Society for American Archaeology

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anne Vawser. Tim Schilling. Ashley Barnett. Allison Young. Michael Schumacher.

In 2011 Wind Cave National Park acquired new lands that include an important prehistoric site where American Indians once made their homes and practiced communal hunting. Two seasons of work at the site have resulted in the discovery of drive lines, rock cairns, processing areas, stone circles, ceremonial features and much more. What has been found at the site is equally as important as the way the work has been conducted, including the involvement of tribal monitors and volunteers, tribal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Harry Lerner.

The majority of lithic use-wear research has been geared towards the development of newer more quantitatively precise methods involving evermore sophisticated forms of microscopy. As vital as such efforts are there is still a place in today’s interdisciplinary world for more traditional approaches when coupled with new ideas. This presentation will look at the results of a GIS analysis of experimental use-wear traces from images generated using conventional incident light microscopy....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elijah J. Hermitt. Kirk D. French. Carly Hunter. Cayt Holzman. Caitlin Donahue.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, the vast majority of local whisky production has been unregulated and illegal. Both production and distribution of illicit liquor moved underground with the passing of the 18th Amendment – known as the Prohibition – in 1919. This economic shift occurred in tight-knit mountain communities where knowledge has been vigilantly guarded. This continuous whisky production cycle has resulted in the deep social, economic, and cultural ties that persist in the Cataloochee...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Sonnenburg. John O'Shea. Ashley Lemke.

Understanding of early Holocene hunter-gatherer archaeological sites relies heavily on paleoenvironmental data, as many of these sites are ephemeral and have little archaeological visibility on the landscape. In rare cases, such as on the Alpena-Amberley Ridge in Lake Huron, highly visible hunting structures are preserved which offer a unique insight into early hunter-gatherer lifeways, while targeted sediment sample collection provides high-resolution paleoenvironmental information. Since 2011,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tom Dillehay.

Interdisciplinary investigation of the large coastal mounds of Huaca Prieta and Paredones and their associated domestic settlements represent Preceramic human occupation as far back as ∼14000 cal BP. Research at these sites has documented a long Preceramic sequence from the activities of the first maritime/terrestrial foragers from the late Pleistocene to early Holocene to the construction of the mounds and the introduction and development of agriculture and monumentality from the middle to late...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Reyes Parroquin.

This is an abstract from the "Mesoamerican Figurines in Context. New Insights on Tridimensional Representations from Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The smiling figurines found more than half a century ago in Mexico's Gulf Coast, have always captured researchers through their enigmatic smile. Through these scholars' work, we know they were possibly related to deities like Xochipilli or Quetzalcoatl, linked to the main city of El Tajin...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sara Cullen.

The Park and Chaquaqua Plateaus—politically bisected by the Colorado-New Mexico state line—are distinctive geographical features that demarcate the transition from the Rocky Mountains to the Llano Estacado and High Plains. Regional archaeology has emphasized interpretation of sites as part of a cultural demarcator between the Northern Rio Grande Pueblos and residents of the Southern and Central Plains. Yet there has been limited work to examine local, between-household interactions and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Smith.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Water is intrinsically linked to textile production. The dye process requires a substantial amount of water to acquire a consistent and proper color. Colonial textile mills, known as obrajes, were strategically built near bodies of water for this reason. Obrajes significantly shaped colonial water politics. Their presence on the water changed waterscapes, or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Simon. Shanna R. Diederichs.

Crow Canyon Archaeological Center’s latest project, the Northern Chaco Outliers Project (NCOP), continues the tradition of research around the theme of community. The Lakeview group is one of the densest concentrations of great houses in the central Mesa Verde region of southwest Colorado. The group includes three sites, the Haynie site (5MT1905), the Ida Jean site (5MT4126) and Wallace Ruin (5MT6970). The NCOP focuses on community development, social stratification, and identity formation at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kirsten Mink. Antonio Beardall. Victoria Izzo. Jaime Awe.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. No country is immune to crumbling infrastructure and (un)predicable weather that exposes archaeology. How we deal with these sudden assemblages and how we use the information gained from these quick and limited excavations can be a place of growth in our field. This can be most crucial in salvage burial excavations. The biological, especially the human,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joel W. Palka.

Lacandon Maya fabricate incense burners ("the gods’ ceramic vessels") found by archaeologists in Maya ruins, caves, and abandoned "god houses". Ethnographies and my field notes describe the incense burners and how they are made and used. The function and symbolism of the burners provide clues to the importance of fire and smoke in past Maya rituals, including cremation. The incense burners are formed from clay with human heads, arms, and legs. The anthropomorphic bowls become bodies of gods...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan McGuinness.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the Intermountain West there is mounting evidence that some Western Stemmed Tradition (WST) points are as old, if not older, than Clovis points on the Plains and in the Southwest. Given this, the distribution of WST points may hold the key to understanding how people initially populated the Far West. I use WST point and site location data in Lake County,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Warren Church.

To answer the query "what was Chachapoyas?" we must think in terms of time, space and identity. Chachapoyas scholars have encountered documentary and/or archaeological evidence of a mosaic of social identities, all undergoing transformations during successive pre-Inca, Inca, and Colonial times within a truly vast Andean region. In this paper, I consider notions of Chachapoyas internal and external boundaries as they have been conceived in the southern area where I conduct my research....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Augusto Oyuela-Caycedo.

This paper presents evidence that suggests a very different environment than the observed landscape tropical forest of today. A comparison of two regions, the white waters system of the upper Amazon river (region of Iquitos, Peru) and the black water system of the Mesay river drainage (Chiribiquete National Park, Colombia), illustrates the strong possibility that these areas were grasslands in the past. This is considered to be a byproduct of (consider using anthopogenic activities) human action...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrea Lopez.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This project builds on the work of Dr. Bardolph's 2014 gender research, where she analyzed gender publication trends across 11 major archaeological journals from 1995 to 2014, assessing disparities between men and women in their number of publications. Her research put statistical value on what many researchers had before found to be true—men had higher rates...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Konwest.

Greater La Amontonada, a cluster of Postclassic period sites in the Nejapa region of Oaxaca, Mexico, is an ideal location for investigating the ways in which people would have negotiated their roles as members of households, neighborhoods, and larger communities. Group members enact their relationships through everyday choices, habits, and routines that are materialized through daily action. The practices enacted in one community, the learning and doing, may be materialized differently than...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ian Kuijt.

How many people lived in individual buildings within early food producing communities? Be it as an explicit driver or as an implicit background landscape, all modeling of small-scale household life, developing Neolithic villages, and the evolutionary trajectory towards the full-blown domestication is linked on some level to demography and the increasing scale of human communities through time. The reconstruction of the scale of Neolithic house, including our engagement with what may represent...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steven Dorland.

This is an abstract from the "Hearth and Home in the Indigenous Northeast" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Investigations of childhood practices in the Great Lakes have emerged through ceramic analysis and skill evaluations. This approach has been effective in tracing direct material interactions of potters and social relations within a communities of practice. However, there is less focus on potters and their relations to the village environment....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Santarone. William Eckerle. Katherine Puseman. Kenneth Cannon.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Site 26EK16689 is a multiple component open archaeological site near West Wendover, Nevada, approximately three miles from Danger Cave. Despite a history of inundation, ground disturbance, and generally rough treatment, excavations have shown that site 26EK16689 preserves extensive and intact cultural deposits with good organic preservation. In addition,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sara Stauffer. Lindsay Johansson.

The Fremont people were socially complex and lived within various sized communities. As with any community there are mechanisms used to either differentiate among members of the community or to integrate members of the community and beyond. One of these mechanisms is feasting. In this paper we present evidence from several large village sites across the Fremont region that suggests that the practice of feasting was utilized. In many cases, evidence for feasting is associated with structures that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Kaiser.

It is often said that the practice of mummification became a veritable business during the Late and Roman periods, when it was extended to include not only the elite, but also those on the lower end of the status scale. The increase in the number of bodies being embalmed led to the widespread adoption of more expeditious techniques, sometimes resulting in mummies that, though outwardly pleasing in appearance, concealed nothing but a jumbled mess of bones beneath their wrappings. The non-elite...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Corey Bowen. Emma Branson. Patrick Ryan Williams. John Janusek.

This is an abstract from the "Exploring Culture Contact and Diversity in Southern Peru" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Turnovers in political and religious authority in the ancient Titicaca Basin correspond with significant, intentional shifts in material procurement practices. During the 5th century AD, the developing Tiwanaku elite asserted a new ideological hegemony through a novel monumental and iconographic tradition. Tiwanaku masons also...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Trina Arpin. Harris Greenberg.

The anthropogenic landscape of a prehistoric site is made up of artifacts, structures, and features. However, the three do not receive equal attention. Features--by which we mean stationary but non-structural evidence of human activity--are usually the least analyzed. Inspired by Paul Goldberg’s work on Paleolithic hearths, we hope to bring a new, more inter-disciplinary look at some of these less-studied elements of the anthropogenic landscape. To do so, we will expand the study to a later...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brandy Joy.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological evidence, historical documentation, and oral histories are used to compare the diet of individuals enslaved on Stono Plantation with those of the tenant-era population of James Island. Pre-emancipation data indicate a high level of livestock consumption supplemented primarily by fishing, but also by some degree of trapping and/or hunting....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kale Bruner. Hannah Owens.

This study explores human/environment interactions in the Aleutian archipelago by pairing eco-niche modeling of cod (Gaddus sp.), a primary subsistence species, with prehistoric archaeological site distribution using a GIS platform. The distributions of site locations and cod habitat simulated using GARP software at multiple time slices through the Holocene show strong spatial and temporal correlation. Both site location and cod distribution are time transgressive with a pattern of westward...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Rocek.

The archaeology of the United States Southwest permits examination of the process of Neolithisation with chronological precision in a wide range of contexts. In broadest outline, Southwestern data parallel social, economic and technological patterns documented worldwide. The recency, large sample, and fine resolution of Southwestern data allow recognition of multiple divergent and convergent patterns shaped by local environments and cultural traditions that are difficult to observe in other...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Curtis Schaafsma. Polly Schaafsma.

This is an abstract from the "Tales of the Feathered Serpent: Refining Our Understanding of an Enigmatic Mesoamerican Being" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In many parts of the world including the Americas, snakes are incorporated into symbolic and metaphorical constructs in order to better describe and understand natural and social components of various cosmologies. As a result, their depictions are often enhanced with attributes that depart from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Lanza. Amanuel Beyin. Erik R. Otárola-Castillo.

There is a broad paleoanthropological consensus that hominins left Africa multiple times during the Pleistocene, but the geographic routes through which they exited the continent remains unclear. Although the Sinai Land Bridge and the Strait of Bab-al-Mandab on the southern end of the Red Sea are commonly implicated as the likely pathways used by early humans during their expansion out of Africa, the evidence supporting each route is still much debated. Here, we identify viable pathways for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Haley Streuding.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2018, Coastal Environments, Inc., (CEI) conducted a targeted cultural resources survey in the Lake Erie waters of Ashtabula County, Ohio, a study area covering ca. 30 square miles of lake bottom. The project’s first phase consisted of a geophysical survey at selected locations within the study area. The second phase involved the selection of ten anomalies...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Deborah Ziel.

The turpentine industry employed African American labor in the southeastern United States under a system of debt peonage that was similar to antebellum slavery. One such company camp, Nalaka, located in Polk County, Florida was in operation between 1919 and 1928. The circumstance of its abandonment is unknown. Although no structures survive, artifact scatters from 1920s Nalaka remain in situ. Despite the oppression of peonage, African American laborers developed venues known as "jook joints" for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melinda Martin.

This is an abstract from the "Dancing through Iconographic Corpora: A Symposium in Honor of F. Kent Reilly III" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mississippian cosmologies were inextricably entangled with the sacred environment and landscape, often materialized through iconographic imagery and motifs. One example of such interwoven relationships may be seen in the imagery of other-than human beings; that is, preternaturals who control and often...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Agni Prijatelj.

White bones in black caves: cave burials and social memory Caves have always been part of contemporary, living landscapes: as such, they have acted not only as natural, cultural, social, economic and ritual places, but also as political locales. One of the most recent, and contested, examples of this phenomenon in Slovenia is the use of karstic shafts as sites of post-war executions between May 1945 and January 1946, in the aftermath of the Second World War. Such sites of mass executions are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Evans. Louise Tizzard. Megan Metcalfe. Alexandra Herrera-Schneider.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Global Submerged Paleolandscapes Research" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sea-level rise models since the last glacial maximum demonstrate that the North American landmass available for precontact human habitation was larger than at present. In the northwestern Gulf of Mexico, less than 1 m2 of the continental shelf has been sampled and tested archaeologically. Out of 106 sediment cores acquired for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dougless Skinner. Paul Williams Sr.. Holly McKinney. Michael Koskey.

This study explores how indigenous archaeological methods can quantitatively assess prehistoric subsistence practices in interior Alaska. Archaeological sites in Alaska are among the oldest in the Americas, providing valuable information concerning human/animal interactions. Although there are substantial amounts of archaeological information present in the literature, there is a distinct lack of indigenous ecological knowledge. The goal of this project is to combine traditional indigenous ways...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kate Shantry.

This is an abstract from the "Fire-Cracked Rock: Research in Cooking and Noncooking Contexts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The potential range of behaviors represented in heating stone assemblages is enormous. This paper is an attempt to identify targets for hot rock sampling and analyses that can develop our understanding of ancient global technologies in a day-to-day context. Hot rocks are ubiquitous in archaeological assemblages, yet the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Bettinger.

The alpine zone (above 10,000 feet) of White Mountains of eastern California is the most extensive, and by far the most intensively occupied by aboriginal groups, in the Great Basin. The earliest consistent use, beginning about 5500 BP, is by hunting parties. Beginning sometime after A.D. 600, the White Mountains village residential pattern is distinctive, featuring one or more well-built dwellings, well-developed middens, and extensive assemblages of chipped and ground stone. While hunting was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kim Cox. Carolyn Boyd.

The prehistoric hunter-gatherers of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands created some of the most spectacular rock art of the ancient world. Perhaps the greatest of these masterpieces is the White Shaman mural. This presentation provides an introduction to our recently-published book The White Shaman Mural: An Enduring Creation Narrative, which is one of the most comprehensive analyses of a rock art mural ever attempted. Drawing on twenty-five years of archaeological research and analysis, as well as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Owen Lindauer. Arleyn Simon.

This is an abstract from the "WHY PLATFORM MOUNDS? PART 1: MOUND DEVELOPMENT AND CASE STUDIES" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We present a consideration of Roosevelt Black-on-white, recovered from archaeological sites in Arizona's Tonto Basin, as a correlate for Tonto Basin populations’ changing exchange relations as well as emulation through production of locally-produced copies of non-local wares. Implications of broad-scale ceramic exchange,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julien Royer. Andrew Somerville.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The use of oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen isotope analyses of faunal bone samples can provide information reflective of past environmental conditions. White-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) antlers, although found in many archaeological assemblages, remain underutilized as paleoenvironmental proxies. Here we assess their feasibility to serve as proxies of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Greer.

This is an abstract from the "Deepening Archaeology's Engagement with Black Studies" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For decades, Black Studies scholars have provided powerful, far-ranging critiques of the concept of race and the processes of racialization. Yet, when applied to archaeological case studies, these concepts are often only used to discuss the lives of Africans and their diasporic descendants. However, as Black Studies scholars point...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen LaValley.

This paper reports on mid-20th century aspen dendroglyphs from the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in extreme north-central New Mexico. A class III archaeological survey conducted by Envirosystems Management, Inc. in July 2014 recorded ten previously unknown historic sites between 10,400 and 11,000 feet in elevation on the Carson National Forest. Each contains at least two and up to twenty-one carved aspens that date from the 1930’s to the 1950’s. Upon initial assessment, these sites appear to have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gerardo Gutiérrez. James Córdova. Mary E. Pye.

The caves of Cauadzidziqui and Techan offer contrasting views of how Olmec style appears in eastern Guerrero. Cauadzidziqui presents large-scale paintings of individuals with Olmec style symbols and objects plastered over what is believed to be local late Archaic paintings—essentially graffiti placed in a sacred locale along a primary route between the highlands and coast. The Cave of the Governors presents 3 or possibly 4 jaguar sculptures carved out of living rock, flanking the interior...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Womack.

This is an abstract from the "Cross-Cultural Petrographic Studies of Ceramic Traditions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In northwestern China’s Gansu Province, painted pottery from the late Neolithic Majiayao Culture has long been admired for its skillful construction and beautiful painted motifs. Since the majority of whole vessels have been recovered from graves, it has generally been assumed that these items were produced primarily for mortuary...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Jennings. Patricia Knobloch. Elizabeth Gibbon.

At the beginning of the ninth century AD, a Wari-affiliated settlement was founded in the Sihuas Valley of southern Peru. Celebrants ritually smashed face-necked jars when they abandoned the site less than a century later. These vessels likely represent elites or ethnic groups in the Wari sphere - agents whose associations in conflict or cooperation can be used to tell a more dynamic story of the founding of Quilcapampa during this turbulent era of Wari state expansion. This paper uses social...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jane Sliva.

The projectile point assemblage from Las Capas (AZ AA:12:111 [ASM]) provides a case study for using a social dynamics model to explain shifts in point design during the San Pedro phase (1200-800 B.C.) in the Tucson Basin. Available evidence indicates that the population of Las Capas and the residents of a possibly related settlement directly across the Santa Cruz River maintained a separate projectile point design orientation from other settlements in the northern Tucson Basin during the early...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leslie Van Gelder.

The study of finger flutings, lines drawn with fingers in the soft surfaces of cave walls and ceilings, allows for the identification of unique individuals within a cave’s context. In early years of research we were able to identify men, women, and children in some of the 15 caves which have been studied. These led to discoveries as to which individuals which were often found together in their movement through the caves. The intimacy of cave spaces with artists working side by side, sometimes in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Donald Blakeslee.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The bison jumps and bison pounds of the Northern Plains are prominent features of the landscape, but conditions are different on the Central and Southern Plains. Early historic documents tell of large long-distance communal hunts conducted from horticultural villages. Thousands of hunters used surrounds to take the animals, but no kill sites of that kind...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Doug Bailey.

In the summer of 1995, a team of British, Bulgarian and American archaeologists, students, helpers and local villagers made preliminary CENSORED at the late Neolithic settlement tell at CENSORED. After a CENSORED field season, during which CENSORED, CENSORED, and CENSORED were regularly engaged in CENSORED by CENSORED, several of the team were CENSORED. In the months that followed, CENSORED CENSORED CENSORED CENSORED and CENSORED CENSORED. National press coverage in CENSORED as well as a formal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Collins. April Nowell. Christopher Ames.

This is an abstract from the "Culturing the Body: Prehistoric Perspectives on Identity and Sociality" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ostrich eggshell and marine shell beads have been linked to the establishment and maintenance of hunter-gatherer social networks in southern Africa, but studies focusing on the methods of their manufacture and especially the social contexts surrounding their manufacture are often overlooked. This research presents a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Xiuzhen Li. Andrew Bevan. Marcos Martinón-Torres. Yin Xia. Kun Zhao.

A striking feature of Qin material culture (770-210 BC) in ancient China is the frequency with which it preserves stamped, incised or painted marks with a variety of Chinese characters, numerals or symbols. In a general sense, such repeated mark-making was an administrative strategy that enabled Qin administrators to mobilise people, raw materials and finished goods in vast bulk, subject to careful quality and quantity control, and archaeologically, this strategy is nowhere more obvious than in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katelyn Bishop. Samantha Fladd. Sarah Kurnick.

This is an abstract from the "Beyond Leaky Pipelines: Exploring Gender Inequalities in Archaeological Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A recent paper by Mary Leighton problematizes the culture of archaeological practice and the emphasis on embodying aspects of “performative informality.” Social relationships among archaeologists are attributed to assessments of merit rather than the friendships they often represent, and these relationships...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicole Boivin.

While there is little doubt that we currently live in an era in which humans have become the dominant force shaping climate and environments globally, the question of when we entered this era has become a contentious one. Many archaeologists argue for an early start date, but have been largely excluded from geology-driven discussions by the Working Group on the Anthropocene. Does this matter? This paper will explore this question, and consider more broadly the place of archaeology in shaping...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ronald Faulseit. Jeremias Pink.

Dainzú, located in the Oaxaca Valley of Mexico, has a long history of religious-ceremonial significance. In the Classic Period (A.D. 200 – 900), the site expanded significantly from its once small core into an urban settlement covering around 4 km2. Our mapping project reveals that the new site construction was carefully planned out to represent a "cosmogram", or spatial representation of the ancient Zapotec ritual calendar. After the decline of Monte Albán, Dainzú was slowly abandoned as people...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Farrell. Nancy Ukai.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Eighty years ago, James Wakasa was shot and killed while walking his dog in the Utah desert. Wakasa was one of 120,000 Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II because of their ethnicity; he had been imprisoned at the Topaz Relocation Center and his killer was a Military Police guard. In a finding that would sound all too familiar even today, an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Beaudoin.

Archaeologists in Canada are empowered by the Canadian state through licensing and/or permitting systems; as such, archaeological practices are intrinsically entangled with various levels of governance. While it would be convenient to argue for an archaeology either free entirely of state control, or entirely and purposefully guided to fulfill state mandates, the reality is more nuanced. Archaeology is often structured by interpretive conventions that act to replicate the dominant archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Deanna De Boer. Samantha Wade.

This is an abstract from the ""Re-excavating" Legacy Collections" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Unlike most archaeological collections, those held and curated by the Seminole Tribe of Florida (STOF) represent a living culture, and tribal understanding of those archaeological collections is a fluid, dynamic entity. The unique relationship between the Tribal Historic Preservation Office (THPO) and STOF requires an adherence to and respect of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Minor.

As the ancient Nubian Classic Kerma kings undertook military campaigns into Egyptian territory (1700-1550 BCE), their mortuary practices grew to include mass inhumation of their subjects within their burial tumuli. The tumulus of the second Classic Kerma king (KX) contains over 300 human sacrifices and is the largest group found at the site. The sacrificed Kermans were arranged in the tumulus corridor alongside Egyptian statues taken as spoils of war, emphasizing the king’s control of internal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Donovan. Jeremy Wilson.

The Orendorf site is a Mississippian village and mortuary complex located in west-central Illinois. Salvage excavations between 1970 to 1990 have yielded one of the largest and best-preserved skeletal assemblages in the central Illinois River valley. The human skeletal assemblage from the Orendorf site has been ideal for a wide variety of bioarchaeological research, both invasive and non-invasive. Despite the attention given to the individuals, research focusing on the burial contexts and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lance Pursey.

Recent insights into how urbanism and permanent settlements can function and be integrated into mobile societies has helped to overturn the notion that human societies ‘progress’ from mobile forms of production through irrigated agriculture to urbanism. Indeed the Liao Empire (907-1125CE) of Northeast Asia shows how these three modalities can coexist and be interdependent. City and kiln sites, standing architecture and tombs are distributed extensively through the former Liao territory, and yet...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lori Hager.

Archaeologists encounter the people of the past as skeletons with some frequency, yet attempts to reconstruct the life histories of the dead have often been ordinary and predictable. As a scientist and a storyteller, Ruth Tringham's consideration of the dead, inspired by empiricism and imagination in equal measure, imparts multiple truths through multiple voices in novel ways, with a particular focus on visualization. The people of one house at the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük, for example, are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kenneth Aitchison.

There are shortages of professional archaeologists in many African countries. It is a widely held view that there just aren’t enough professional experts in Africa to carry out the work needed in projects, both large and small, that are affecting African cultural heritage and landscapes. And these views are relevant, and important, and true – but they are often anecdotal rather than evidence-based. The first step in building capacity is to measure current capacity, then to use the results to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brooke Drew.

Since its discovery during the original 1990s excavations, the Register of Burials at the Milwaukee County Poor Farm Cemetery has been the foundation for most historical and archaeological research involving the Milwaukee County Poor Farm Cemetery. Until recently the register was considered a complete listing of most, if not all, burials on the Milwaukee County Grounds between 1882 and the final burial in 1974. However, new excavations during the summer of 2013 as well as comprehensive...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Neeley. Geoffrey Clark.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since the 1980s, surveys in Jordan’s Wadi al-Hasa document dozens of Late Pleistocene hunter-gatherer sites, some of them tested or partly excavated. To track landscape-scale forager mobility and settlement patterns over time, we examine 26 levels from 13 sites dated to the Middle, Upper and Epipaleolithic using aspects of Barton’s WABI research protocol,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Braun. Matthew Douglass. Benjamin Davies. Jonathan Reeves.

Large scale surface surveys represent singular insights into the landscape scale variation in behaviors. Detailed investigations of the spatial distribution of artifacts across large spatial extents allow archaeologists to investigate a landscape as a single site. Surface assemblages have the advantage of large sample sizes and large aerial extents. However, biases associated with the formation processes of surface assemblages often undermine our confidence in the behavioral inferences derived...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Vanessa Monson. Jeffrey Brzezinski.

Previous archaeological excavations in the lower Río Verde Valley in Oaxaca, Mexico have provided evidence for communal ceremonies since the Late Formative (400-150 BCE). The Terminal Formative (150 BCE-250 CE) period saw a continuation of communal ceremonies at hinterland sites along with the emergence of the region’s first polity, Río Viejo. The maintenance of these practices in the hinterland during the increasing urbanization occurring at Río Viejo suggests their importance in community...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carole Crumley.

Four decades ago this summer, newly arrived in a country where we barely spoke the language, our field crew began excavation of an Iron Age hill fort. First encounters quickly taught us that local identity was grounded in the tradition of the Iron Age Celts, not the later arriving Romans, Franks, or the region’s powerful medieval dukes. My intention was to see how indigenous peoples had fared before and after the Roman conquest; I planned a colonization framework. But the site was a surprise,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sophie Miller.

Bone fragmentation is a potential issue for anyone who works with skeletal remains. If a bone is burned, or fragmented in a way that prevents morphological identification, it can be near impossible to identify which bone it is, or what taxa it belongs to. However, there are techniques for identifying bones based on their microstructure, as the microstructure of human and non-human bone has distinct differences. These differences allow for microscopic comparisons of bone cross-sections and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fiona Marshall.

This is an abstract from the "Questioning the Fundamentals of Plant and Animal Domestication" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Morphological, genetic, ethnographic and behavioral research on domestication has provided a basis for understanding variability in the process of donkey domestication. It is clear that the lack of herd-based sociality among wild relatives of the donkey and people’s reliance on donkeys for transport create distinctive...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ken Seligson.

This is an abstract from the "An Exchange of Ideas: Recent Research on Maya Commodities" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Burnt lime (calcium hydroxide) has been crucial for architectural, dietary, and other purposes in Maya society since as far back as the Formative period. The recent identification of hundreds of pit-kilns used for lime production in the Puuc region of the Yucatán Peninsula allows for an investigation of the socioeconomic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicole Slovak. John Rick.

Since 2009, the Programa Arqueológico Chavín has unearthed a series of historic burials from the Monumento Arqueológico Chavín de Huántar. Although the identity of the deceased remains a mystery, initial archaeological and ethnographic evidence suggests that the individuals may be casualties of the War of the Pacific (1879-1883), perhaps even Chilean soldiers who met an unusual and unfortunate fate at the hands of Chavín’s residents. The current paper presents radiogenic strontium isotope...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erik Otárola-Castillo.

This is an abstract from the "Bayesian Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bayesian inference and its underlying philosophy offer an alternative to null hypothesis significance testing (NHST), the conventional statistical framework in archaeology. Due to new technological advances, Bayesian inference has become an essential component of broader scientific efforts and progressively prevalent in archaeological research. Here, without using...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kirstie Haertel.

The relevancy of archaeology to contemporary social issues has become a topic of concern for many in the discipline. Zooarchaeologists in particular have focused some effort in highlighting how archeological interpretations can assist with wildlife management and conservation biology. While this work helps to amplify the social value of archaeology, the approach to date has been somewhat disparate. In order to implement the vision of integrating archaeological findings to wildlife management and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paola Schiappacasse.

The late 19th century and beginning of the 20th century provides us with numerous examples of the acquisition of collections carried out by museums. When archaeologists talk about those collections, housed at museums worldwide, the discussions are often directed towards how the lack of context limits or nullifies their research potential. I argue that we need to go back and carefully re-examine the research prospects of these collections. This presentation considers several avenues for research...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Birch. Ben Raffield.

This is an abstract from the "Beyond “Barbarians”: Dimensions of Military Organization at the Bleeding Edge of the Premodern State" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There are good reasons to problematize and theorize dimensions of military organization. Despite the wellspring of research on the archaeology of warfare over the last 30 years, conceptual gaps remain. Warfare among small-scale societies remains typified as total war, while the study of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Teresa Raczek.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In recent years, archaeologists have increased their archaeology outreach and education activities as a way to engage the public, share research, and promote the discipline. However, few such programs are formally evaluated even though assessment helps archaeologists improve their programming, streamline resources, and ensure that the public learns intended...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathleen Sterling. Sébastien Lacombe.

This is an abstract from the "More Than Shelter from the Storm: Hunter-Gatherer Houses and the Built Environment" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Late Pleistocene in Western Europe is the origin of the idea of the "caveman," and the majority of research has historically focused on cave sites. In regions of Europe where caves are not present but archaeological evidence is, the assumption is that people used lightweight ephemeral shelters such as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa Janz.

This is an abstract from the "Do Good Things Come in Small Packages? Human Behavioral Ecology and Small Game Exploitation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The trajectory of diet change in Northeast Asia, is distinct from that in the Near East, whose archaeological record has shaped our most enduring models for changes in human diet. Traditional optimality models, as applied to the archaeological record, predict that small game will only...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ivy Faulkner.

While it is true that theoretical advancements are slow to cross disciplinary boundaries, when disciplines by necessity overlap, it seems almost willfull ignorance that perpetuates old frameworks. For example, it has been over thirty years now that anthropology and colonial studies have come to terms with the complexities of identity in colonial contexts and yet scholars in related disciplines, such as Classics, still argue over which label imposed by colonizers should be used for which...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alan Simmons.

Why humans colonize unoccupied lands, such as islands, has always intrigued scholars. Over the past few decades, researchers working on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus have documented both a Late Epipaleolithic occupation and a more substantial early Neolithic colonization episode. The number of such sites remains limited, but is growing with continuing research. For the Neolithic, both Pre-Pottery Neolithic A and PPNB occupations are now well-documented, and are as early as mainland sites....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alan Simmons.

Why humans colonize unoccupied lands, such as islands, has always intrigued scholars. Over the past few decades, researchers working on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus have documented both a Late Epipaleolithic occupation and a more substantial early Neolithic colonization episode. The number of such sites remains limited, but is growing with continuing research. For the Neolithic, both Pre-Pottery Neolithic A and PPNB occupations are now well-documented, and are as early as mainland...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Gusick. Jon Erlandson.

Islands have long been viewed as marginal habitats compared to mainland regions where terrestrial resources are generally more abundant and diverse. We examine this concept of island marginality by reviewing evidence for Paleocoastal settlement of islands off the Pacific Coast of Alta and Baja California. If the islands were marginal, we should expect human settlement to occur relatively late in time and early use of the islands to be sporadic and specialized. For the Northern Channel Islands...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andres Troncoso.

The origin of rock art has frequently asked from an evolutionary and cognitive perspective to understand the dawn of making images in the Paleolithic. But in many regions of the world the beginnings of rock art production occurred later. The Central North of Chile is one of these places. In this area, the practice of marking and chipping rocks surfaces started around 2.000 BCE in coherence with the transition from the Middle to the Late Holocene and the start of many transformations in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Donna Nash. Ryan Williams.

In Moquegua the monumental provincial center of Cerro Baúl was ritually abandoned circa 1050CE. It is at this time that Wari affiliated occupation of the sacred summit ended and production of imperial Wari goods ceased in the region. This evidence does not indicate that the empire collapsed at this time, but instead suggests when Wari officials chose to withdraw from this frontier region. Why did they leave? In this paper we discuss the changing population dynamics in Moquegua at 1050CE and how...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melissa Torquato.

The evolution of the genus Homo is characterized by the emergence of numerous biological and cultural traits including bipedalism, encephalization, and language. A more recent adaptation led humans to transition from a foraging subsistence strategy to one based on farming. This is significant because foraging persisted for approximately 95% of human existence until farming emerged about 12,000 years ago. For nearly a century, anthropologists have studied the foraging-farming transition and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacqueline Kocer.

I examine the behavior of emulation wherein an artisan reproduces a craft on a less valuable or precious material to mimic a desired symbolic prestige good. I present cross-cultural examples of artisans making copies of a craft using different materials. Under what circumstances do people create counterfeit objects? Examples from the Gallina area (AD 1100-1300) of the American Southwest are discussed. The Gallina occupied an area on the periphery of a more socially complex polity (Chaco) and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sara Becker.

This is an abstract from the "Cooperative Bodies: Bioarchaeology and Non-ranked Societies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. When past peoples congregated to form complex societies, a question arises as to under what circumstances would heterarchical, reciprocal labor be emphasized over top-down hierarchical configurations? In the Central Andes of South America, modern indigenous people practice reciprocal labor with groupings organized around family...

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

This is an abstract from the "Coffee, Clever T-Shirts, and Papers in Honor of John S. Justeson" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Fifty years ago, what was arguably the most important paper ever written for modern work in quantitative archaeology was published in “American Antiquity.” Unfortunately for its author, and generations of archaeologists, few took notice of it at the time. With few citations, more than half of which have occurred in just...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brent Kober. Suzanne Hayden. Martin McAllister.

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 question posed in the paper title will be addressed by presenting arguments for the development and adoption of an American Convention on the Protection of the Archaeological Heritage similar to the existing European convention on heritage protection. Using the European convention as a model, important components of an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emma Lightfoot.

The spread of agriculture in the Neolithic and Bronze Age is an important topic of archaeological research, with major implications for human societies across Eurasia. The Food Globalisation in Prehistory project (FOGLIP) has furthered our knowledge of the spread of crops across Eurasia in prehistory using a variety of archaeological methods including archaeobotany, genetics and stable isotope analysis. This presentation will focus on the contribution of stable isotope analysis to our...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Xinyi Liu.

Scholarly interest has increasingly focused on an episode of Old World globalization of food resources that significantly predates the ‘Silk Road’. The impetus behind this growth of interest has been the expansion of bio-archaeological research in Central and East Asia over the past decade. This paper considers the agents responsible for the food globalization process in prehistory and the forms they took. One of the key aspects of the Trans-Eurasian movements of crops in prehistory was that the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jesse Wolfhagen.

This is an abstract from the "Bayesian Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bayesian inference has become a popular framework for statistical analyses across scientific fields in the past several decades, thanks to the development of software for generalized or specialized Bayesian modeling. With the logistical barriers to Bayesian inference becoming less onerous, a wide variety of Bayesian applications have started to appear in scientific...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer E. Lapp.

During Pre-Columbian times, it is well-known that the societies of Mesoamerica developed monumental architecture with a high level of complexity. During this same period, much if not all of lower Central America never achieved higher complexity other than that of chiefdom level. Honduras is the one major exception. While the societies of Nicaragua had similar gods and ceramics much of this can be explained through other means. The gods that were similar were "lesser" gods and not the main gods...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alan Sandstrom.

Pilgrimage is a "dynamic concrete isolate" found throughout the world at all levels of socio-cultural integration. Pilgrimage involves a journey to a significant geographic location and a return to the place of origin. Pilgrimage shades into tourism and a pilgrim's destination may range from the site of a miraculous appearance of a deity to Graceland. In Mesoamerica, pilgrimage has become a major focus of archaeological research. Sites with ritual associations and little evidence of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Dombrosky.

This is an abstract from the "Do Good Things Come in Small Packages? Human Behavioral Ecology and Small Game Exploitation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In prehispanic central New Mexico, small numbers of disarticulated fish remains—such as catfish, sucker, and gar—are frequently recovered from Pueblo IV (AD 1350–1600) sites in the Middle Rio Grande basin, but they are rare during earlier agricultural time periods. Increased aquatic habitat...

DOCUMENT Citation Only R.G. Matson. William Lipe.

Lipe et al. (2017) present estimates of the costs of raising maize fed turkeys. Raising a turkey required approximately one-third as much maize as a Puebloan ate in a year. Here we present the probable reason for engaging in this costly behavior. Pueblo III Mesa Verdeans had a diet heavily dependent on maize and short on other protein sources. Most importantly, it was short on two essential amino acids, lysine and tryptophan. We begin by reconstructing the height and weight of Pueblo III Mesa...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jason Miszaniec. Paul Szpak. John Darwent. Christyann Darwent.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Zooarchaeological Methods" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Saffron cod (Eleginus gracilis) are small nearshore fish distributed throughout the Pacific and Arctic oceans and were a staple to preindustrial Indigenous fisheries of Western Alaska. Fish, mammal, and bird-bone were sampled for carbon and nitrogen stable isotopes from sites in Norton Sound, Alaska, spanning 2500 BCE–1850 CE. Comparing our...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael E. Smith.

Although initially developed to understand contemporary urban systems, the method and theory of settlement scaling are particularly appropriate for archaeological data. The scaling framework can be seen as an outgrowth of existing archaeological research on demography and settlement patterns. Although developed independently, the "social reactor" model that explains observed patterning is in fact well-grounded in anthropological and archaeological theory. The key process that drives change is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Weinmeister.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While both lithics and color have a long history in archaeological research, archaeologists rarely address the importance of color in lithic artifacts. The ethnography of the American Southwest indicates that both color and lithics can play a critical role in indigenous ritual and ceremony. To explore the relationship between lithic artifacts and color...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James O'Connell. Jim Allen.

This is an abstract from the "Fifty Years of Fretwell and Lucas: Archaeological Applications of Ideal Distribution Models" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human populations in Sahul (Pleistocene Australia-New Guinea) probably numbered in the tens of thousands, two orders of magnitude below the 3-4 million estimated at time of European contact. They were also more patchily distributed than simple hypotheses grounded in an ideal free distribution...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Popp. Jarman Jarman. Hilary Close. Thomas Larsen. Terry Hunt.

Archaeology and isotopic studies have demonstrated several examples of initial colonists of Pacific Islands subsisting mainly on terrestrial diets, with exotic domesticates preferred over local seafood. Seemingly a poor adaptation to remote island environments, this appears confusing from a behavioural ecology perspective. From a culture evolutionary viewpoint, however, this could demonstrate how intergenerational transmission of human behaviour may preserve dietary traditions in long-distance...