempt to neutralize it. This paper examines ash deposition at Parchman Place, a late Mississippi period (AD 1300-1541) site located in the northern Yazoo Basin. Here, and elsewhere in the Southeast, Mississippian people incorporated ash...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara Roth.

Throughout much of the Southwestern U.S., ash was an important component of ritual deposition and has ethnographically been closely associated with processes of cleansing and renewal. The presence of ash in ritual contexts is well documented, but it also appears to have played an important role in the closing of domestic structures. In this paper, I present cases of ritual closure of domestic structures and examine the role that ash played in these closures using data from pithouse sites in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cheryl Claassen.

Following the analysis of Newt Kash Kentucky shelter and other ash and sandal shrines in the eastern US as menstrual retreats, the author examines a number of caves and shelters around the Great Basin paying particular attention to their ash and sandal content. Both items may constitute fertility petitions left at retreat and medicine shelters such as Cowboy Cave, Hogup Cave, and High Rolls. The ash may represent the burning of fertility offerings, including menstrual pads and diapers.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hemmamuthé Goudiaby. Lydie Dussol.

From 2014 to 2016, the intensive excavation of the residential unit 5N6 in Naachtun (Guatemala) has yielded 13 burials intricately linked with the evolution of the architecture. Put together, these funerary contexts allow for a fine-scale reconstruction of the local dynamics and everyday life in the unit. However, funerary archaeologists often fail to consider the burial itself as a micro-context, a combination of significant gestures and actions that can be analyzed using the same principles as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marvin Kay.

Sediment of varied textures and colors, ash among them, is highlighted from deliberately burnt Harlan-style charnel houses. These were erected in sub-mound pits. In one rendition that followed an earlier house burning, light gray ash alternates in the superior, or upward, position with the black charcoal layer of a collapsed burnt thatch and cane roof. The ash was levelled as a platform. This completed a mortuary cycle linked lineally to subsequent pyramidal mound construction. In other cases...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leore Grosman. Natalie Munro.

A chief source of information on archaeological cultures is gathered from excavated cemeteries. Burial location and treatment provide insight into many aspects of the daily life, social organization, and ideology of past human populations. In particular, the location and organization of human interments can reveal how past cultures perceived their natural surroundings and their place within them. Through burial, an individual returns to the soil of their homeland symbolizing the connections...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Judy Berryman. William H. Walker.

Magic and witchcraft, like many classic topics in the anthropology of religion, involve everyday things such as dogs, plant pollen, ashes, and arrow points. As such the archaeological record offers a rich source of ancient religious practices if we can link formation of its deposits to past ritual activities. For example, strata exhibiting ash and projectile points deposited on floors and in the fill of abandoned houses may derive from protective magic. Rather than haphazardly tossed hearth...

DOCUMENT Full-Text John Ruskamp.

This book introduces previously unrecognized ancient written evidence that in pre-Columbian times multiple intellectual exchanges took place between Asiatic and North American populations. Using the novel integration of the legal concept of substantial similarity with the comparative statistical tool of Jaccard's Index of Similarity the Chinese origin of 107+ North American petroglyphs and pictographs is established. Here is the long sought sinographic proof that Asiatic explorers not only...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Natalia Donner.

Pre-Hispanic Central Nicaraguan pottery has often been addressed as "poorly studied", or "problematic". Therefore, researchers still have a lot of questions regarding the region’s development and specially its interactions with other areas. Even though a ceramic sequence was established at the end of the 1980’s (Gorin 1990, Espinoza and Rigat 1994), analyses have traditionally focused on type-variety and modal traits, often concentrating on decoration techniques and motifs. As a result, we lack...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Danti. Allison Cuneo.

Cultural Heritage Initiative—Planning for Safeguarding Heritage Sites in Syria and Iraq (CHI) is headed by The American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR) and is funded by a cooperative agreement from the US Department of State, Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. Active conflict in Syria and northern Iraq is contributing to the damage and destruction of cultural heritage. This research project aims to 1) raise awareness in Syria and Iraq and among the international community about current...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Israel Lara Barajas. Fiorella Fenoglio Limón.

El hallazgo y recuperación de los restos de un bulto mortuorio que contenía el esqueleto de un individuo masculino permitió, dadas sus características, plantear la hipótesis de que se trataba de un cazador recolector que habitó en esta zona antes de la llegada de los grupos sedentarios a la región; para confirmar dicha hipótesis se realizaron diferentes fechamientos a los materiales arqueológicos de éste y otros contextos hallados en la zona. En esta ponencia se dará a conocer los resultados del...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edgar Ortega. Gustavo Martinez.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Multidisciplinary Investigations in the Mirador Basin, Guatemala" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. En la última década, el Proyecto Cuenca Mirador ha trabajado en el Grupo Cascabel ubicado al norte de la gran plaza principal del sitio El Mirador. Su meta ha sido la investigación arqueológica y consolidación arquitectónica de varios edificios de este grupo para conocer los aspectos constructivos de épocas...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ricardo Leonel Cruz Jimenez. Jose Luis Ruvalcaba Sil. Edgar Casanova González. Mayra Manrique-Ortega. Luis Barba Pingarron.

This is an abstract from the "Central Mexico after Teotihuacan: Everyday Life and the (Re)Making of Epiclassic Communities" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. En el marco del "Proyecto arqueológico Chicoloapan viejo" de la Universidad de Wisconsin-Madison, se discuten aspectos de vida comunitaria y regional en el sitio de Chicoloapan Viejo durante su ocupación epiclásica (550-850 ec). A partir del estudio morfo-tecnológico de la obsidiana y del...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Keith Stephenson.

Complicated stamped pottery vessels, and the carved wooden paddles used to stamp them, were produced in Southeastern North America beginning early in the first millennium AD and continued in some quarters well into the 19th century. Much of the research on paddle designs has focused on the highly decorative and diverse Woodland Period expressions, with little attention given to later, more repetitive paddle stamps. In this paper, I bring the methods of analysis used to study Woodland paddle...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Miquel Molist.

In this communication we will deal with the symbolic documents that the archaeological excavation at Tell Halula (Syria) (7800-6500cal BC) have provided. The documents are essentially symbolic paintings representations on the walls of houses, figurines and a rich funerary objects. This documentation provides exceptional discussed the symbolic world of the first farmers while data confronts economic and social communities of emerging farmers. SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Goldberg. Vera Aldeias. Dennis Sandgathe. Alain Turq. Laurent Bruxelles.

La Ferrassie is one of the best-known Middle and Upper Paleolithic sequences in Europe, playing a key role in the question of Neandertal mortuary behavior. Until now, geoarchaeologically-oriented research has focused on the long sequence exposed during the original excavations of Capitan/Peyrony and Delporte (early 20th century and 1968-1973, respectively) in the easternmost part of the site. Our research has exposed intact layers several meters away in the extreme western area of the site, next...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabriel Popescu.

The research I will report in my paper has two main goals. The first is to learn something of the behavior of the hominids responsible for the production and accumulation of the Middle and Early Upper Paleolithic assemblages at two multistratified sites in NE Romania, Middle Prut Valley region (Ripiceni-Izvor and Mitoc-Malu Galben). The second goal is methodologically related. Paleolithic assemblages recovered from the archaeological record are mostly interpreted as "typical" expressions of...