Society for American Archaeology

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kurt Rademaker. Gordon Bromley.

The Central Andean region poses numerous environmental challenges, including hyper-aridity, rugged topography, strong seasonality, uneven spatial distribution of biotic resources, and high altitude, yet this area was colonized successfully in the Terminal Pleistocene. However, the archaeological record shows considerable discontinuity through the Terminal Pleistocene-Early Holocene transition, with site occupation hiatuses or abandonments often interpreted as having stemmed from unfavorable...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edward Jolie. Verónica Lema. Sara López Campeny.

Accumulating evidence from Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene sites in the Americas attests to the antiquity and sophistication of perishable technologies such as cordage, netting, basketry, and textiles. Although the record of perishable industries is limited principally by factors of preservation, reevaluation of the available data for plant fiber-based technologies, and direct radiocarbon dates, continue to provide insights into the importance of these earliest perishable artifacts and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robin Robertson.

Joseph Ball has devoted his professional career to masterfully determining how the ceramic complexes at one site related to those at another, generating models for Maya movements and prehistory from the identified similarities or differences between them. Following his example, this paper proposes to take the data from Cerro Maya in Northern Belize and correlate it with other sequences in the region to produce a carefully researched sequence for the region with specific attention to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Davidson.

As "beachheads of empire" 16th -17th century European colonies in eastern North America vigorously pursued trade relations with Natives to secure raw materials for export to an emerging global market. Exchanges of furs and hides, slaves and other commodities stimulated economic activity throughout eastern North America. Production of hides for exchange was widespread among native groups located on colonial peripheries. To contrast, relatively little research has evaluated the degree to which...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edward Knell.

Multiple lines of evidence are used to establish terminal Pleistocene-early Holocene (TP-EH) through Late Prehistoric spatio-temporal patterns and settlement strategies around pluvial Lake Mojave (more recently Soda and Silver Lake playas), California. Data from pedestrian survey and in-field analysis of lithic artifacts at four survey areas along the eastern shoreline of Soda and Silver Lake are analyzed using GIS to establish whether settlement strategies changed in accordance with variations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Takeshi Inomata. Daniela Triadan.

Excavations at Aguateca and Ceibal revealed a series of dense deposits associated with the ritual destruction of buildings. At Aguateca, such deposits were found in and around Structures M7-22 and M7-32 of the Palace Group, probable royal administrative-residential buildings. Excavators also unearthed similar deposits around Structures L8-6 and L8-7, temple pyramids in the Main Plaza. These deposits date to c. AD 810 when enemies attacked Aguateca. At Ceibal, dense deposits of broken objects...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Urban. Edward Schortman.

This is an abstract from the "Centralizing Central America: New Evidence, Fresh Perspectives, and Working on New Paradigms" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists have long speculated that western Honduras was one source of the copper artifacts found in southern Mesoamerica from the tenth century onward. Until now, there has been little field evidence to back up this claim. Work conducted at the major political center of El Coyote in 2002,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Frachetti. Edward Henry. Taylor Hermes. Elissa Bullion. Farhod Maksudov.

Using remote sensing techniques along with standard archaeological survey in 2011 our collaborative team discovered the Silk Road city of Tashbulak, located at roughly 2000m elevation, in the mountains of Uzbekistan. The modern environmental and political particulars of this high-altitude city made the use of aerial photography and Geophysics essential tools for documenting this unexpected mountain site and allowing for clear documentation and targeted research in a (geographically) restricted...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Raymond Hunter.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Geoarchaeology and Environmental Archaeology Perspectives on Earthen-Built Constructions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists are increasingly examining remains from the past, including durable landscape features such as terraces, earthen mounds, and seemingly “abandoned” sites, in terms that query not just their initial construction, but also ongoing use and reoccupation. In this paper, I...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Berquist. Alexei Vranich.

This is an abstract from the "How Did the Inca Construct Cuzco?" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Standing architecture is an important and impressive part of Inca Cusco, but comprises only a portion of the pre-Columbian built environment. Developing a sense of the grand plan of Cusco involves forgetting our fascination with the standing architecture and concentrating on recreating the three-dimensional form of the terraces that formed the surface...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sherman Horn. Anabel Ford.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ongoing research at El Pilar—an ancient Maya city located along the Belize/Guatemala frontier—has documented hundreds of landscape-modification features in the area surrounding the monumental civic center. The complexity and variety of these features, which include terraces, berms, quarries, check-dams, and aguadas, indicate the sophistication of Maya...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Asa Randall. Kenneth Sassaman.

All societies face contradictions between the perception of how the world was in the past or should be in the future, and the material realities of the present. Changing social and ecological contexts are catalysts for intervention by communities hoping to restore or assert structure during turbulent times. Terraforming is one mode of intervention in which large-scale modifications to land reference ancient times, events, and persons to create new opportunities for the future. At the landscape...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Colin Grier.

The archaeological record of the southern Gulf Islands of coastal British Columbia provides evidence of deliberate and long-term construction of coastal landforms over the last 4500 years. Local landscapes were altered, modified and managed in the service of production, but the implications of such practices for the construction of place, of inequality, and of political networks are profound. I document the magnitude and extent of landscape construction spatially, focusing on quantifying...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bryce Davenport. Douglas Comer. Will Megarry. Alexandru Popa. Sergiu Musteata.

The Moldovan site of Orheiul Vechi has been continuously occupied since the Late Paleolithic due in part to its commanding position over the local landscape and its strategic situation on the nexus of Eurasian cultural flows and population movements. From the Iron Age onward, the inhabitants of Orheiul Vechi took advantage of natural fortifications, tributary access to the Dniester River, and nearby chernozem soils to consolidate a long-term power base. Using data from ongoing archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mariana Navarro Rosales.

El pasado prehispánico de la sociedad Ñuu Savi ha sido explorado por diversos investigadores desde la década de los sesenta del siglo XX. A pesar de sus valiosas contribuciones, existen aún muchas interrogantes en torno a sus modos de vida, su organización social y urbana. Durante la temporada 2014 del Proyecto Arqueológico Cerro Jazmín se excavó una terraza fechada por radiocarbono en la fase Ramos temprano (100-200 a.C). La exploración parcial de la Terraza 504 reveló importantes diferencias...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Lingle. Nicola Lercari. Arianna Campiani. Manuel Duenas Garcia. Anaïs Guillem.

Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) is a well-established survey technique in archaeology, architecture, and earth science, which is able to deliver high-fidelity data of surfaces and structures as well as ultra-precise measurements of the morphology of stratigraphic layers. Analyzing and comparing terrestrial laser scanning point clouds captured over time, conservators utilize of an unprecedented amount of quantitative information on the rate of decay of archaeological and built heritage to be...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sudhagar Nagarajan. Christian Davenport.

The Jupiter Inlet I (8PB34) site is one of the most investigated prehistoric sites in Palm Beach County, Florida. Like many of the ancient shell works sites across the state it was partially destroyed for road fill during the first half of the 20th century. Only a sketch map of the site from 1883 depicts what the site looked like prior to destruction. Since then there have been attempts to reconstruct the mound form but these relied on verbal accounts and limited stick and scope survey...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Mead.

This is an abstract from the "Pacific Maritime History: Ships and Shipwrecks" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The recent discovery and subsequent recovery of ship timbers believed to belong to the Manila galleon Santo Cristo de Burgos present new opportunities for archaeological survey on the Oregon coastline. The Maritime Archaeological Society, along with Oregon State Parks, has plans to conduct survey and phase one testing in areas surrounding...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sylvian Fachard.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Surveillance: Seeing and Power in the Material World" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Greek world formed a giant mosaic of city-states and leagues stretching over the entire Mediterranean and delimited by political borders. Like today, crossing a border was not innocuous, as states imposed their rule of law and enforced strict surveillance over their territories. This paper examines archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rodrigo Liendo. Esteban Miron.

To date, archaeologists working in the Northwestern Maya Lowlands, specifically in the Upper Usumacinta region have focused their attention to ceramic variability and regional distributions trying to "picture" the degree of variability in the role of local centers in regional ceramic exchange systems. Nevertheless, little attention has been paid to territorial variability-for example, the distinction between contiguous and non contiguous territorial formations highlighted by recent regional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sören Stark.

Territorial barriers are a widespread phenomenon in many micro-regions of Western Central Asia where they specifically take the shape of large-scale oasis walls, surrounding the entirety or large parts of the agricultural hinterland of important urban centers vis-à-vis stretches of desert or desert-steppe in the region. Nonetheless, starting with their dating, our understanding of these sizable monuments is still very insufficient. The most monumental and best preserved one of these territorial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Fitzsimmons.

What actually constitutes Classic Maya political units? One way to address this question would be to examine ancient Maya conceptions of territory. Certainly, many major Maya sites had emblem glyphs, and these did provide—for those who could read—the sense of a geographic place controlled by a ‘holy lord.’ The real issue for understanding territory, however, is not an emblem glyph but what a Maya kingdom was to the people within it: how territorial boundaries were perceived by different...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julie Hoggarth. Jaime Awe. Richard George. Rafael Guerra. Claire Ebert.

Evidence suggests that the influence of regional polities in the Upper Belize River Valley shifted through time, with political centers ascending and declining in power. Archaeological research by the Belize Valley Archaeological Reconnaissance (BVAR) project utilizes a regional approach to understand the political development and disintegration of three major centers: Cahal Pech, Baking Pot, and Lower Dover. This paper uses a multi-scalar settlement approach to understanding territorial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Antonio Martínez Tuñón.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper explores the different strategies used by a small polity to gain influence in long distance communication routes and access to resources and their changes through time. The research is based on spatial models and an archaeological survey conducted in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. The survey was performed in an area in between two major...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Jazwa. Douglas Kennett. Bruce Winterhalder.

The location of archaeological settlement sites is influenced not only by the distribution of ecological resources, but also cultural factors including conflict between neighboring populations. The ideal free distribution is a human behavioral ecology model that has been used to understand the establishment and persistence of settlement sites in the archaeological record. On California’s northern Channel Islands, the number and location of settlement sites expands over time until the Medieval...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alicia Espinosa. Nicolas Goepfert. Vincent Chamussy.

Since the Virú Project, the use of Castillo Decorated as the principal chrono-cultural element to characterize the Virú-Gallinazo presence laid to a “Gallinazo illusion“. Unfortunately, it appears that our knowledge about the Virú-Gallinazo populations are still limited, and most of the time we define them through the prism of the Mochicas. In order to understand who these groups were, we analyzed the spatial distribution of the following ceramics styles trough the northern coast using GIS:...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Frank Bayham. Kasey Cole.

Being a high-ranking prey item, large game are often desired for their economic and prestige values, both of which may be converted to an individual’s status. As such, big game can serve as a potential axis for competition between linguistic or ethnically distinct groups particularly under conditions of population stress leading to resource depression. This dynamic has been modeled using an evolutionary ecological approach that combines an amalgam of standard foraging models with the added cost...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pedro Urquijo.

This is an abstract from the "Landscapes: Archaeological, Historic, and Ethnographic Perspectives from the New World / Paisajes: Perspectivas arqueológicas, históricas y etnográficas desde el Nuevo Mundo" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Through a geographical and historical analysis, we propose to interpret the territorial and ritual organization of the landscapes in the Colombino Codex, which alludes mainly to the heroic feats of Lord 8 Venado...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wei-chun Chen.

In the 17th century, Taiwan was considered as an outpost for the Dutch East Indies Company to trade with China and Japan, and to compete with its European counterparts in the region. Located in the contemporary Tainan City, Taiwan, Provintia stood as the Island’s first planned city by the Dutch in AD 1625, the second year when they traded the city land with 15 cangan cloth from the indigenous Siraya. In AD 1653, a fort, called Fort Provintia was constructed as a result of Han Chinese rebels...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Farnsworth.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2017, archaeological survey and excavations began at the Wallblake Estate on Anguilla, B.W.I., to examine the plantation landscape and the major activity areas of the estate. The research project is focused on understanding the development of African-Anguillan culture from its origins in the boom and bust plantation economies of the seventeenth and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brea McCauley. Mark Collard.

Recently there has been a surge of interest in the possibility that demography affects cultural evolution. Some authors have proposed that population size affects the appearance and retention of innovations and therefore influences the complexity of a population’s cultural repertoire. Others have averred that it is not population size that drives cultural complexity but rather population pressure (the ratio of population density to the density of available resources). Still others have argued...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hugo Cardoso. Joana Abrantes. Laure Spake. Luis Rios.

Little work has been done on whether juvenile age estimation methods perform well beyond the population that was used as a reference. This study uses a sample of 81 known-age juvenile skeletons, aged between birth and 12 years, combining data from archaeological, anatomical and forensic reference collections in the US, Canada and South Africa. Ages were estimated from the diaphyseal lengths of the humerus, radius, femur and tibia, using Cardoso et al. (2014) and Stull et al. (2014) prediction...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kong Cheong. Chris Carleton. Dan Savage. James Conolly. Gyles Iannone.

In 2012, a settlement survey was conducted on the North Vaca Plateau in west-central Belize as part of the Social Archaeology Research Program (SARP). The survey was intended to test the predictions of a new archaeological potential assessment method called the Locally-Adaptive Model of Archaeological Potential (LAMAP). A LAMAP assessment was produced for Minanha, a Classic Maya civic-ceremonial center, which served as the first case study for the new method. When conducting the survey to test...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Fries.

In the absence of LiDAR and similar high-resolution data products, an alternative approach was developed to model and predict site location information from low-resolution, publicly available datasets such as ASTER, LANDSAT, and aerial photographs. Manipulating and combining the analyses of multiple datasets permits refinement of modeling and detection capabilities. A large database of known sites, in assorted topographic and vegetative conditions and degrees of exposure, was used as a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Allison Sherman. Aaron Comstock.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Turpin site (33Ha19) reflects the remains of an early Fort Ancient (ca. AD 1000-1300) village located near the confluence of the Little Miami and Ohio Rivers on the east side of modern-day Cincinnati, Ohio. Recent excavations at Turpin revealed evidence of habitation, midden, and possible special purpose contexts. One large pit (Feature 100) dated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Sterner. Robert Ahlrichs. Dan Wendt. Larry Furo.

The Old Copper Complex represents a unique temporally and geographically bounded technological phenomenon. Binford (1962) challenged the idea that copper tools were adopted by Native Americans solely because they were technologically more efficient. He argued that Archaic copper served a primarily socio-technic function based on two assumptions. One, that copper tools were more efficient in use performance than their stone and bone counterparts. And two, that the energy expenditure required for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caitlin Wichlacz. David Abbott.

An understanding of the nature of late Classic period settlement at Las Colinas is an important element in understanding the broader social changes that took place across the Phoenix Basin during this time. One perspective on settlement at Las Colinas figures prominently in the recent "core decay" model proposed for the Phoenix Basin Hohokam. In response to this model, we propose new alternative scenarios for late Classic period settlement at Las Colinas. We test these alternative settlement...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chris Stantis. Lesley Chesson. Kirsten Verostick. Gregory Berg. Gabriel Bowen.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Carbon and oxygen isotope ratios of human tooth enamel carbonate are frequently used to reconstruct past diet, movement, and environmental conditions. Despite a long legacy of research, samples are prepared and analyzed using a remarkably broad range of protocols, and this methodological heterogeneity raises questions about the comparability of isotopic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tommy Budd. Amanda Wissler.

Periosteal lesions are often used as non-specific indicators of overall levels of stress and health in the past. Using medieval London samples, Sharon DeWitte (2014) demonstrated that distinguishing between active and healed periosteal lesions can significantly improve our understanding of stress and differential frailty. She found that healed lesions correlated with higher levels of survivorship when compared to active or no lesions. This study examines whether such a pattern may be observable...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Collard. Brea McCauley. Chris Carleton. André Costopoulos.

The construction of shrines, tombs, and other monuments is one of the most puzzling human behaviors from an evolutionary perspective. Building monuments is costly in terms of time and energy, and yet it is difficult to see how it contributes to survival and reproduction. In the late 1980s, Dunnell argued that monument building and other apparently wasteful behaviors are in fact adaptive in environments that are characterized by severe and/or unpredictable perturbations. Such behaviors are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Lena Jones.

"Environmental rebound" has been proposed by a large number of researchers to explain the disjuncture between the reports of American environments by early Spanish explorers and the long-term human impacts evidenced in the archaeological record of North, Central, and South America. However, by definition environmental rebound may be caused by multiple factors: changes in human population numbers, settlement patterns, resource acquisition and/or land use may all have contributed to a rebound of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Smallwood. Thomas Jennings. David Anderson. Jerald Ledbetter.

For the Southeast, Meeks and Anderson (2012) propose Younger Dryas climate changes triggered a human population crash and/or substantial reorganization. We use the Georgia point record in the Paleoindian Database of the Americas to test for evidence of changes in landscape use through the Paleoindian period and consider these changes in the context of the Georgia paleoenvironmental record spanning the YD. Based on differences in point frequencies, distributions, stone types, and transport...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Martina Steffen.

Archaeological applications of ethnographic models require that variables derived from the activities of living people be translated into archaeological terms. Enloe suggested that processing caribou (Rangifer tarandus) carcasses for food storage should be recognizable in patterns of bone fragmentation. He predicted that relatively uniform and large-sized bone fragments would result from mass processing for marrow as part of logistic collector subsistence strategies, compared with smaller and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Maki. Timothy Matney. David Perry. Linda Barrett. Lopa Afrin.

This is an abstract from the "Quivira Revisited" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2015 the National Park Service’s Archaeological Prospection Workshop was held at the Tobias Site (14RC8). Students and instructors evaluated the site using a variety of non-invasive prospection methods ranging from landscape-level LiDAR analysis to high sample density subsurface geophysical survey. The evaluation identified buried features and patterning within the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brady Liss. Matthew Howland. Thomas E. Levy.

Satellite imagery and remote sensing have secured a place in the archaeological toolbox, but the scale of satellite derived data often results in large datasets with individual image tiles consisting of many gigabytes. Consequently, performing complex analyses on satellite data can be computationally intensive to a prohibitive degree. Google Earth Engine (GEE), an in-development, cloud-based platform for visualizing/analyzing satellite imagery, affords a solution for researchers with limited...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Lewandowski. Theodore Tsouras.

The presence and proportions of well-dated ceramic wares and types are used to date the occupation of sites across the Southwest, often to general periods or phases that exceed a site's likely occupation span. Various methods have previously been used to refine the dating of archaeological sites using ceramic artifacts. Recently, Logan Simpson conducted a Class III cultural resources survey of Peabody Western Coal Company's leased lands on northern Black Mesa, Arizona. This study uses ceramic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Janine Billadello. Anarrubenia Capellin Ortega.

The Copan Valley in western Honduras has been the subject of a number of studies concerning human-environmental interaction, with particular emphasis on questions of ancient sustainable practices and whether or not land-use mismanagement contributed to the end of the Maya dynasty at Copan. The current PARAC project seeks to identify the range of foods consumed by the inhabitants of the Copan Valley during the Late Classic to Postclassic period. This paper will describe analyses conducted on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacob Jepsen.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ephemeral nature of many Fremont habitation sites has made site identification extremely difficult for Fremont archaeologists today. Unlike the standing and partially exposed ruins of their ancestral Puebloan neighbors, the Fremont left little evidence of their habitation across the region. Those that remain include structures now buried below the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joseph Keeney. Robert Bowman.

Magnetic susceptibility (MS) is the measure of a material’s potential to hold a magnetic field, the variation of which can indicate anthropogenic forces acting upon a substrate. In Alaska, diachronic MS analyses have been useful when investigating environmental change and anthropogenic variation through time in deeply-stratified subarctic interior sites. Synchronic MS approaches, on the other hand, use surficial MS probe mapping to analyze contemporaneous variation across space and can reveal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sean Bergin. Salvador Pardo Gordó. Michael Barton. Joan Bernabeu Aubán. Nicolas Gauthier.

Much initial research into the arrival and dissemination of agriculture in Europe has focused on identifying the speed and direction of the arrival of Neolithic subsistence. More recent work has begun to examine the chronological and spatial patterning of the spread of agriculture with the goal of identifying important sociological or environmental factors that affected the timing and location of agricultural settlement. In this context, agent-based computational modeling is emerging as a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jesse Nowak.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent coring at the Lake Jackson Aquatic Preserve in Northwest Florida investigated the current sediment and stratigraphic integrity in order to assess the research potential of the area for exploring associated cultural events from the Mississippian Period (AD 1050 - 1500). The lake is a unique karst formation with sinkholes that cause dramatic drydown...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Briana New. Merisa Stacy. Sarah Blessing. Jessa Ripley. Susan Kuzminsky.

Determining biological/cultural affiliation of prehistoric human skeletal remains for NAGPRA compliance is standard protocol in museums and academic institutions. However, the biological affiliation of skeletons of unknown provenience is not always straightforward, especially when they preclude the use of destructive analytical methods (e.g., DNA extraction). Although software is available for the estimation of ancestry of human skulls in forensic cases, few comparative datasets are available...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabriel Sanchez.

We use ArcGIS and spatial analysis to quantitatively test a proposed association between chipped stone crescents and wetland environments in western North America. Dating between ~12,000 and 8,000 cal BP, crescents are often found in association with stemmed points of the Western Pluvial Lakes or Western Stemmed traditions. Many scholars have suggested that crescents served as transverse projectile points for hunting waterfowl, others have viewed them as more generalized and multi-purpose tools,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Hopkins. Tom Higham.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Middle to Upper Palaeolithic biocultural shift is an important turning point for Human Evolution. As Anatomically Modern Humans (AMH) enter Europe, Neanderthals disappear, eventually leaving AMH as the only representative of their species. To understand the trajectory of AMH dispersal, and the processes underlying this biocultural shift, a robust...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Greger Larson. Laurent Frantz. Angela Perri. Ophelie Lebrasseur. James Haile.

Despite numerous investigations leveraging both genetic and archaeological evidence, the geographic origins of dogs remain unknown. On the basis of an ancient Irish dog genome and an assessment of the spatiotemporal appearance of dogs in the archaeological record, a recent paper suggested that dogs may have been domesticated independently in Eastern and Western Eurasia from distinct wolf populations. Following those independent origins, a mitochondrial assessment suggested that the Mesolithic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Ledogar. Jessica Watson.

Galliformes, or game birds, are one group of birds commonly utilized by prehistoric people that are particularly difficult to classify beyond family. In addition, bird bone assemblages are often fragmentary and poorly preserved, making avifauna notoriously difficult to identify to species, even by trained specialists. Non-identified bones lead to a decrease in information available about taxa present at the site, hunting preferences of the site inhabitants, environmental conditions, and other...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Gerard. René Vellanoweth.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past decades, archaeologists have developed regression formulae to estimate animal body size based on shell fragments. In this study, we tested the efficacy of five different methods by measuring over 1200 mussel (Mytilus californianus) shells excavated from an archaeological site (CA-VEN-395) in the Santa Monica Mountains, located about 9 km from the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lori Phillips. Erin Thornton. Eleanor Harrison-Buck.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Stable isotope analysis of carbon (13C/12C) and nitrogen (15N/14N) are often used to reconstruct ancient Maya diets. While these two isotopes provide us with a broad understanding of past subsistence practices, carbon and nitrogen are limited in their ability to differentiate freshwater and terrestrial based diets. Similar problems exist in other areas of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Samuelsen. Elizabeth Horton. Adriana Potra.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The use of rivercane in ancient basketry and other ancient materials presents an opportunity to understand how culturally important objects were used and moved across the landscape. Examples of ritual and subsistence related basketry have been found at Spiro and in the Ozark Mountains, some of which are expected to come from other locations. Modern plant...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rhiannon Stammers. Andy Herries. Nicola Stern.

The heat treatment of silcrete for lithic production has been identified as far back as 72,000 years ago, using a variety of scientific techniques. However, in most contexts simple visual assessment, notably the appearance of a lustrous red surface, is used to identify the use of heat treatment. Mass Gloss Analysis (MGA) is a quantitative, non-destructive method designed for measuring the increase in lustre noted on heat-treated lithics. Initially developed to investigate microcrystalline...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sandi Copeland. Hayley Cawthra. Richard Cowling. Julia Lee-Thorp. Petrus LeRoux.

In contrast to Holocene sites, late Pleistocene sites along the South African south coast are dominated by large and medium-sized ungulates, many of which are typical of open-habitat grasslands and migration ecosystems. During much of the late Pleistocene, sea levels were substantially lower, exposing the Paleo-Agulhas Plain up to 100 km south of the modern coastline. The Migration Ecosystem hypothesis proposes that the Paleo-Agulhas Plain supported a migration ecosystem driven by summer...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeffrey Ferguson. Timothy de Smet. Jonathan Schaefer. Deborah Huntley. Suzanne Eckert.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The use of lidar as a survey tool has revealed vast areas of past human activity in parts of the world with dense vegetative cover. However, its applications have not been explored to the same degree in areas with less vegetation and good surface visibility, such as that of the American Southwest. Ongoing research for the Lion Mountain Archaeology Project...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arianne Boileau. Elspeth Ready. Cédric Beauval. Marie-Pierre Coumont. Eugène Morin.

Archaeozoologists generally consider that counts are replicable data accurately representing the initial abundances of elements, individuals or taxa. However, few studies have examined these assumptions with control data. To test the robustness of NISP (Number of Identified SPecimens) and MNE (Minimum Number of Element) counts, we conducted a blind test that involved the analysis of two large experimental samples composed of known red deer (Cervus elaphus) and cattle (Bos taurus) elements. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fernanda Falabella. Silvia Alfaro. María Teresa Planella. Matthew T. Boulanger. Michael D. Glascock.

La Granja site in central Chile has been considered a social aggregation site for Llolleo communities based on an unusually large smoking pipe assemblage, ritual features and an abundance of drinking jars. The hypothesis states that people from a wide region gathered here for group cohesion purposes mediated by rituals involving the smoking of psychoactive substances and drinking of fermented beverages. Based on the potential of NAA to fingerprint ceramic artifacts’ raw material sources, we...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arianne Boileau.

Identifying formation processes of shallow archaeological sites can be difficult. At Lamanai, Belize, the main problem consists of distinguishing between pre- and post-Spanish contact deposits buried at a depth of 10 to 60 cm. Evidence of interaction with the Spanish includes a few European objects and two Christian churches. However, identifying pre-contact deposits is more challenging. Maya archaeologists typically rely on ceramic typology to establish chronology, but the main pottery type in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pamela Allan. Moira McMenemy. Kelly Brown. Matthew Baker. David Robinson.

For decades, debates have raged over the role of trance in the origination of rock-art. However, there remains almost no direct evidence of the ingestion of trance inducing material at any rock art site world-wide. The site of Pinwheel Cave has a large element thought to represent the opening of the flowering Datura. Dozens of quid, or 'chews' - i.e. masticated fibres of unidentified plant material - are found within the ceiling of the cave. A sample of this was taken and analysed to determine...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jared Divido.

This poster presents methodologies for testing the use of 3D scanning in its ability to capture quality 3D images of faunal bones for comparative purposes. An investigation of prior studies confirms that 3D scanning has successfully been used in aspects of archaeological research. Yet, the full potential for the use of 3D scanning in zooarchaeology is still unclear. At present, zooarchaeologists often have to resort to loaning physical bone specimens from other institutions when comparative...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Michael. Bethany Slon. Rachel McConnell.

Poor skeletal preservation is a ubiquitous problem in the Maya area, complicating the use of macroscopic techniques aimed at producing age range estimates. An important, but underutilized, set of skeletal approaches to aging employ microscopic methods, which rely on quantifying age-related histomorphological changes. This study focuses on histological structures in ribs and has two objectives: 1) to refine age estimations for burials from two rockshelters in the Caves Branch River Valley, Belize...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Iza Romanowska. Seth Bullock.

The Variability Selection Hypothesis proposed by Potts (1996; 1998) postulates the evolution of behavioural plasticity among early hominins arising during periods of strong environmental fluctuations in the last 6 million years. It argues that the inconsistency in selection regimes caused by the rapid environmental fluctuations produced particularly strong selection pressure on adapting to change rather than any particular set of conditions (termed 'adaptive complexity', 'adaptive flexibility',...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Veatch. Thomas Sutikna. E. Wahyu Saptomo. Jatmiko. Matthew M. Tocheri.

This is an abstract from the "The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis and Human Origins: Archaeological Perspectives" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent debates in anthropology surround the utility of human behavioral ecological (HBE) approaches for inferring archaeological phenomena. Criticisms of popular HBE approaches, including optimal foraging theory (OFT), challenge the assumption that humans will always maximize their behavior. Thus, these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Abigail Buffington. Smiti Nathan. Mary Lawrence Young.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists use charcoal assemblages principally to reconstruct chronologies and past vegetative landscapes, especially when sampled from long-used refuse features, though human decision-making plays a role in the construction of these assemblages. In this paper, we will gather together a dataset reflecting an unpublished dataset from three sites in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel McTavish. Richard Edwards, IV.

In the Lake Koshkonong locality, Oneota sites are commonly placed near abundant ecotones. Preliminary analyses have compared the diverse suite of resources utilized by the Oneota groups in the region. Just as maize agriculture can tether groups to the landscape (e.g., planting, harvesting, defending surplus), we explore the possibility that the harvesting of watershed resources (e.g., wild rice, fish) could have a similar effect, as both a draw and a tethering agent to a particular location. ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Taylor Hermes. Michael Frachetti. Farhod Maksudov. Alexei Mar'yashev. Paula Doumani Dupuy.

This paper focuses on tracking the mobility and diets of domesticated animals using isotopic analysis. We present two archaeological contexts from mountain regions of Central Asia: 1) A 9th-10th century (medieval) iron smelting town located at 2000 masl in the Zaamin Mtns. of Uzbekistan and 2) a series of Bronze Age (2500-1200 BCE) pastoral settlements located between 900 and 1500 masl in the Dzhungar Mtns. of eastern Kazakhstan. We are curious about pastoral productivity as it relates to social...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Stirn. Rebecca Sgouros. Robert Curran. Megan Jones. Connor Johnen.

Following nearly a decade of high-elevation research in the Wind River Range of Wyoming, the Teton Archaeological Project seeks to record and interpret prehistoric alpine occupations of the Teton Range. The 2014 field season was multi-focused with three primary goals of; exploring previously unsurveyed areas for archaeological sites, investigating ice-patches for thawing artifacts, and testing the survivability of lipid biomarkers on high-elevation surface artifacts. The work performed in this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patrick Cruz. Samuel Duwe.

According to tradition, soon after emergence into this world the Tewa were split into two peoples – the Summer and Winter – and were tasked with finding the "middle place," or the location of their eventual historic villages. The Summer People traveled along the Jemez Mountains practicing agriculture, and the Winter People journeyed along the Sangre de Cristo Mountains eating wild game. On their travels southwards the people stopped twelve times and these are represented as ancient villages....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Porter Swentzell.

Tewa history is the story of places. The narrator emplaces a story within the context of Tewa time by naming the place at which the story takes occurs. By using a Tewa place-based approach to narratives of the past, I demonstrate three important points. First, that history is an ethical act. Tewa history helps reproduce the values of good humanness. Second, that Tewa place-based history reconnects the narratives of the past with people’s relationship with land and linked responsibilities. As...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marybeth Tomka. Jonathan Jarvis.

The Texas Archeological Research Laboratory (TARL) was formally established at the University of Texas in 1963 to preserve an ever growing accumulation of records and collections documenting the unique history and prehistory of Texas for research, teaching and public interest. Acquisition of the collections and archive began ca. 1918. University excavations under the Works Projects Administration, and later the federal River Basins Survey salvage program for sites impacted by dams and reservoir...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Schach. Jane Buikstra.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While the bioarchaeology of Chiribaya Alta is well documented, there is little available data from the textiles at the site. This poster presents data from three types of textile coca containers recovered from the mortuary contexts at Chiribaya Alta. These are chuspas, or coca bags, which are brightly colored and often decorated with three stripes of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sophie Desrosiers.

Textiles are important artifacts when looking at mobility since they constitute a matrix of complex conceptual ideas, are important identity markers, and they travel easily with their owners. Pre-Columbian textiles have seldom been preserved in the wet Andean highlands, making it difficult to evaluate their past diversity and to identify them among the vast quantity of pieces discovered on the arid coast of Peru. Nevertheless, combining the study of present highland weaving practices with the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Steber.

This is an abstract from the "Local Development and Cross-Cultural Interaction in Pre-Hispanic Southwestern New Mexico and Southeastern Arizona" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The development of the Hohokam regional ballcourt system in the Phoenix basin caused an economic shift during the Colonial period that increased the need for trade goods. Surplus cotton became a valuable commodity for communities situated on heavily irrigated river valleys....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Holly Pittman.

Production of textiles rose to an industrial level in the late Uruk period of southern Mesopotamia. Iconographic sources found in glyptic art provide a detailed visual description of aspects of this industry. Gender differentiation is clearly institutionalize, with women preparing the thread and skeins while males are engaged in the actual weaving. This paper presents a close analysis of a single motif in the glyptic iconography, offering an explanation of what has previously been identified...

DOCUMENT Citation Only María Eugenia Maldonado Vite. Kim Richter.

This is an abstract from the "Textile Tools and Technologies as Evidence for the Fiber Arts in Precolumbian Societies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Postclassic period, the Huasteca region along the northeastern Gulf Coast was an important producer of textiles made of zapupe (the local name for ixtle, that is, agave or yucca plant fibers) and especially cotton as evidenced in early colonial manuscripts, such as the Codex Mendoza and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nina Castillo Sánchez.

Las últimas investigaciones sobre patrones funerarios en la costa central peruana exponen, principalmente, entierros femeninos de élite dedicados a la actividad textil. Sobre la base de las descripciones del ajuar asociado a la textilería. Estas explicaciones hacen énfasis en los objetos hallados, asumiendo directamente la posición social del individuo, sin mencionar que este ajuar, probablemente, representa el actuar colectivo sobre estándares sociales de enterramiento femenino y no...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara Klessig.

This is an abstract from the "Defining Perishables: The How, What, and Why of Perishables and Their Importance in Understanding the Past" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Tools used in the creation of textiles can be made of numerous materials, including stone, clay, metal, wood, bone, and anther, just to name a few. Numerous experiments in creating tools, such as spindle whorls, loom weights, needles, combs, and weaving battens have been carried...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marco Nadal de Masi.

The results of an archaeological project in the Lower valley of Canoas River in the Highlands of southern Brazil show a cultural sistema of proto-ge grups formed by residencial bases, camp sites, cultivation fields, storage pits, hunting camps, cerimonial centers and burial mounds. Burial mounds show evidences of social hierarchy and the storage pits show variability in their size indicating diferente functions for those pite. Polen from few pite shows how the environment evolve near by the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michele Hanks.

Since the late 1990s, paranormal investigating has emerged as a popular means of seeking knowledge of the ghostly or paranormal in England. Paranormal investigators are self-fashioned experts who aim to balance scientistic and spiritual perspectives in hopes of proving or disproving the existence of ghosts from an objective perspective. They dedicate significant amounts of their leisure time to reading about, talking about, and researching ghosts or the paranormal. English paranormal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Rosenberg.

Implicit in most approaches to the evolution of culture is both the view that cultural evolution is always incremental and that cultures are structurally simple entities, making individual cultures seem entirely as capable of evolving in one direction as another, based solely on phenotypic plasticity and/or selective forces. However, as noted 140+ years ago by Tylor, culture is a complex whole. Structurally, it can best be viewed as multiple reflexive social, behavioral and informational...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Stewart. Kyra Pazan. Genevieve Dewar.

This is an abstract from the "From Veld to Coast: Diverse Landscape Use by Hunter-Gatherers in Southern Africa from the Late Pleistocene to the Holocene" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Multidisciplinary research suggests Marine Isotope Stage 5 (~130–74 ka) was an important evolutionary stage in African deep history. Population expansion and growth spurred changes in material culture and the exploration of previously unoccupied regions and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Terren Proctor. Tiffiny Tung.

This study examines cranial vault modification (CVM) frequency and styles among 35 crania from the Vegachayoq Moqo sector at the site of Huari, the former capital of the Wari Empire. The crania date to the post-Wari era (AD 1250 – 1400). In order to document the process by which they were modified, the crania were analyzed by noting the number of pad impressions and locations, as well as the center of applied pressure; the design of the modification devices was extrapolated from the observed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Maitland Gardner.

Our hands shape and express the social and material worlds in which we live by creating and measuring things around us and communicating our thoughts, feelings and ideas. In Classic Maya iconography, hands are represented in a variety of shapes and forms, which offers a unique glimpse into ancient Maya gestural practices. This paper journeys through the actions and representations of hands in the ancient Maya world, exploring the dynamic and dialogic relationships between bodily gestures and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Will Russell. Sarah Klassen.

This is an abstract from the "Journeying to the South, from Mimbres (New Mexico) to Malpaso (Zacatecas) and Beyond: Papers in Honor of Ben A. Nelson" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Social inequality exists simultaneously in a number of domains, and can often be traced - or allegedly traced - to founding lineages. Antecedence is the demonstration of longevity in place and, therefore, claims to moral authority. In this paper, we explore the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelsey Cornwell.

To contend with expensive and invasive ‘big dig’ excavations, archaeologists have trended towards using regional surveys to examine and interpret distribution patterns across a given area. Regional surveys offer an effective and efficient way of analyzing the long-term use and wide scale development of variably occupied spaces. With the introduction of Geographic Information Systems and other new technologies, archaeologists have been able to capitalize on the insights gained from statistical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lesley Chesson. Gregory Berg.

This is an abstract from the "The Intersection of Archaeological Science and Forensic Science" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation describes the theoretical frameworks for isotope data collection and interpretation that will help archaeological scientists ensure their contributions to forensic investigations are scientifically sound and legally defensible. Archaeological science is now commonly used in forensic settings to reconstruct...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Gustas. Kisha Supernant.

Spatial modeling of early prehistoric maritime movement on the Pacific Northwest Coast is important in contemporary archaeology because it can help locate new sites in a landscape which has radically changed over the last 20,000 years. Here we present the theoretical framework used in a research project which modeled maritime movement using least cost path analysis (LCP) to determine the routes most likely to have been traveled by the inhabitants of the Dundas Islands, British Columbia over the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kirsten Lopez.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Textiles are often given short thrift in archaeological research and reporting, due in large part to their rarity and thus limited depth of analysis. Recent studies have demonstrated a variety of new analytical techniques, revealing new potential in archaeological and anthropological textile studies. Unfortunately, over ten years into these developments, few...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erik Martin. Robert G. Elston. D. Craig Young. Brian Codding. David E. Rhode.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The nature of human use of the central Great Basin during the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition (PHT) remains unclear. Ongoing archaeological research in Grass Valley, Nevada, focuses on understanding foraging behavior in changing PHT landscapes through expectations of Human Behavioral Ecology and geoarchaeological investigations for defining the extent of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Holly Miller. Naomi Sykes.

Stable isotope studies have become common-place in archaeological investigations of human diet and mobility, often underpinned by small comparative studies of associated animal remains which are generally utilised as baseline data. However, the value of moving beyond such anthropocentric studies and of analysing animals in their own right is becoming increasingly recognised. Detailed research on animal diet and mobility is enhancing our understanding of animal management and patterns of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ann Kakaliouras.

This is an abstract from the "The Future of Bioarchaeology in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since the 1970’s bioarchaeology has become both a valid specialization within archaeology as well as a standalone discipline with its own analytical and institutional traditions. Archaeology, though, enjoys a much more robust mosaic of competing theoretical frameworks than does bioarchaeology. From the processual to the postprocessual—to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Darryl Wilkinson.

Accounts of ancient infrastructure are very common. Almost every archaeologist who deals with complex polities regularly encounters infrastructure in some form - including roads, irrigation canals, bridges, harbors, aqueducts, recording systems and forts - just to name a few of the most common varieties. That said, the concept is rarely explicitly theorized or defined within the discipline - and is usually identified on the basis of "we know it when we see it". In contrast, this paper seeks to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charles Andrews.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Along with many other disciplines, Space and Power are both topics of long-standing interest within archaeology. Space has been heavily theorized by authors such as LeFebvre, de Certeau, Soja, and Adam Smith. While there has not been an equivalent to the “Spatial Turn,” Power has also received much attention, and authors such as Marx, Althusser, Bourdieu,...