Society for American Archaeology

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shawn Penman. Kari L. Schleher.

This is an abstract from the "Ann F. Ramenofsky: Papers in Honor of a Non-Normative Career" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ann F. Ramenofsky arrived in New Mexico in 1990 and in the following decades has influenced many careers. Beginning with her archaeological projects in the Upper Chama to her final archaeological research project at the Pueblo of San Marcos her insistence on methodological and intellectual rigor has contributed to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Cook Hale. Jessi Halligan. Morgan Smith.

This is an abstract from the "*SE The State of Theory in Southeastern Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The southeastern United States encompasses the greatest extent of submerged continental shelf in North America along with the greatest abundance of documented submerged precontact sites. It also includes some of the earliest documented precontact sites in North America, some of which are also submerged today. A substantial component of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Allison Carlton.

Colonial studies have progressed exponentially in archaeology, but such studies can suffer from contextual limitations. Analyzing colonialism in many different social contexts adds to its potential as a lens through which to study the archaeological record. Diverse applicability would allow archaeologists an opportunity to make sense of colonialism’s profuse influence on the people it affects. Throughout the 19th-century, the Nipmuc from eastern Massachusetts faced many of the common processes...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Naoko Matsumoto. Atsushi Iriki. Saburo Sugiyama.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Landscapes and Cosmic Cities out of Eurasia: Transdisciplinary Studies with New Lidar Mapping" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient consciousness may be a key concept to discern human biocultural evolutionary processes. We reassess how indigenous people out of Eurasia developed consciousness about time and space and created conceptual dividing apparatuses, like calendar systems. We begin with theoretical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dana Kollmann. John Nase.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Late Woodland period human remains were recovered from the Hughes site (18MO1) in the Maryland Piedmont during the 1930’s. Among the remains are two mandibles and a maxillary right dental quadrant that contain carious teeth suspected of having undergone antemortem dental modification. Affected teeth representing two adult females and a child were analyzed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Harris.

This is an abstract from the "The Current State of Archaeological Research across Southeast Asia" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The religious transition of the Khmer Empire (ca. 802–1431 CE) from Saivaite and/or Mahayana Buddhism to the religion known today as “Theravada Buddhism” is thought today to be one of the defining social phenomena of the late Angkorian period (ca. fourteenth to fifteenth centuries) in medieval Cambodia. However, despite...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Peart. Deanna N. Grimstead. Catherine E. Mendel.

This is an abstract from the "Current Research on Turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) Domestication, Husbandry and Management in North America and Beyond" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The human-domesticate relationship has long been a focus of archaeologists, and advances in archaeological science have revealed the dynamics of husbandry practices. But why domesticate? Evolutionary ecology suggests expanding human populations, depressed habitats, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Krug. Kyle Waller. Christine VanPool.

Previous studies of shell exchange in the Southwest have supported archaeological interpretations of competing regional networks in which the Hohokam, Sinagua, and Anasazi acquired shell from the Gulf of California, while the Casas Grandes, Mimbres, and Western Puebloan groups acquired shell from West Mexico. This study will build on previous analyses by integrating stylistic analysis with an expanded compositional database to further examine the role of shell exchange in the Animas phase region...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Parcak.

This paper will discuss the range and type of studies possible based on past and current advances in the field of satellite remote sensing. It will focus on work in the Middle East, North Africa, the Mediterranean, Europe, and North Atlantic. The paper will primarily focus on the range and type of questions is it possible to ask (and in some cases answer) using a diverse range of satellite datasets combined with intensive ground survey and excavation. It will also provide a range if...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edward Henry. George Milner. Natalie Mueller.

Adena-Hopewell enclosure complexes have inspired much conjecture and some well-supported inferences concerning the rise of Middle Woodland ceremonialism, interaction, and social organization in the Eastern Woodlands. After examining Hopewellian interaction at Tunnacunnee in Northwest Georgia, Dick Jefferies turned his focus to Adena-Hopewell mound and enclosure sites in Central Kentucky. Dick’s examination of the Winchester Farm Enclosure in the early 1980s with George Milner was the first...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emma Slayton.

This is an abstract from the "Modeling Mobility across Waterbodies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the field of modeling water-based movement, many researchers have focused on modeling colonization or larger migration patterns. However, longer and more exploratory voyages encompasses only part of humanity’s use of sea travel. Evaluating closely connected sea-oriented communities can provide key insights into the everyday nature of sea movement,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maia Dedrick. Luke Auld-Thomas.

This is an abstract from the "Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper considers the development of agriculture and society in northeastern Yucatán, Mexico, drawing on evidence from lidar imaging, paleoethnobotany, and isotopic studies. We focus on geological features known as dolines, sinkholes, or rejolladas—round, low areas that dot the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexander Baer.

This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Hinterlands in Polynesia" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While core-periphery studies have long been employed to highlight distinctions between areas within a shared sociopolitical sphere, less articulated is what it means to actually be "peripheral." Or, for that matter, "liminal," "a hinterland," or "marginal," among others. This paper uses examples from two regions, the district of Kaupo, Maui, and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Hinkelman. Robert Cook.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the US Midwest, most students are exposed only briefly to the precontact history in the fourth grade and then not again unless they opt for archaeology as an elective in college. The Ohio Board of Education requires teachers to merely state that American Indians lived in Ohio, participated in the War of 1812, and then died or left the area....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Catherine Jones. Shannon Freire. Jessica Skinner. B Charles.

This is an abstract from the "There and Back Again: Celebrating the Career and Ongoing Contributions of Patricia B. Richards" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Throughout her career, Patricia B. Richards has held many prominent positions within and adjacent to conventional academic anthropology, among them senior scientist, adjunct curator, principal investigator, and associate director of an archaeological research laboratory. While these positions...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Evan Mann. Aida Romera. Roland Tremblay. Karine Taché.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Nomadic hunter-gatherer populations of the Eastern Subarctic were once thought to have largely rejected or ignored pottery technology. The archaeological recovery of ceramics at several sites north of the St. Lawrence Lowlands over the past few decades has passed the status of anecdotal finds and seriously challenges this assumption. Questions remain, however,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shawn Collins. Sarah Payne. Erica Olsen.

The Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, a not-for-profit organization located in southwestern Colorado, has used archaeological research to teach multiple audiences about the human experience for more than 30 years. Changing educational standards and transportation needs have affected Crow Canyon’s student program attendance, and an aging demographic increasingly limits our adult program attendance, with ramifications felt in our membership and donor support. We face the challenge of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steve Markofsky.

The complex boundary regions between deltas and deserts pose particular difficulties for archaeological enquiry. In these regions, the dynamic interactions between aeolian and alluvial processes result in continuously changing hydrosocial landscapes that manifest over a range of spatio-temporal analytical scales. The wealth of tools, methodologies and theoretical approaches offered by the burgeoning field of remote sensing can help to deconstruct complex and often visually obstructed human...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edith Gonzalez.

In an effort to discover the next big viable cash crop, the Codrington family of Antigua hired a botanist to implement a strategic introduction of species from the four corners of the British empire to Barbuda as an 18th-century living laboratory. This paper draws on historical documents to explore the dynamic and sometimes conflicting motives for agricultural experimentation - those of food security in times of drought or war versus finding the next "sugar."

DOCUMENT Citation Only Esteban Rangel. Heather Edgar.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The use of three-dimensional (3D) models for skeletal analysis has become common practice for osteological research. However, current methods for obtaining the 3D models are either too costly, such as computer tomography (CT), or require time-consuming post-processing such as scanners or cameras. Recent advances in technology have resulted in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alyce De Carteret.

The construction of the home (‘otot’ in the language of the Classic Maya inscriptions) is one of the most important and meaning-laden events in Maya communities modern and ancient alike. In the Maya world, culturally-contingent notions of propriety, order, and moral rectitude guide each stage of housebuilding, including the procurement of materials, the organization of labor, and the actual act of construction itself. Additionally, houses must be properly consecrated before they can be...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Dudgeon. Charles Speer. Beau Craner. Rebecca Hazard.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Thermal analysis (TGA/DTA/STA) has seen sporadic use as an archaeometric technique. Recent papers on archaeological mortars, plasters, ceramic pigments, and paints have sought to understand recipes or mineralogical components by thermal decomposition, especially where traditional chemical analysis by mass spectrometry is limited due to the multiple forms a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Diana Ewing.

The technical ability of women to engineer clothes as adaptation to the harsh arctic environment in Indigenous North America has not been extensively investigated. My research focuses on the analysis of the thermal and transpiration properties of Arctic clothing. The materials chosen for clothing have certain inherent properties that include species of animal selected, different tanning processes, patterning of the garments, seam construction, and tailoring. All these properties play into the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Russell Cutts. Sarah Hlubik.

Recognizing fire evidence in the record can be challenging and contentious. Aside from baked earth features – hearths, daub, etc. – a widely reported associated artifact is fire-cracked rock (FCR). Unlike flaked stone assemblages, FCR lacks a standardized description, criteria, test or model; archaeologists often learn identification ‘in the field.’ Recent actualistic studies have demonstrated that a previously undescribed type of FCR has likely been unknowingly lumped with other ‘angular...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dominique Meyer. Eric Lo. Danielle Mercure. Patricia A. Beddows. Dominique Rissolo.

The Maya port and site of Vista Alegre carried political and trade importance in the Terminal Classic to Early Postclassic periods. Located in the Laguna Yalahau of northern Quintana Roo, Mexico, the site is built on a small and low elevation island surrounded by mangrove. Inland from the site are freshwater wetlands (sabanas), while the near-shore waters of the restricted circulation lagoon are hypersaline. A significant research question is how the inhabitants of Vista Alegre accessed potable...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Annette Oertle.

Tropical archaeological shell middens throughout Australasia provide valuable information about subsistence practices, environmental changes, and human occupation. One of the major anthropic processes that can occur in any midden site is burning or heating of the shell, either from cooking or heat-treating shell for working. Thermal influences on marine shell are poorly understood across all disciplines, including archaeology. Burning or heating may not always show any visual signs and rather...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nolan O'Hara. Tiffany Raymond. Carl P. Lipo. Hannah Elliott.

A common class of prehistoric ceramic vessels are those that share attributes related to the processing, cooking, storage and serving of food resources. Depending on the specifics of the use contexts, attributes will vary systematically and depend on the range of activities, the details of the food resources, and the heating technology in which the vessels are used. Thus, we can expect that many technological traits of vessels such as temper, wall thickness, porosity, firing temperature, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Spencer Pelton.

Human cold intolerance unambiguously suggests that mid to high latitude prehistoric foragers used thermoregulatory technologies, such as clothing and housing, to cope with the environment, even if archaeologists rarely find them in the record. Others have recognized this, but none have developed a formal means of expressing variation in thermal technologies in the archaeological record over widespread temperature clines. I draw from observations collected during ethnoarchaeological fieldwork...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sean Carroll.

One application of experimental archaeology is attempting to understand variations in flintknapping skill. These experiments often have flintknappers of varying skill levels attempt to replicate different variants of prehistoric stone tools. Previous studies of skill level in the debitage produced during flintknapping is restricted to qualitative means of analysis. To add to the expanding collection of experimental archaeology that attempts to identify flintknapping skill, this paper addresses...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Cook. Ervan Garrison.

Sedentary occupations and monumental architecture first appear during the Middle Archaic (8,000 BP to 5,000 BP) in Florida at sites where marine, estuarine, and riverine resources were exploited, spreading to the coast of Georgia by the Late Archaic, around 4,500 BP. However, the coastline did not reach its modern position until around 5,000 BP, leaving many sites submerged. Fieldwork was initiated in June of 2014 in order to relocate, excavate, and interpret Middle Archaic sites submerged in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Natalie Faught.

This poster presents a critical reflection on the dialectical and power-imbued relationships of archaeologists and stakeholder communities, focusing on the ongoing Stélida Naxos Archaeological Project in the Cycladic islands, Greece. While much has been written about archaeologists’ interaction with neighboring populations, Stélida provides a complex case due to the transitory and heterogeneous nature of what constitutes its "local" community. Residence is both seasonal (summer) and fluid in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Allen Christenson.

This is an abstract from the "Beyond Maize and Cacao: Reflections on Visual and Textual Representation and Archaeological Evidence of Other Plants in Precolumbian Mesoamerica" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the Title of Totonicapán, a sixteenth-century K’iche’ Maya text, the authors declare that the founders of their royal lineage were the “roots” from which they grew and were nourished, as a maize plant draws its sustenance from its roots:...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Munkittrick. Alison Harris. Kelly-Anne Pike. Vaughan Grimes.

From the mid 17th to early 19th centuries the lucrative cod fishery drew sailors and settlers from the British Isles and continental Europe to the shores of Newfoundland. Poor agricultural prospects and a dependence on imports challenged permanent settlement; as a result, the life- and foodways of these early ‘Newfoundlanders’ differed from those that developed at other North American colonial settlements. Through palaeodietary analysis, we investigate the different subsistence-based adaptive...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meredith Poole.

This is an abstract from the "Individuals Known and Unknown: Case Studies from Two Burial Contexts at Colonial Williamsburg" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. At the request of the descendant community, Colonial Williamsburg archaeologists in 2022 excavated three burials from among 62 discovered on the site of the First Baptist Church. Despite poor preservation and a dearth of identifying information, archaeological evidence recovered from these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Loughmiller-Cardinal.

Among the various sources of information about what foodstuffs comprised the Classic Mayan diet, we lack resolution on daily, domestic, and the various ritual and event foodstuffs. Beyond the archaeologically recovered macrofossil and faunal data, the identifications of drugs and ritual foodstuffs are less well established. Speculative and presumed behaviors that surround these goods tend to bias methods of analysis towards known substances and preconceived interpretations, thereby potentially...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Debora Trein. Angelina Locker. Stacy Drake. Manda K. S. Adam. Patricia Neuhoff-Malorzo.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Maya Landscapes in Northwestern Belize, Part I" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Programme for Belize Archaeological Project (PfBAP) was established to explore ancient Maya life in a 250,000 acre area of protected forest in northwest Belize, employing a regional perspective grounded in robust field methods. This regionally-oriented approach continues to guide research being conducted at PfB every year since...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Allan.

The unprecedented growth of San Francisco during the California Gold-rush was fueled in part by the ingenuity and ambitions of entrepreneurs who recognized and exploited economic opportunities unrelated to the activities in the gold fields. This paper will discuss several maritime enterprises whose remains have been discovered and documented during archaeological investigations William Self Associates has conducted along and within the former confines of early San Francisco’s Yerba Buena...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Danny Zborover. John Pohl.

This is an abstract from the "After Cortés: Archaeological Legacies of the European Invasion in Mesoamerica" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent studies show that the Spanish conquest of the Oaxacan Pacific Coast was shaped, and even orchestrated, by indigenous kingdoms (Zapotecs, Mixtecs) and allied groups (Pochutecs, Chontal) that vied for control over key trading ports. These same indigenous players continued their cycles of conflicts,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Schmader.

In 1540, Francisco Vázquez de Coronado led one of the largest expeditions ever assembled by the Spanish crown into the present-day American southwest. The expedition had 375 European men and was supported by a large contingent of at least 1,300 native Méxican soldiers from various ethnic groups. The native Méxican soldiers likely did much of the advance work, hand-to-hand fighting, guarding, and other military detail. The whole expedition was not well-equipped with European military technology...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bernard Means.

This is an abstract from the "Female Firsts: Celebrating Archaeology’s Pioneering Women on the 101st Anniversary of the 19th Amendment " session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the lesser known programs that funded archaeological excavations during the Great Depression was the National Youth Administration (NYA). NYA archaeology has been overshadowed by projects funded by its more prominent “cousin,” the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), and its...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Brown.

This is an abstract from the "Music Archaeology's Paradox: Contextual Dependency and Contextual Expressivity" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The distributions of different types of musical instruments across the American Southwest have been generally defined, but little work has been done to tie these data to studies of ethnogenesis, migration, and language groups. This paper examines archaeological, musicological, ethnographic, and historical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Colleen Delaney. Shawna Couplin. Charles Fazzone. Kathleen M Marsaglia.

The Spanish chroniclers of the 18th century document extensive and intensive long distance regional trade networks among indigenous peoples throughout southern California (and beyond). Archaeologists are currently reevaluating these long held interpretations of Chumash regional exchange networks in the southern California region during the late prehistoric period. We report a pilot study focused the determination of the lithology/mineralogy of stone bowls/mortars collected from various sites in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lauren Jones. Anna Linderholm. Michael Waters.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although considered pests to farmers and golfers alike, gophers – specifically pocket gophers (family Geomyidae) – can be excellent proxies for assessing climate change in archaeological contexts owing to their penchant for living in specific soil conditions. At the Hall’s Cave site in Kerr County, Texas, geomyids are found in most of the radiocarbon-dated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christina M. Giovas.

Prehistoric commensal animal relationships are understudied for the Caribbean, with little explicit consideration for the defining attributes of the insular commensal niche or what taxa may be rightly considered commensal. Here, I address these issues by clarifying the nature of Caribbean commensalism with respect to synanthropy, domestication, animal management, and phoresy. I consider which vertebrate and invertebrate taxa most likely enjoyed commensal relationships with humans in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Kwan.

Ceramics from the early Holocene Shangshan Culture, in Zhejiang Province, China, have been subjected to thin section petrographic analysis in order to characterize clay groups, view production patterns, and aid in the development of a complete understanding of the Shangshan technological tradition. Analysis has revealed a pattern in the local production of ceramic vessels likely related to the transformations in cooking methods and dietary patterns that coincided with new evidence for the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Davenport.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study investigates the organization of production for Inka pottery at Pachacamac from several contexts throughout the site’s ceremonial core and elite residential sector. Pachacamac was a major Ychsma center on Peru’s central coast that was transformed into a major Inka provincial center around 1470 C.E. The Inka constructed a number of buildings and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marcel Kornfeld. Mary Lou Larson.

Forager campsites are commonly thought of as locations where social activities occur, but most archaeologists focus on subsistence (butchery, processing), stone tool production and use, and how these systems relate to mobility strategies. The record is often silent when it comes to the behaviors incidental to what appears central economic endeavors. Often camps yield information beyond subsistence. Ochre, needles, beads, bone rods, structures, and context of various activities provide more...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Speakman.

This is an abstract from the "2019 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of M. Steven Shackley" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past 15-20 years, archaeological chemistry has moved largely from centralized laboratories of interdisciplinary expertise to decentralized laboratories where expertise often times is lacking. This shift is most pronounced in the widespread adoption and use of inexpensive, compact, highly portable XRF...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jamie Arjona.

This paper examines late nineteenth and early twentieth century jook joints as sites that generated queer African-American intimacies and animacies. Emerging in the 1880s throughout much of the rural United States, jook joints crafted a performatively queer medium within African-American communities. Particularly in the rural south, these jooks offered a haven for black music, dance, gambling, prostitution, and alcohol consumption that disoriented expectations of temperance and frugality. ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Helen Blouet.

As a professor at Utica College in New York, I am faced with a challenge. I teach archaeological field methods, but I only have room to do so in the spring semester, a time dominated by cold and snowy weather. While a large-scale summer field school would be ideal, many UC students have summer work commitments or otherwise cannot afford to participate. So I have decided to bring the digging into the classroom. In this presentation, I will show how students learn and practice archaeological field...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christina Friberg.

The ‘Mississippianization’ of the Midwest unfolded during the late 11th and early 12th centuries as interactions with Cahokia influenced aspects of local community organization, ceremonialism, material culture, and access to exotic raw materials. For local peoples, these encounters and affiliations also facilitated interactions between Mississippian groups beyond Cahokia. The direct proximity of the Lower Illinois River Valley (LIRV) to the Greater Cahokia area enabled certain social, political,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pierre Morenon.

Are eye-witness descriptions in 1524 of extensive farming and intensive habitat modifications around Narragansett Bay by indigenous people just fantasies? Pollen evidence in now urban industrial Rhode Island remains unconvincing. To date, less than a dozen pre-Contact Rhode Island sites containing Zea maize have been found. This paper examines ongoing experiments with charcoal, particularly from RI 1898 – a tiny intact spot with a remarkably preserved stone tool manufacturing assemblage on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Diego Bitencourt Mañas. Bruno Trípode Bartaquini. Rui Sérgio Sereni Murrieta. Marcia Maria Arcuri Suñer. Ignácio Alva Meneses.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This work seeks to analyze the continuities and discontinuities on the landscapes occupied by ancient Moche (an archaeological culture which flourished on the north coast of the central Andes between the first and eighth centuries) and contemporary populations. We intend to refine the discussion about the effectiveness and limitations of the ecotopes concept –...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steven Kuhn.

This is an abstract from the "Defining and Measuring Diversity in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Diversity is fundamentally a scalar phenomenon. Archaeologists have been very attentive to the relationship between sample size and various diversity measures. They have not paid as much attention to the spatial scale of diversity. Ecologists frequently consider diversity at three spatial scales. Alpha diversity refers to richness within...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Randall McGuire.

This is an abstract from the "In Defense of Everything! Constructive Engagements with Graeber and Wengrow’s Provocative Contribution" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. “The Dawn of Everything" urges us to rethink the most basic concepts of culture and cultural evolution. Waving the black flag of anarchism, Graeber and Wengrow question the widespread idea that inequality and exploitation were unavoidable consequences of human technological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lorna Tilley.

The bioarchaeology of care is a case-study-based, contextualised approach for inferring and interpreting the experience of disability and health-related care response in the past that is based on evidence for experience of disease found in human remains. It is supported by the Index of Care, a non-prescriptive on-line instrument intended to assist researchers work systematically through the four stages of bioarchaeology of care analysis. This presentation opens with an overview of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lynne Goldstein.

Having been a professional archaeologist for a very long time, I have used a variety of different tools. Since 1988, I have actively employed digital tools for archaeological research, teaching, and public engagement. This work has primarily been based in the Midwestern US, and has included both prehistoric and historic sites. In this paper, I highlight three examples and discuss the epistemological implications of the digital tools. The first is a Wisconsin projectile point book prepared almost...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Ortman.

Archaeologists are used to thinking linearly, where sample measures can be well-characterized by a mean, a standard deviation or a proportion. Settlement scaling theory requires us to think exponentially, where all these summary measures change with the scale of the settlement from which they derive. This sounds like a big problem, but once one gets used to it many traditional concerns about the quality of archaeological data turn out to not be all that important, and the archaeological record...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marian Creveling. Karen Orrence.

The National Capital Region of the National Park Service is rich with archeological resources as can be attested by the vast collection of objects stored at the Museum Resource center. However, for many collections, only a basic identification of the artifacts exists. Collections dating from early Native American habitation to the American Civil War to 20th Century Industrialization are available for further research that could lead to Master's Thesis or Dissertations. This paper will highlight...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Cercone.

This is an abstract from the "Ceramics and Archaeological Sciences 2024" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. After the birth of the Turkish Republic, German archaeologists fled to Turkey in search of new beginnings and freedom. These archaeologists would soon head the first archaeology departments in Istanbul and Ankara, shaping how budding archaeologists would complete their training and research for the next 90 years. Traditionally, ceramic research...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samantha Rubinson.

This is an abstract from the "Site Stewardship Matters: Comparing and Contrasting Site Stewardship Programs to Advance Our Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the last 15 years, there have been several surveys of cultural site stewardship programs. None, however, reach the scale of the 2022 National Site Stewardship Network Survey, which included over 30 programs across the US and one in Scotland. This provided an opportunity to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sean Dolan.

Excavation is often the way to mitigate for the loss of cultural resources to comply with Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act. However, excavation is not always the most practical solution. A case study is presented to demonstrate how alternative mitigations advance the research value of cultural resources, and increase flexibility in land-use decisions by agencies while satisfying the mutual interests of stakeholders. In 2012, four prehispanic Ancestral Puebloan fieldhouses...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lauren Kohut.

One of the more promising applications of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in archaeology is the potential to incorporate aspects of human perception and experience of the landscape. Visibility analysis has been applied extensively to archaeological contexts, and models of movement, acoustics and other sensory experiences have recently received greater consideration. But despite the promise of moving beyond measurements of geographic space, most applications of experiential modeling continue...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Swogger.

Comics are an effective medium for promoting engagement with archaeology, as they are able to communicate complex and detailed archaeological information to audiences unfamiliar with its concepts and practice. This communication is facilitated both through the comic itself and the process of creating it. During the University of Oregon's Palau Archaeology 2015 field school on the island of Palau, Micronesia, comics were used to present the ongoing results of excavations to multiple audiences....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lorna-Jane Richardson.

As research momentum gathers alongside the adoption of digital technologies into everyday life, the terms ‘virtual reality’, ‘online’, and ‘cyberspace’, increasingly fail to recognize the degree to which the adoption of digital technologies, and the material objects through which the digital is accessed, have been domesticated and made normal. The entanglement of social communication networks in the variety of digital environments provided by archaeological organisations is often seen as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erica Hill.

Canids are among the most commonly encountered animals in archaeological assemblages worldwide. Using examples from the Arctic, I discuss some of the key ways that humans employ dogs to think about their relationships with other humans, animals, and the world around them. While dogs were often treated similar to human persons, they were also used to distance and distinguish "real people" from others. Ethnohistoric evidence suggests that a dynamic tension existed in the Arctic between humans and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claudia Glatz.

The Middle East and surrounding areas are among the most mountainous regions of the world, where a combination of material and written records provides a unique opportunity to explore highland-lowland interaction in the distant past and over the long-term. This includes issues of relevance to current efforts to document, preserve and protect mountain regions and ways of life, such as the movement of people, goods and ideas, the environmental and resource contexts and consequences of such...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah E. Adcock.

In this paper, I explore the intersection of empire and environment in imperial and post-imperial contexts using the collapse of the Hittite empire and its aftermath in central Turkey around 1200 BC as a case study. More specifically, I mobilize zooarchaeological evidence from the Hittite capital of Hattuşa and from Çadır Höyük, a rural town, in order to discuss how we might distinguish between political, economic, and climatic factors in our interpretations of the relationships between empire...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sam Ghavami.

This is an abstract from the "Peering into the Night: Transition, Sociopolitical Organization, and Economic Dynamics after the Dusk of Chavín in the North Central Andes" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The study of Andean prehistory divides broader cultural eras or horizons which have their own distinct and well-discernible characteristics; political and social structures and material and symbolic traditions. Between these eras of (relative)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Seebach.

Residents of Grand Junction, Colorado must necessarily adapt to the arid, high-elevation climate of the northern Colorado Plateau. One highly visible adaptation to aridity is the personal transport of potable liquids in an array of vessels. Such vessels are ubiquitous among Colorado Mesa University students, staff and faculty, and they provide a readily accessible source of data with which to illustrate the uses of typology, style and the material correlates of social organization. In a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Douglas Bamforth. Kristen Carlson. Matt Reed.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Redstone elbow pipes, often made from catlinite from the Pipestone quarries in Minnesota, play essential roles in many Pawnee ceremonies, including the Hako ceremony, and in the calumet ceremony that was widespread in eastern North America. They appeared first during the thirteenth century in Central Plains tradition communities in eastern Nebraska. ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristin Kuckelman.

This is an abstract from the "Research, Education, and American Indian Partnerships at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The initial 40 years of research conducted by the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center included several excavation projects that focused on a primary stated research goal of the center: discover why Pueblo peoples completely and permanently vacated the northern San Juan region late in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephanie Strauss.

Almost a century after William H. Holmes published the first study of the incomparable Tuxtla Statuette, the La Mojarra Stela was recovered from the Acula River in Veracruz, Mexico. In the three decades that followed, the hieroglyphic script that pours over these objects has been scrutinized and debated, named and renamed, both deciphered and declared undecipherable. This paper reflects on the status of Isthmian studies and explores the intricacies of Epi-Olmec visual culture as it is understood...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Antoine Dorison. Gregory Pereira. Marion Forest.

Thirty years ago, investigations in the city of Las Milpillas in the Malpaís of Zacapu, provided unprecedented insights on the origins of Late Postclassic tarascan social organization. One was the highlighting of a unique kind of urban organization upon lava flows ; as in all four tarascan cities of the Malpaís. Yet, unlike its counterparts, Las Milpillas specificity resides in the fact that a site portion lies upon older volcanics, providing arable lands at hand for the city dwellers to use....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Geoffrey Cunnar. Edward Stoner.

We argue that it is time to reconsider the use of the term biface in Great Basin archaeology and implement more heuristic terms in its place. In most instances, there is only one role or "one side of a biface" and that was to become a projectile point. It is time we recognize bifaces as such and acknowledge that preform morphology can be an indicator of temporal association and of social agents including children. Stage classification alone is limiting in terms of allowing us to broaden our...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Philip Carr.

This is an abstract from the "Three Sides of a Career: Papers in Honor of Robert L. Kelly" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bob came to the University of Louisville in my third year, and literally changed the Anthropology Department and my life. Coursework, field school, directed studies, and senior thesis, taught and/or guided by Bob, propelled me to graduate school. Consistent conversations over time and specific guidance at the 1991 SAA in NOLA...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Jones.

The Mashantucket Pequot Reservation is today one of the best-researched heritage landscapes in New England. Cooperation between the Mashantucket Pequot Tribe and UConn archaeologists has been positive and ongoing since the early 1980s. Initial heritage management work on the Reservation focused on ethnohistorical research and the documentation of Pequot homesteads as well as important off-reservation historical sites such as Mystic Fort. Archaeological work was largely limited to extensive...

DOCUMENT Citation Only German Loffler.

In this paper I explore the possible function of the annular rings on p’uku-like ceramic vessels from the Central Coast of Peru during the Late Intermediate period. I argue that this part of the vessel is not decorative as others have suggested for modern contexts. Instead, I hypothesize that the annular ring at the bottom of the p’uku-like vessel’s function was to buffer the hand from heat. Alternatively, the annular ring might have aided in adding stability to a standing vessels in shaky...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Dumas.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Colonial Archaeological Research in the American Midcontinent" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The French established Fort Tombecbé in present-day Alabama in 1736 to secure their alliance with the Choctaws and to more firmly establish their presence in a region vulnerable to English takeover. During the following twenty-seven years, hundreds of Choctaws visited the fort to trade and confer, and they eventually...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Monika Banach. Mark Howell.

This is an abstract from the "The Maya Wall Paintings of Chajul (Guatemala)" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Baile del Tz’unun is one of the dance-plays performed in the western highlands of Guatemala. In the past it was an annual celebration in Chajul. It is also present in Aguacatan, and there is a documented history of musical exchange between these two regions. Oral tradition associated to the Baile del Tz’unun as well as in the same time to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn MacFarland. Katherine Dungan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological repositories curate artifacts and associated documentation for state, tribal and federal agencies. In carrying out their legally mandated duties, each repository faces unique challenges, but common to all is the well-documented, multifaceted national curation crisis. The Arizona State Museum (ASM) is no exception, with personnel working to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kenneth Feder.

In the Martian Chronicles, author Ray Bradbury describes the ruins of an ancient Martian city in this way: "Perfect, faultless, in ruins, yes, but perfect, nonetheless." The notion that archaeological sites are perfect, precisely because of an appearance of decay, resides at the center of a worldview in which the archaeological record is inherently mysterious, removed from any connection to the mundane world of hunting camps, farmsteads, and industrial complexes of ordinary human beings. In this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Corey Herrmann. Nicholas Brown.

Archaeologists have long been fascinated with the exploitation and exchange of Spondylus spp. across the ancient world. This is especially true for the Andes, where the "thorny oyster" has been found far afield from its tropical breeding sites along the coasts of Ecuador and northern Peru. However, factors such as the uneven development of archaeology between Peru and Ecuador and the persistence of certain myths about Andean Spondylus have led to a "black-boxing" effect where exchange from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Irene Torreggiani. Lina Cabrera Sáenz. Eldetelllo Castilla. William Harvey. Alexander Geurds.

This is an abstract from the "Underwater and Coastal Archaeology in Latin America" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Central Nicaragua is highly susceptible to hydroclimatic variations, which are affecting the subsistence economies of local populations. To what extent hydroclimatic changes impact prehispanic adaptation strategies in the Mayales River Valley (MRV)? This presentation will show the final result of the Interdisciplinary Archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Celeste Gagnon. Bethany Turner.

Much sweat and ink has been shed investigating the Moche of north coastal Peru. But what of those who came before? In order to understand the Moche world, we must explore their history. To address this issue, the skeletal remains of over 850 individuals who lived in the Moche valley during the Guañape, Salinar or Gallinazo phases were examined. The collected bioarchaeological data including demographic patterns, oral health indicators, light and heavy isotopes, and pathological conditions allow...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erika Ruhl. Sanna Lipkin.

This paper specifically addresses the cultural construction of children’s age and identity by examining the textiles and burial clothing from a series of pre-Modern mummified children’s burials recovered from beneath church floors in northern Finland. During the pre-modern era, children’s burials in pre-modern Finland take one of three forms: (1) alone, in individual coffins (2) in association with other burials but still in their own coffin (3) co-burial, in the same coffin as others. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meaghan Peuramaki-Brown. Shawn Morton. Antonio Beardall.

This is an abstract from the "“The Center and the Edge”: How the Archaeology of Belize Is Foundational for Understanding the Ancient Maya, Part II" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological heritage management (AHM) involves identifying, protecting, managing, and preserving material remains of past human activity. In Belize, the Institute of Archaeology-NICH oversees AHM, including archaeological permitting, artifact management (including...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Heather Walder.

Through LA-ICP-MS elemental analyses of 874 glass trade beads from 31 early colonial-era archaeological sites in the Upper Great Lakes region of North America, and from late 17th century contexts historically associated with French exploration of the Gulf Coast of Texas, I identify patterning in the spatial and temporal distribution of European glass-bead recipe groups. Trading relationships among Indigenous peoples and outsiders in this French "Upper Country" took place on a complex "middle...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Fowler. Raquel López Rodríguez.

The impact of the eruption of Ilopango Volcano in the early sixth century A.D. has been a focus of Payson Sheets' research for more than four decades. The signature of this eruption is the distinctive "tierra blanca joven" (TBJ) layer found at sites in central and western El Salvador. Our excavations in 2013-15 at Ciudad Vieja, the archaeological remains of the Conquest-period town of San Salvador, have allowed us to identify a hitherto unknown site in the distribution of TBJ tephra. In some...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katie McHugh Bonham. Christyann M. Darwent. John Darwent.

Osseous tools and debitage collected from three middens at the Shaktoolik Airport site during excavations in the summers of 2014 and 2015 were analyzed using the chaîne opératoire rather than a typological approach to assess site use over time. Relative frequencies of raw materials, tool types, and production debris were analyzed from different periods. The Early Thule/Proto-Yup’ik portion (ca. AD 1200) of the assemblage came from a midden associated with a men’s house (qasgiq), and is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Will Pratt. David Brown. Steve Athens. Ryan Hechler.

This is an abstract from the "2023 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Timothy Beach Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Nestled within a deeply incised valley in the eastern cordillera of the Andes, the archaeological site of Zuleta is an immensely humanized hydrologic landscape. A complex network of perennially and seasonally wet streams and canals crisscross the pastures along the valley floor carrying water from the paramo to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mitchell Allen. William Trousdale. Ghulam Rahman Amiri.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ziyarat-i Amiran is a contemporary shrine dedicated to one of the founders of Islam in Afghanistan. Located in the barren Sistan desert of southwest Afghanistan and supported by food, water, and fuel brought in by pilgrims and truck drivers, it seems an unlikely place to support an ongoing religious institution. Documented by the Helmand Sistan Project in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thania Ibarra. Aurelio López Corral.

Textile production was one of the most valuable social and economic activities in prehispanic Mesoamerica. In this study, we inquire into thread production in the site of Tepeticpac, Tlaxcala, one of the main altepemeh of Late Postclassic Tlaxcallan, using a technological, ethnoarchaeological and experimental analysis. In particular, we evaluate key attributes of archaeological spindle whorls in the spinning process, including weight, shape and moment of inertia. With the collaboration of three...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thania Ibarra. Lane Fargher. Aurelio Lopez Corral.

This is an abstract from the "Tlaxcallan: Mesoamerica's Bizarro World" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological excavations undertaken by the Tlaxcallan Archaeological Project have recovered an important sample of spindle whorls from Late Postclassic – Early Colonial (1420 -1540 A.D.) domestic contexts in Ocotelulco, a subsection of the urban site of Tlaxcallan, Mexico. In this paper, we present the results of the analysis of identified whorl...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edward Jolie.

In North America, some of the largest and most well preserved archaeological collections of perishable artifacts, including objects such as string, nets, baskets, textiles, mats, and sandals, are curated by the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian and National Museum of Natural History. Generally poor preservation of these items has challenged interested researchers to recover as much information as possible from them, meaning that even some of the very early, minimally...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sebastian Warmlander.

The history of South American metalworking still presents a number of unresolved questions, despite decades of archaeological and historical research. This is especially true for the Andean region, where in prehistoric times alloys of copper as well as precious metals were crafted into intricate objects. Here, analytical metallographic techniques such as scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD), and infra-red (IR) spectroscopy are used to investigate different aspects of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joshua Wright. Naomi Standen.

A wide range of Medieval settlement has been identified in the watershed of the Shar mörön river, a territory of grassland and narrow river valleys in the heartland of the nomadic Khitan and their Liao state (907-1125 CE). These settlements range from village landscapes to imperial capitals. This paper will introduce three urban settings of the Liao state: (1) A mercantile center, (2) a local administrative hub, and (3) an imperial capital city along with their immediate hinterlands. Through a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Hunstiger.

Dorsal flake scar directionality is used in lithic analysis to infer methods of core reduction and flake production. This has been done in two dimensions. This study analyzes flake scars at the assemblage level in three dimensions. I use both experimental assemblages (bifacial, blade, discoidal, and levallois) as well as archaeological samples from Tabun Cave, Israel, an important reference sequence (partly defined by scar patterning) for the Levantine Paleolithic. Experimental samples...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maxwell Lopez. Nathan Goodale. Alissa Nauman. Greg P. Lord.

Virtual reconstructions are becoming increasingly commonplace in archaeological vernacular and cultural heritage initiatives. As with any emergent technology however, the advantages, limits and drawbacks of such an approach are not well defined. This study assesses and contextualizes the validity and usefulness of virtual reconstructions in archaeological interpretation and academic publication and explores how such technologies are utilized in the field as a whole. In addition to a survey of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chip Wills. Beau Murphy. Heather Richards-Rissetto.

There are two large mounds on the south side of Pueblo Bonito that were extensively trenched in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Data from the re-excavation of three trenches are combined with new geospatial and remote sensing information to create a three dimensional reconstruction of mound history. Although low walls were built around parts of each mound at some point, there is no evidence that the mounds were ever enclosed by architecture. The mounds consist mostly of household...