Society for American Archaeology

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samantha Fladd. Claire Barker. E. Charles Adams. Dwight Honyouti.

The Homol’ovi Settlement Cluster (HSC) holds a significant place in Hopi history as a source of immigrants and a destination for emigrants. In addition to representing an important location along the migration route for groups from the South and East, these villages also housed people who temporarily emigrated from the Hopi mesas. As such, the HSC provides a unique perspective on the processes of population and social movement that contributed to the current form of Hopi society. Using the...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Sarah Janesko. Alison Shepherd. Grace Gronniger. Kevin Bradley.

The Veterans Curation Program has been rehabilitating U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) collections for long-term preservation since 2009. With the dual goal of training and assisting veterans with their professional goals while also archiving and curating USACE collections, this program ultimately produces high quality digital records and photographs of cultural materials from across the U.S. This paper delves into the value of USACE’s digital collections for continued research, education,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Luc Vrydaghs. Alexander Chevalier. Yannick Devos.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Archaeobotany, Part II" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite extensive research during the last decades, phytolith botanical attribution remains a critical issue. Nevertheless, the development and expansion of reference collections confirm that some taxa produce very distinctive phytoliths at different taxonomic levels. Things become more complex when considering closely...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Borrazzo.

An anthropocentric perspective governs most of archaeological research into lithic assemblages. Hence, spatial and morphological trends in the lithic record are interpreted primarily in terms of human technological behavior without a systematic assessment of unintentional and/or non-human factors as sources of variation. Surprisingly, controversies on the natural vs. anthropic character of several lithic assemblages or ‘industries’ did not prompt the adoption of taphonomic approaches by lithic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steve Kosiba.

This is an abstract from the "Humble Houses to Magnificent Monuments: Papers in Honor of Jerry D. Moore" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past three decades, anthropological archaeologists have engaged in a vibrant interdisciplinary conversation about the production of space. Rejecting earlier viewpoints that saw social space as the passive product of cultural worldview or political strategy, archaeologists developed innovative approaches...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Schumacher. Miriam Belmaker.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Colonies, as discontinuous frontiers, may be more or less integrated into the homeland, resulting in distinct fortification patterns across time. The former Danish West Indies (DWI) was one such discontinuous frontier, separated from Copenhagen by more than 7,500 km yet a key part of the Danish economy. By examining changes and continuities in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Scherer. Stephen Houston.

The dichotomies of hot and cold, light and darkness were essential to Classic Maya cosmology. The celestial and underworld journey of solar deities offered a fundamental mythic charter, and fire was the ultimate transformative force, providing a bridge between earthly and otherworldly realms. Such ideology is especially patent in rites of death, sacrifice, and veneration. Monuments from western kingdoms describe censing rituals performed months, years, and even decades after the death of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Linda Neff. Ronald Krug. Peter Pilles.

This is an abstract from the "To Curate or Not to Curate: Surprises, Remorse, and Archaeological Grey Area" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Many land managing agencies have policies that forbid the collection of artifacts during archaeological survey and, even under controlled situations, as determined to be an "Adverse Effect" under Section 106 compliance interpretations. The main rationale is that removal destroys the contextual information of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patrick Lyons.

This is an abstract from the "To Curate or Not to Curate: Surprises, Remorse, and Archaeological Grey Area" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Arizona State Museum (ASM), at the University of Arizona, is the oldest and largest museum of anthropology in the southwestern United States and the largest and busiest non-federal archaeological repository in the country. ASM, as the state's official archaeological repository, is required to accept...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Martin. Blair Tormey.

Ground-penetrating radar (GPR) results can factor into the decision to excavate in the search for a clandestine grave. Most published research and case studies focus on the successful location and recovery of human remains, while relatively few examples have been published showing negative results. This presentation highlights a cold case where the data interpretation led to excavation, but did not produce the target sought. Information from a confidential informant led investigators to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chrissina C. Burke. Katie K. Tappan. Gavin B. Wisner. Julie Hoggarth. J. Britt Davis.

Deciphering middens, feasting, ritual, or terminal deposits in the Maya world requires an evaluation of faunal remains. Maya archaeologists have been and continue to evaluate other artifacts classes, but often simply offer NISP values for skeletal elements recovered from these deposits. To further understand their archaeological significance, we analyzed faunal materials from deposits at the sites of Baking Pot and Xunantunich in the Upper Belize River Valley. We identified the species, bone...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hendrik Van Gijseghem. Giacomo Gaggio. Kevin Vaughn.

Mina Primavera was a hematite mine exploited during the first part of the Early Intermediate Period by members of Nasca society. Its exceptional preservation conditions have led to the recovery of a large assemblage of botanical remains. Recent analysis of the ubiquity and diversity of botanical species allow us to reconstruct consumption practices that took place as part of mining activities. However, observation of taphonomic processes and stratigraphic distribution of the hundreds of maize...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Harrod. Kathryn Baustian.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The intent of this presentation is to compare patterns of violence on human skeletal remains recovered from archaeological sites in the San Juan Basin associated with Chaco Canyon and the Mimbres region in the US Southwest. The Chaco sites date to AD 850–1300, while the Mimbres sites date to AD 650–1300. Bioarchaeological signatures of violence on the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Haisley. Ashley Parker. Christopher Parker. Brian Codding.

Variation in territory size, population density, and residential mobility among small scale hunting and gathering societies tends to co-vary with territorial behaviors. Specifically, groups living in larger areas, at lower population densities with higher mobility are less likely to exhibit territorial behavior than their counterparts in smaller areas. Based on models from behavioral ecology, we suggest that this variation is due to underlying levels of environmental productivity: where...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nala Williams.

This is an abstract from the "Beyond Leaky Pipelines: Exploring Gender Inequalities in Archaeological Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, archaeological organizations and universities organized panels to address anti-Black racism in archaeology. These talks and panels relied on Black women’s sense of obligation to better not only the field of archaeology but the climate for Black people in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Casper Jacobsen.

This is an abstract from the "Misinformation and Misrepresentation Part 1: Reconsidering “Human Sacrifice,” Religion, Slavery, Modernity, and Other European-Derived Concepts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Spanish accounts from sixteenth-century colonial New Spain tell us that the Aztecs “sacrificed” humans, a notion that has been corroborated and expanded by scholars from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including archaeology,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Atkins Spivey.

Archaeologists rarely examine the reuse and reimagining of artifacts within contemporary Indigenous communities. The Pamunkey Indian Tribe, located in the Tidewater region of Virginia, has a long history of utilizing materials from the Reservation’s archaeological record in a variety of ways. For over a century, tribal members have reused artifacts in methods similar to their intended function, and they have reimagined them to create artwork and encourage artistic inspiration. Archaeology has...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Celeste Gagnon.

During the last two decades of work at the Huacas de Moche site a large number of human interments have been excavated. Although the remains of human sacrificial victims have been well studied, those buried as part of the daily course of events at the site have received less attention. Yet, if we are to understand how the Southern Moche Polity developed, thrived, and ultimately declined, then we must investigate the everyday lives of the women, men and children who were the polity. In this paper...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christian Gates St-Pierre. Jean-Christophe Ouellet. Claude Chapdelaine.

This is an abstract from the "Hearth and Home in the Indigenous Northeast" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists have been largely interested in documenting the architecture, variability, evolution, and even the symbolism of Iroquoian longhouses for several decades in the Northeast, often using the village or the region as the preferred scale of analysis. However, the study of daily life inside these longhouses has not received the same...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Taylor Lawhon. David Mixter.

In 2012, excavations were conducted within a Late Classic noble palace at the ancient Maya site of Actuncan, located in western Belize. Remains of a large deposit of Terminal Classic materials were recovered from a corner of the palace’s primary courtyard. Based on its location on the courtyard surface and below collapse, the deposit was assumed to date to the period of the palace’s abandonment. The placement of this deposit was contemporary with Actuncan’s 9th-century renaissance as a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Danny Zborover. Aaron Sonnenschein.

The quaint and seemingly static Oaxacan Chontal villages, tucked away in the highlands of southern Mexico, conceal behind a long history of population movements and resettlement. For the last five centuries and more, entire communities migrated and changed places as an adaptive response to intricate ecological, economic, political, and social factors. While the dispersed settlement pattern largely ‘fused’ together in the 16th century colonial congregations, many other communities went through a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Cox.

To conduct an archaeological data recovery project using another’s testing results as your guide can be problematic, especially when those results are over a decade old. In 2014 Northland Research, Inc. undertook a large data recovery project at two sites located at the Wide Ruins Community on the Navajo Nation. Both of these sites had been previously tested by a company other than Northland. One of these sites AZ P-37-42(NN) was an obvious habitation with the remnants of a room block and an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Chiou.

In recent years, coastal Peru has seen an encouraging upwards trend in the number of archaeologists trained in the field of paleoethnobotany or archaeobotany. With growing numbers of practitioners in the field, it is crucial to remain vigilant of methodological concerns that are relevant not only to archaeobotanists as a whole, but particularly to those working in the unique environment of coastal Peru. In the interest of maximizing interpretative potential while maintaining the capability to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sean Dougherty. Akira Tsuneki.

The injurious effects of the agricultural transition on health have been well documented. However, contributions from the Near East are relatively uncommon. Excavations at the Pottery Neolithic cemetery at Tell el-Kerkh in northwest Syria provide an opportunity to study into the effects of the agricultural transition in this less examined region. The cemetery sample consists of 258 individuals. The mortality profile reveals high infant mortality, with 40% of the sample dying before the first...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeffrey Splitstoser. Gabrielle Vail.

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. Archaeological sources suggest that textiles from Chancay culture (ca. 1000-1470), occupying the central coastal region of Peru, were produced in large quantities. While they are ubiquitous in collections all over the world, they remain to be systematically studied, as do the tools that were used to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan deFrance. Edana Lord. Michelle LeFebvre. Catherine Collins. Elizabeth Matisoo-Smith.

The Caribbean Ceramic Age (AD500-1500) was associated with increased interaction between the islands and mainland South America. The domestic guinea pig (Cavia porcellus) was introduced to the Caribbean post-AD500 through human transportation. Archaeological remains of guinea pigs are present on several Caribbean islands. This study used complete mitogenomes from ancient guinea pigs as a commensal model to identify likely human migration routes and interaction spheres within the Caribbean...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sonia Alconini.

The Kallawaya region was an important imperial breadbasket of the Collasuyu, located to the east of the Titicaca basin. Formed by a set of narrow temperate valleys, this region was a natural corridor that led to Apolo and the Mojos savannas to the north, and to the east to the tropical Yunga mountains. Because of its marked altitudinal variation, this region was suitable for pastoralism, the production of corn and coca, and farther east, the exploitation of gold mines. The Inkas at their arrival...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Bletzer.

The roughly 200 years from the Coronado expedition to the reoccupation of the Tiwa pueblo of Sandia (Na-fiat, Tuf Shur Tia) in the 1740s brought unprecedented challenges on two of the largest Puebloan groups, the southern Tiwas and their neighbors, the Piros. Although impact from Spanish encounters and other stressors varied, Piro and Tiwa pueblos were dramatically reduced in number at the time of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. Decades after the Revolt, the Tiwa pueblos of Isleta (Tue-I) and Sandia...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sylvia Batty. Rebecca Friedel. Leah McCurdy.

Maya archaeology has seen a steady shift to the integration of community heritage interest and ownership in the design, execution and outcomes of research and preservation efforts. This poster describes a heritage outreach project focused on archaeology literacy development among grade school children in the community of San Jose Succotz, Belize, adjacent to the Xunantunich archaeological reserve. We authored a fully illustrated book entitled To the Mountain (2016) for the Succotz community,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Manuel Perales.

Previous research on the Inca road system have generally developed functionalist perspectives on their associated characteristics and infrastructure, inherited in several cases from procesualist approaches that focused primarily on their economic and military role. However, more recent studies on the nature of the Inca state have varied substantially, granting an outstanding importance to ideology and religion as mechanisms of domination. Based on these considerations, this paper presents an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian McCray.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the montaña, the forested eastern slopes and adjacent upper Amazon, inhabitants were involved in regional and interregional trade networks connecting the Andes and Amazon. Given that material correlates for often ephemeral lowland goods are difficult to recover archaeologically worked bone artifacts are an important piece of data indexing lowland...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shauna Latosky. Pascale de Robert.

This is an abstract from the "Body Modification: Examples and Explanations" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This chapter offers a comparative look at the labrets of the Mebêngôkre (Brazil) and Mursi (Ethiopia) with a special emphasis on how lip-plates are made, worn, valued, and evaluated at a normative level. By normative, we mean the historical, technical, symbolic, and discursive ways in which such practices are understood by the Mursi and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aylar Abdolahzadeh.

This is an abstract from the "Establishing the Science of Paleolithic Archaeology: The Legacy of Harold Dibble (1951–2018) Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For many Paleolithic archaeologists, it is important to determine whether similar characteristics of lithic artifacts and/or assemblages resulted from convergent evolution because this may help us better understand the evolutionary developments of stone artifact technologies from H....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Terry Powis. Jon Spenard. Adam King. Nilesh Gaikwad.

For the past two decades, considerable archaeological attention in the Maya area has been paid to ritual cave practices and absorbed residue analysis of pottery, yet these two areas of research have not intersected. In this paper, we discuss the results of the kinds of liquid residues identified in monochrome and unslipped pottery vessels from caves around the site of Pacbitun in west central Belize, where extensive research in Classic Maya elite behavior has taken place. While we know the elite...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lawrence Loendorf.

Pictographs and a few petroglyphs of tobacco plants, tobacco gardens and tobacco headdresses are found at a dozen sites across Montana and Wyoming. Very similar images painted on Crow Indian Tobacco Society pipe bags, moccasins and other clothing strongly suggest the pictographs and petroglyphs were made by the Crow. High concentrations of tobacco pollen at one site suggest it was the location of a tobacco garden

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Damitio. Shannon Tushingham. Korey Brownstein. David Gang.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The past several years have seen a number of studies—largely based at Washington State University—incorporating organic chemical residue analytical methods to address questions regarding past smoking practices in Northwest North America. In this poster we summarize the results of these studies, which cover a geographic range from northern California to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Sattler. Thomas Gillispie. Carrin Halfmann. Angela Younie.

Three precontact individuals inadvertently discovered in the village McGrath, Alaska provide a novel understanding of human history of the Upper Kuskokwim River region of Eastern Beringia. Collaboration between the McGrath Village Council, MTNT, Inc. and Tanana Chiefs Conference enabled a community research endeavor that has yielded a radiocarbon age estimate of c. 600-700 cal BP, isotopic dietary reconstruction suggesting a strong reliance on anadromous salmon, rare dental traits including a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Kurnick.

This is an abstract from the "Democratizing Heritage Creation: How-To and When" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Collaborative archaeological approaches recognize that partnerships between archaeologists and members of descendant communities can potentially democratize heritage production and foster a more inclusive—and thus more accurate—understanding of the past. Nevertheless, descendant communities are often themselves hierarchical. Inequalities...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Noa Corcoran-Tadd. Arturo Rivera Infante. Barbara Carbajal Salazar. Sarah Baitzel.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent field work in Tacna (far southern Peru) by a joint team from Princeton and Washington University in St. Louis has investigated the long-term landscape history of the Sama Valley and its desert margins. Located between the research hotspots of Moquegua and Arica, the Sama Valley has long been overlooked. At the same time, it is well positioned to offer...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Kappelman. Matthew Hill. Frank Huffman.

This is an abstract from the "A Tribute to the Contributions of Lawrence C. Todd to World Prehistory" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Larry Todd has played a central role in applying taphonomy to studies of prehistoric human behavior. He developed standardized and, most importantly, reproducible methods of observational quantification. We here present studies of Trinil (Java) and Hadar (Ethiopia), both of which figure prominently in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dougless Skinner. Kristen Barnett.

The Togiak Archaeological and Paleoecological Project (TAPP) is a collaborative project driven by the Togiak community of southwest Alaska and their interests in documenting past lifeways at the Old Togiak Village. During the summer of 2015 The University of Montana conducted field work at the site using surface and sub-surface mapping to guide a non-invasive core sampling technique across the village, led by Dr. Kristen Barnett (Bates College). Thirty-five core samples were collected from a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ross W. Jamieson.

In the 1870s Manuel J. Cobos founded the El Progreso plantation agricultural operation on the Island of San Cristóbal in the Galapagos. It is known that he used "scrip," or company-issued cash, to force workers to only spend their wages at the company store. Archaeological recovery of hard rubber tokens from several plantation contexts brings up many questions of economics and labour relations surrounding this remote location which was also tied to the global economy through steam power,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kari Lentz.

During the second half of the nineteenth century thousands of travelers embarked on voyages aboard steamships headed for San Francisco that could last weeks or months. In the past decade, William Self Associates has conducted multiple excavations within the vicinity of the original coastline of Yerba Buena Cove that have yielded an abundance of artifacts. This paper focuses on dinnerware pieces employed for meals aboard vessels of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company that were recovered from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ferran Cabrero-Miret.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the last fifty years, from Amazonian Archaeology there has been a remarkable and growing debate about the origin and dispersion of the cultures of the area, their carrying capacity, population number and density, political structure, and links with the adjacent geographical areas, as the Andes to its western border. More recently, carrying capacity and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Fowler.

This is an abstract from the "The Movement of People and Ideas in Eastern Mesoamerica during the Ninth and Tenth Centuries CE: A Multidisciplinary Approach Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological chronologies and material-culture evidence indicate large-scale migrations of Nahua peoples to eastern Mesoamerica in the ninth and tenth centuries CE linked to the collapse of the Toltec state at Tula Chico in about 850 CE. This event...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dolores Piperno.

This is an abstract from the "Dedication, Collaboration, and Vision, Part II: Papers in Honor of Tom D. Dillehay" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Tom Dillehay’s best-known research is probably his pioneering work at Monte Verde, Chile, which was primary in upending the “Clovis First” paradigm for the initial peopling of the Americas. Perhaps less well known is his research in Peru that provided crucial information on the age, location, settlement...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Arnn.

This is an abstract from the "Dedication, Collaboration, and Vision, Part I: Papers in Honor of Tom D. Dillehay" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Tom Dillehay is best known for his tremendous contributions to the archaeology of the Americas and rightly so. In terms of quality, impact, and scope, the combined body of his work is phenomenal. His interdisciplinary holistic anthropological approach frequently casts the archaeology of the Western...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeffrey Dean. Ronald Towner.

Tom Windes is virtually unique among archaeologists for his appreciation of the range of dendrochronology’s contribution to archaeology and of the preservation crisis that afflicts the integrity of wooden elements in Southwestern archaeological sites of all ages. Tom’s interest in dendrochronology as more than dating led him to develop sampling tools, techniques, and protocols that maximize the behavioral and chronological information in dendroarchaeological wood. His recognition of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cory Breternitz.

Tom Windes has been a leader of innovative research on the Colorado Plateau for over four decades. His early work as the archaeologist on the Manti-LaSalle National Forest in southern Utah lead to one of the first pot hunting prosecutions under ARPA. His Forest Service career was followed by work with the Zuni Tribe and then nearly three decades of association with the National Park Service’s Chaco Center. Tom has become synonymous with all things Chaco, serving as Project Director for the Chaco...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Blair Heidkamp. Olivia Navarro-Farr.

Robert Smith began The College of Wooster excavations at the site of Pella in 1967. Pella is among the longest inhabited sites in the Southern Levant, with first occupation in the Paleolithic and down through the late Islamic phase. In the first season, excavations were focused on the Western Church Complex and the Eastern Cemetery. One of the tombs excavated, Tomb 1, possessed in excess of 100 artifacts, mainly ceramic vessels. Publications on that season contain only a short report on the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Schweickart.

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. In an ironic twist, while the names of the Confederate casualties of the Battle of Williamsburg have been remembered and memorialized, literally carved in stone, the physical remains of the soldiers were lost and forgotten until we accidentally exposed their burials while excavating near the...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Kelly Brown. Alison Shepherd. Josh Wackett.

With the curation crisis growing more prominent in the realm of archaeology, research focus is slowly being shifted to previously excavated collections that are under analyzed and underreported. Many of these previously excavated collections are overlooked by potential researchers because of the perceived difficulties of re-establishing provenience and quantitative control for artifacts that have been long separated from their original archaeological context. Since 2009, the Veterans Curation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julia Earle.

This is an abstract from the "Beyond the Ancestors: New Approaches to Andean "Open Sepulchers"" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper articulates a novel approach to prehispanic Andean funerary architecture that interprets differences in materiality and temporality as evidence for distinct religious traditions. I analyze a sample of 845 tombs throughout the Sacred Valley, Peru, and adjacent tributary valleys, built and used during the Late...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alfonso Gastelum-Strozzi. Ingris Peláez Ballestas. Jesús Zarco Navarro. José Luis Punzo Díaz.

This poster presents the results of the application of computational methods to classified archaeological deposits contained within cinerary urns. The method uses morphological properties and textural parameters to create quantitative descriptors that can be related to archaeological interpretations of the objects. The Pre-Columbian cinerary urns were discovered in the municipality of Huetamo, Michoacan, Mexico. The method uses information obtained from a Computed Tomography scan of each urn...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elisabeth Rareshide.

Many archaeologists have studied religious identity in Native American populations. Tongva sites such as Lemon Tank and Big Dog Cave on the plateau of San Clemente Island provide a rich source of data on Tongva ritual practices. Collections from these sites include ritual avian and canid burials along with caches of seeds, beads, and ritually "killed" objects. Existing research has focused on connecting the archaeological record to the historical and ethnographic record to identify the rituals...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dania Talley.

This is an abstract from the "Hood Archaeologies: Impacts of the School-to-Prison Pipeline on Archaeological Practice and Pedagogy" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. I found my roots in archaeology in undergraduate school during an archaeological excavation at the Stewart Indian School in Carson City, NV. It was an empowering experience. It was the first time I witnessed a BIPOC community having autonomy over their historical narratives. It also...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Sosna. Lenka Brunclikova. Tomas Urban.

In this paper, we examine the role of landfills in the construction of landscape. Landfills represent ambiguous spaces where material remains of human action are disposed and forgotten. They tend to be hidden from the view of persons passing by and only those who gone astray might encounter these blind spots on the map. Yet, landfills are well known to the professionals who plan and manage large amounts of waste to transform it into a new kind of assemblage that shapes landscape. In contrast to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Patterson.

This paper explores two different views about common sense--those of Clifford Geertz and Antonio Gramsci. It examines their presuppositions, their utility for archaeologists, and considers the implications of current common-sense explanations of the past SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Bisson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Acheulo-Yabrudian (A-Y) is the final manifestation of the Lower Paleolithic of the Levant. This paper reports on numerous A-Y tool fragments discovered among the small finds collected during the Jelinek excavation of Tabun Cave, Israel. Tabun is the longest stratified Paleolithic sequence in the Eastern Mediterranean and includes all three facies of the...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Jessica Watson. Jack Rossen.

The Myers Farm site is located on a hill ten miles east of Cayuga Lake, central New York. It is a small mid-15th century Cayuga farmstead and feasting ground identified by a midden approximately ten meters in diameter. A large roasting pit, hearth features, and storage pits contained animal bone, including worked tools and food debris. This paper describes a preliminary faunal analysis of selected features. Recovered fauna include a generous range of local species, including mammals, birds,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chelsea Reedy. Leland Bement.

The Clary Ranch site in Southwestern Nebraska and the Bull Creek site in Northwestern Oklahoma are Late-Paleoindian camps that were used for processing the meat and bones from bison hunts. This is an experimental archaeological investigation involving Clary Ranch and Bull Creek, both of which contain evidence of spiral fracturing on bison phalanges resulting from the butchering and preparation process. This archaeological experiment investigates possible motives Paleoindian hunters would have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ella Beaudoin. David R. Braun. Jonathan S. Reeves.

Although studies of lithic technology have been ongoing for over a century our knowledge of what tools were used for is still poorly resolved. Detailed analysis of microscopic damage has been the major focus studies of tool use. However, these studies are often limited to a subset of tools that have not undergone post-depositional damage and can be studied microscopically. Recently new approaches to damage patterns on the edges of simple flaked tools have been used to develop assemblage scale...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marco Peresani. Davide Delpiano. Kristen Heasley. Nicola Nannini. Matteo Romandini.

Studies of the way Neanderthal groups used knapping technologies and organized their economy and land-use are sparse in Europe and even scantier in the Alps, so only in some regions can cyclical and seasonal residential movements be inferred from data on the exploitation of ungulates with variable levels of migratory behavior. Two of the most widespread methods used in stone knapping were the Discoidal and Levallois. However, analyses of these lithic artifacts are not yet sufficiently integrated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan O'Neil. Nawa Sugiyama. Gilberto Pérez Roldán. Laura Maccarelli. Yosi Pozeilov.

This is an abstract from the "From Materials to Materiality: Analysis and Interpretation of Archaeological and Historical Artifacts Using Non-destructive and Micro/Nano-sampling Scientific Methods" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper reviews our interdisciplinary study examining a set of carved deer bones comprising what appears to be a weaving or sewing kit for an ancient Maya royal woman bearing the Sa’ emblem glyph associated with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lacey Carpenter. Jonathan Paige.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Oaxacan Cuisine" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cooking and eating are practices with cultural significance beyond sustenance. Understanding foodways during times of sociopolitical transformation can provide a window into how people foster, resist, and mediate social change in daily life. The context in which food is produced, prepared, consumed, and shared provides insight into people’s changing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wesley Bernardini.

This is an abstract from the "Attention to Detail: A Pragmatic Career of Research, Mentoring, and Service, Papers in Honor of Keith Kintigh" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. More than any other scholar in the American Southwest, Keith Kintigh is responsible for spreading numeracy – the ability to understand and work with numbers – to the current generation of Southwestern archaeologists. His Tools for Quantitative Archaeology (TFQA) software...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Madsen. Carl Lipo.

Simulation is an increasingly central tool across many theoretical frameworks but especially in evolutionary archaeology. Simulation and numerical analysis is routinely employed in hypothesis tests and model development. Simulations, however, have a well-deserved reputation as difficult to replicate and test, and it is rare that researchers beyond the authors can build upon a previously published simulation study. To improve replicability, and to make our work accessible, we employ standard...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Darci Clayton.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation will discuss the results and conclusions of my Masters thesis research, which addresses cultural interaction patterns and corresponding lithic hafted biface manufacturing traditions in the south-central portion of Ontario. It focuses on the analysis of morphometric and raw material variability in lithic hafted bifaces from the Middle Archaic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jay Taylor.

The purpose of this poster is to discuss the analysis of tools found at Hanna’s Town, and to determine the nature of the various tasks performed by its residents, as well as the town’s economic conditions. This study aims to answer the following research questions: (1.) What kinds of tools are present at Hanna’s Town and what tasks are they associated with? (2.) Does the spatial arrangement of these artifacts reveal any information about where these tasks took place? (3.) Are there any...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ann Peters.

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. In most of the world ancient fabrics are not preserved, though much can be learned about garment systems, surface design and production techniques through tools, accessories and contemporary imagery. The Andean desert coast and mortuary traditions provide extraordinary conditions for textile...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Brady. Julie Royer. Loukas Barton. Micah Hale. Brad Comeau.

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 local vs. nonlocal toolstone sources can reveal much about past hunter-gatherer behavior. Toolstone-acquisition-related decisions reflect past people’s settlement strategy—“mapping on” or logistically exploiting a stone resource, raw material quality, and environmental productivity. Our sample of nine sites is an optimal geographic context...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jon Erlandson. René Vellanoweth. Torben Rick. Nicholas Jew.

Except for major sources of chalcedonic chert on eastern Santa Cruz and soapstone on Santa Catalina, the islands off the Pacific Coast of Alta California were long thought to be impoverished in high-quality materials for making stone tools. As a result, cherts and other toolstones could have been a major source of trade between islanders and mainlanders. We summarize the distribution of known lithic resources on the islands, documenting numerous chert types on the Northern Channel Islands and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara Betz.

To better understand diet, oral health, and physiological stress loads of historic 19th century mobile pastoralists from Central Asia, the frequency of caries, ante-mortem tooth loss (AMTL), and linear enamel hypoplasia (LEH) were assessed macroscopically from a skeletal sample (n=40) of a pastoralist population from Urga (Ulaanbaatar), Mongolia. Results show a low percentage of individuals affected by caries (11.4%) consistent with a diet low in sugars and carbohydrates but high in animal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karina Gerdau-Radonic. Jelle DeFrancq.

Changes in political, economic and social organisation may affect diet and access to resources, and consequently dental health. This study aimed to assess the dental health of two populations from Peru and to establish differences over time. Caries, Linear Enamel Hypoplasia (LEH), ante-mortem tooth loss (AMTL), and calculus were recorded for Tablada de Lurín (TL; 1 AD – 200 AD) and for Pueblo Viejo (PV; 1476 AD – 1534 AD). Frequencies were examined in order to assess sex and inter- population...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Philip Fisher.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The conceptual basis of this study is that flintknapping knowledge and technique in small, hunter-gatherer groups is passed from generation to generation through a small number of flintknappers. This should result in similar flake scar patterning on projectile points that can be identified using topographic morphometric analysis. Topographic morphometrics is a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carole Nash.

The western slopes of the Virginia Blue Ridge contain limited evidence of prehistoric activity, in stark contrast to the eastern slopes where prolific sites model seasonal upland mobility patterns for the southern Middle Atlantic. Fewer than 80 prehistoric sites, the majority identified as small lithic scatters bereft of diagnostics, are documented for the 105 miles of the western slopes of Shenandoah National Park; five times that number are documented for the eastern slopes. Attributed by some...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kenneth Holyoke. Susan Blair. Ramona Nicholas.

Previous studies in New Brunswick have described traditional terminology and place-names (Blair, nd.; Ganong 1896; Rayburn 1975) as well as traditional lifeways and practice (Perley et al. 2000) along the Saint John River, or, the Wolastoq. These studies recognize the intimate relationship between the river and its people, and the language that describes the connection to the river and its dynamic landscape. Certainly, this applies to a perception of resource locales along the river, from where...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gunvor Lindstroem.

A sanctuary of the Hellenistic period was recently discovered at the village of Torbulok in southwest Tajikistan. Its discovery was based on a random find of a large limestone vessel, identified as a perirrhanterion – a vessel for Greek purification rituals. The excavations, started in 2013 by a German-Tajik team, gave insights into the structure of the sanctuary and confirmed the dating to the 3rd and 2nd century BC, as Bactria was part of the Hellenistic world. The unearthed installations and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Williams.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mississippian and related sedentary settlements in the eastern United States often appear unstable in the archaeological record. The eastern US is also in the most tornadically active area on earth. Tornadoes have been an impetus of settlement and social change in both the historic and modern era. Using 50 years of data collected by the National Weather...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Thompson. Jordan Towers. Christopher Henshilwood.

Tortoises are one of the most common faunal components at many Middle Stone Age (MSA) sites on the southern coast of South Africa. They provide protein, fat, and other ‘animal’ resources in a ‘collectable’ package, which gives rare insight into the collected component of MSA diet. At most MSA sites, tortoise assemblages are dominated by Chersina angulata, a medium-sized tortoise with sufficient calories to provide approximately 20 – 30% of the daily energetic requirements for an active adult...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Koski-Karell.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Ile de la Tortue, Haiti, is perhaps more famously known as Tortuga for its association with the seventeenth century's Buccaneers. It was settled in prehistoric times by multiple cultural groups, given its Spanish name by Columbus, depopulated by enslavement of its indigenous population, settled by English Puritans, liberated by French Huguenots, became a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anthony Graesch.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology Out-of-the-Box: Investigating the Edge of the Discipline" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeology has long sought to distance itself from the present, and despite a small corpus of novel and seminal research emerging over the last four decades, an archaeology that addresses the contemporary has remained only on the fringes of the discipline. Highlighting recent investigations in which the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Curtis Marean.

This is an abstract from the "Establishing the Science of Paleolithic Archaeology: The Legacy of Harold Dibble (1951–2018) Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The methods that we use to excavate archaeological sites shape the resulting data in an unchangeable manner and have significant downstream impacts on our ability to study and interpret our data. In 1987 Harold Dibble published “Measurement of Artifact Provenience with an Electronic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joanna Ostapkowicz. Ryan Wheeler. Lee Ann Newsom. Fiona Brock. Christophe Snoeck.

Florida’s wealth of prehistoric wood sculpture includes three large zoomorphic ‘totems’ dredged in the 1950s and 1970s from the banks of Hontoon Island, along the St Johns River, and a stylistically unusual anthropomorphic figure from the Tomoka River. Some, like the Hontoon owl, have had a long history of museum conservation, display and interpretation. These central Florida sculptures form a unique corpus that can inform on the diversity of artistic expression within a region long dominated by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tammy Hodgskiss.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ochre is a colorful thread that meanders through our human story. This iron-rich pigmentous rock became habitually used by Homo sapiens during the Late Pleistocene in Africa. It was later used in the creation of rock art paints, and is still used around the world in various ways. Ochre painting workshops are offered at Origins Centre Museum in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Linda Hurcombe. Alison Sheridan. Fiona Pitt.

Traditional museum presentations of rare or fragile archaeological artefacts are dominated by displays behind glass; vision dominates the sensory experience. The emotional connections built by more multisensory engagement with artefacts offer a better appreciation of the ancient objects and an enhanced museum visit. The research focused on icons of identity which were too precious to allow handling and items which were too fragile to touch, such as ancient perishable textiles and basketry. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Martin Stein. Laura Hronec.

First implemented in 2008, the Permian Basin Programmatic Agreement (PBPA) is an alternative form of compliance with Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, as amended.The PBPA allows the oil and gas industry and potash mining companies in southeastern New Mexico to contribute funding for archaeological research in lieu of requiring a class III archaeological inventory within the PBPA Area, provided they avoid recorded cultural resources.This paper describes the context in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sovi-Mya Wellons. Ryan Seidemann. Christine Halling.

This is an abstract from the "Human Remains in the Marketplace and Beyond: Myths and Realities of Monitoring, Grappling With, and Anthropologizing the Illicit Trade in a Post-Harvard World" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Buddhist and Hindu Tantra practitioners have a well-known tradition of salvaging the skeletal remains of tantric monks from sky burials and converting elements for subsequent ceremonial use. These converted remains, broadly...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kevin Nolan. Talon Silverhorn. Glenna J. Wallace. Joseph Blanchard. Garet Couch.

This is an abstract from the "Collaborative and Community Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2020, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) started planning for the state’s 76th state park focused on the late-eighteenth-century Shawnee town of Chillicothe on the Little Miami River. ODNR was committed to working collaboratively with the three Shawnee Nations to design the park and its interpretive content. Over the last two...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marcus Hamilton.

This is an abstract from the "The Expanding Bayesian Revolution in Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. To date, the “Bayesian Revolution” in archaeology has focused primarily on statistical inference: the move from hypothesis testing to credence building. Bayesian thinking extends far beyond the practicalities of statistical inference. Bayesian theory is about epistemology; it describes how we acquire knowledge of the world by reducing the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ventura Pérez.

This is an abstract from the "The Future of Bioarchaeology in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In his article, Bioarchaeology as Anthropology (2003:27), George Armelagos noted that, "scientists’ perceptions of their discipline clearly influence how they frame their research agenda." This paper will illustrate how all such agendas are politicized. To engage with violence in the past from the safety of your labs and computer screens is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Cohen. Elsa Jadot.

Research on the Purépecha Empire (AD 1350-1521) in western Mexico has traditionally focused on elite activities after imperial formation. Consequently, there is limited information about the mechanisms for imperial development and changes in internal social, political, and economic structures that must have occurred in pre-imperial contexts. Study of artifact production is particularly important for understanding political reorganization strategies because producers and consumers may have been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ellen Chapman. Victoria Ferguson.

This is an abstract from the "Deep History, Colonial Narratives, and Decolonization in the Native Chesapeake" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Long overdue federal acknowledgment of Virginia’s tribes has created a sea change for many of Virginia’s tribal communities over the last five years. Virginia now has seven federally recognized resident tribes, and an additional five tribes have state recognition. Virginian erasures of Native history have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wetherbee Dorshow.

This paper summarizes objectives, strategies and preliminary findings of ongoing research at Chaco Canyon led by the University of New Mexico and the Puente Institute, and funded by the National Science Foundation. The paper focuses on the use of advanced geospatial technologies for field data collection, analysis, and visualization. Project datasets to be discussed include airborne and terrestrial lidar, stereo panoramic photogrammetry, kite/balloon mapping, GIS-based full-motion video,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Pluta. Brittany Cummings. Jessica Whelpley. Megan LeBlanc. Gustav Paulay.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Maritime adaptations play an essential role in the central Andean past as far back as the region’s earliest occupation. While economically useful molluscan species are well known by archaeologists, other invertebrates are inadequately understood due to poor preservation and/or lack of interest. This poster presents the preliminary results of a biodiversity...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dusti Bridges. Kurt Jordan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Onöndowa'ga:' (Seneca Iroquois) White Springs site near Geneva, New York, was occupied circa 1688-1715 CE. The town, approximately 3.4 hectares in size and likely palisaded, was founded in the aftermath of the 1687 French-led Denonville invasion that destroyed several Onöndowa'ga:' towns and most of their agricultural fields. Cornell University-sponsored...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Pryor. Waylon Coats.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While there is a long history of archeological work in Yosemite National Park, this work is grounded in Western European traditions of archeology that does not take into consideration perspectives of the people who produced much of the record this archeology sets out to understand. These people had their own sense of time, space, and values that effected...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Wattenmaker.

This is an abstract from the "Breaking the Mold: A Consideration of the Impacts and Legacies of Richard W. Redding" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Decades before anthropologists advocated for multispecies anthropology and ethnography, Richard Redding was charting a new path for a multispecies approach to anthropological archaeology. His research reveals an implicit awareness of the complexity of human-animal relationships that is a hallmark of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Pryor. Galen Lee.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster is a collaboration in an attempt to create a new archeology rooted in a Native American tradition of the people who created the archeological deposits, based in a Nim sense of time, space and values. Archeologists must get away from the artificial concept of sites, which divides rather than looks for interconnections. We must show respect for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only TzeHuey Chiou-Peng. Jianfeng Cui.

Although research works on the Bronze Age burials in Yunnan in the past fifty years have expanded our knowledge on various aspects of ancient Yunnan societies, many questions pertaining to the earliest stages of human existence in Yunnan have remained to be answered for short of a well-defined chronological sequence from settlement archaeology. Recent findings of early habitation sites in the environs of the Lake Er are beginning to shed new lights on the exiting issues, including questions...