Society for American Archaeology

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carly Ameen. Joel Alves. Thomas Fowler. Greger Larson. Naomi Sykes.

This is an abstract from the "HumAnE Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human immigration and biological invasions are high-profile topics in modern politics, but neither are uniquely modern phenomena. Migrations of people, animals and ideas were common in antiquity and are frequently incorporated into expressions of cultural identity. However, the more recent the migration, the more negative modern attitudes are towards them. Native is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelly Jenks. Shannon Cowell. Hannah Dutton.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Paraje San Diego is a historic campsite situated on El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro National Historic Trail in Doña Ana County, New Mexico. Documents from the Spanish colonial, Mexican, and American periods indicate that travelers regularly stopped at this site to collect water and rest before continuing their journey. Archaeological survey, evaluative...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Gerard. Matthew Napolitano. Geoffrey Clark. Scott Fitzpatrick.

The initial human settlement of Yap, Western Caroline Islands (northwest tropical Pacific), is one of the least understood in Pacific prehistory, although new archaeological research is beginning to address this issue. Excavations at the southern site of Pemrang in Yap, western Caroline Islands (northwest tropical Pacific) have revealed multiple rich, well-stratified deposits of shell and pottery spanning the known occupation sequence of Yap and extended the date of early human activity by ca....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Greig. Elizabeth Matisoo-Smith. Richard Walter.

Dogs were introduced to the islands of Australasia and the Pacific during human migrations and colonisations, but the timing and dispersal routes are unclear. To investigate these Oceanic dog introductions and movements, we generated complete or near complete ancient mitochondrial genomes from archaeological dog specimens from Thailand, Island Southeast Asia and Pacific islands, and from modern dingoes. When combined with additional published complete mitogenome sequences from modern dogs from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lorena Becerra-Valdivia. Katerina Douka. Thomas Higham.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The timing of early human presence in the Americas is a debated topic in First Americans research. The variable of time is, after all, fundamental in the study of human dispersal; it forms a base with which to elucidate spatio-temporal patterns, study applicable bio-cultural processes, and frame environmental data. As such, this investigation analyses current...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Stone. Caroline Kisielinski. Justin Tackney. Scott Fitzpatrick. Dennis O'Rourke.

This is an abstract from the "When the Wild Winds Blow: Micronesia Colonization in Pacific Context" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Initial settlement of Remote Oceania represents the world’s last major wave of human dispersal. While transdisciplinary models involving linguistic, archaeological, and biological data have been utilized in the Pacific to develop basic chronologies and trajectories of initial settlement, a number of elusive gaps remain...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Miranda LaZar. Jonathan Dombrosky. Emily Jones. Seth Newsome.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this poster, we explore a cost-effective method for tracking artifacts made from individual raptors (or birds of prey) through the use of intra-skeletal variation in δ13C, δ15N, δ2H in modern samples of Turkey Vultures (Cathartes aura) and Golden Eagles (Aquila chrysaetos). Current methods of quantification in zooarchaeology, such as the minimum number of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Miranda LaZar. Jonathan Dombrosky.

This is an abstract from the "Birds in Archaeology: New Approaches to Understanding the Diverse Roles of Birds in the Past" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ability to track trade of socially valued goods made from raptor bones can give archaeologists a deeper understanding of both human-raptor interactions and networks of exchange. Reconstructing distribution of such goods from production centers, however, requires the ability to identify bones...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Luca Sitzia. Javiera Tapia. Francisco Garcia-Albarido Guede. Claudio Latorre. Calogero Santoro.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeophycology: New (Ethno)Archaeological Approaches to Understand the Contribution of Seaweed to the Subsistence and Social Life of Coastal Populations" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The use of seaweed as fuel has been mentioned in ethnographic sources from different world regions. Still, the archaeological record of seaweed burning is limited to contexts where preservation is exceptional, and the macroscopic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Hare. Marilyn Masson.

Considering luxury production activities in Mayapán's urban landscape reveals new data regarding a complex and diverse economic system. We explore the evidence for luxury production activities at households attached to elite palaces at this Postclassic Maya capital city. Surplus crafting at Mayapán varied according to scale, intensity, and the value of surplus items. Crafting of valuables such as effigy censers, figurines, copper objects, and stucco sculptures, was more closely supervised (or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Max Price.

How do animal morphologies change during domestication? How do different parts of the skeleton adapt to human management? In this poster, I take a quantitative approach to domestication by comparing biometrical data from two species of mammals that were domesticated in the Middle East around the same time (ca. 8000 BC): pigs (Sus scrofa) and sheep (Ovis aries). Both pigs and sheep were domesticated by Pre-Pottery Neolithic B communities in northern Syria/southern Anatolia, but these species...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angela Feak. Brian Stewart. Genevieve Dewar. John Kingston.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Stable isotopes in ratite eggshells record information about the birds’ diet during shell formation, making them valuable proxies for paleoenvironmental reconstruction. Here we present the results of carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen stable isotope analyses in ostrich (Struthio camelus australis) eggshell (OES) collected in excavation at Spitzkloof A, a rock...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew LoBiondo. Emily Kracht.

This is an abstract from the "Twenty Years of Archaeological Science at the Field Museum’s Elemental Analysis Facility" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Migration, pilgrimage, and other forms of movement and culture contact have long been recognized as important forces of social change. Social interaction among culturally diverse groups has been demonstrated archaeologically as an important causal factor in Mississippian origins throughout the US...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Roxana Cattaneo. Gisela Sario. Gilda Collo. Andres Izeta. Jose Caminoa.

In the archaeology of the Sierras Centrales of Argentina more than one hundred years ago studies reported the presence of a lithic technology centered on the use of quartz as a predominant raw material. However, little effort has been made to try to characterize its chemical composition so as to understand the circuits of mobility or the exchange networks in the archaeological sites of the region. The results of provenance studies have allowed us to advance in a geochemical characterization of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacob Johnson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Evergreen Plantation is a robust and well-preserved sugar cane plantation complex in Southeast Louisiana, that has its roots dating back to the formation of the Louisiana colony. Material culture from the plantation can provide an incredible insight into both temporal and behavioral patterns in the lives of free and enslaved individuals who lived at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine Halling. Ryan Seidemann. Frank Willis.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Hurricane Ida barreled ashore in southeast Louisiana as a category 4 tropical cyclone on August 29, 2021. The winds and storm surge caused massive damage to many of the coastal parishes, forcing evacuations, destroying homes and businesses, and displacing hundreds of Louisiana’s dead from their final resting places. In the immediate aftermath of the storm,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ian Milliken. Jerome Hesse. Suzanne Griset. Doug Gann.

Located at the confluence of the Rillito and Santa Cruz Rivers in Tucson, Arizona, archaeological excavations discovered an ancient agricultural field and canal irrigation system that contained human footprints belonging to an estimated 7 adults and 2 children, and 1 set of canine prints. These fields and footprints date between 1,000 and 500 B.C. This exceptional discovery drew worldwide media attention and required an innovative and collaborative approach to data acquisition and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nadia Neff. Keith M Prufer. Geraldine Busquest-Vass. Erin Ray. Seth Newsome.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The middle-late Holocene in southern Belize saw shifts in subsistence strategies, including the introduction of managed plants and animals. Botanical and stable isotope data have been used to track the introduction of agricultural products into human diets, with maize first consumed before 7,000 cal. BP. However, the timing of the introduction of managed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Courtney Hofman. Torben Rick. Jesus Maldonado.

One of the greatest human impacts on the environment has been the intentional and unintentional introduction of plants and animals around the world. Islands are particularly susceptible to ecological change following introductions, but distinguishing between natural and cultural introductions of wild taxa is often challenging. Here we present our interdisciplinary approach to investigating the origins of California Channel Island terrestrial mammals that can serve as a framework for helping...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daron Duke. Thomas Urban. Anya Kitterman. Kyle Freund. D. Craig Young.

This is an abstract from the "Application of Geophysical Techniques to Military Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2022, human footprints were discovered on the Old River Bed delta, a large terminal Pleistocene to early Holocene distributary wetland in western Utah’s Great Salt Lake Desert. The site also sits within the boundaries of the U.S. Air Force’s Utah Test and Training Range. The prints’ preservation and context showed the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kefilwe Rammutloa.

This is an abstract from the "African Archaeology throughout the Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Our understanding of the trade and exchange networks systems in Southern Africa during AD 700 to AD 1300 has mostly been drawn from sites located in the Shashe Limpopo Confluence Area (SCLA); a drainage basin that is positioned on the borders of Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe. This has led to bias interpretations and conceptualisation on...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Evan Sternberg. Justin Lowry. Jason Paling.

Trade and inter-community connections are keys to understanding how the ancient region around the modern city of Managua, Nicaragua interacted and participated in the larger Central American and Mesoamerican trade corridor. This poster will present potential interpretations of long distance and local connections through a cost and pathway analysis using ArcGIS. This study will incorporate recent research on obsidian sources from the site of Chiquilistagua into the model of interactions, as well...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Wilcox. Paul Nick Kardulias.

This research examines the trade and production of steatite vessels during the Archaic Period in New England. The study focuses specifically on a quarry Located in Barkhamsted, Connecticut where recent excavation has supplemented prior investigations from 1949 to 1951. The material from this site is located at Yale’s Peabody Museum and the archaeology lab at Central Connecticut State University. We also examine the artifact assemblages from other sites in Connecticut and Massachusetts. Along...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Silvana Rosenfeld.

Chavín de Huántar is a complex ritual site widely recognized for its connections to other regional centers. While much of this regional interaction is understood based on common ceramic styles and designs as well as the presence of non-local material, much less is known of the actual mode of transportation. Llama caravans most certainly played a key role in the movement of goods across space during Chavín times. Were llamas for caravans raised in the proximities of Chavin? Were caravan llamas a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rosemary Lieske.

In ancient societies political, ideological, and environmental factors played a role in determining settlement patterns and trade routes. The use of GIS-based modeling approaches, such as least cost path analysis, provide us with a greater understanding of how ancient people moved and interacted in the landscape and the possible trade routes that existed among them. In this study I use network and least cost path analyses to reconstruct the network of trade and communication routes surrounding...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alireza Khounani.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Trade and Exchange" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. It has been plainly demonstrated that market systems are socially embedded, a quality that fosters the movement of information, commodities, and people. Before the industrial period, long-distance trade required the presence of commercial agents at both the distribution centers and at the destinations for sale. The kin-based structure of merchant...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Cromwell. Christopher DeCorse. Douglas Wilson.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Research on Glass Beads and Ornaments in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation discusses a trade bead assemblage excavated from the Chinook Middle Village at the Station Camp/McGowan Site (45PC106), a location that can be considered the western terminus of the historic Lewis and Clark expedition of 1803–1806. The camp was situated at the likely site of a seasonally occupied Chinook...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jiun-Yu Liu.

The origin and expansion of Austronesian, a language group disperses from Easter Island to Madagascar, is a long-term discussed issue in Taiwan and Southeast Asia. For the movement of people and materials, the migrationist models have dominated the explanatory frameworks in the South China Sea, a broader area of my proposed research region. In this proposed research the concept of trade diaspora is applied to examine the possibility of frequent bidirectional movement of materials and people...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carmen Sarjeant.

This is an abstract from the "The Movement of Technical Knowledge: Cross-Craft Perspectives on Mobility and Knowledge in Production Technologies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. New research on trade networks amongst early sedentary Neolithic communities, c. 4200-3000 BP, in southern Vietnam has shown that domesticated cereals and stone resources were imported to the coastal site of Rach Nui. While the stone likely came from quarry locales in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caroline Solazzo. Jean Soulat.

Tortoiseshell is made from the scutes of sea turtles; historically, hawksbill turtle was the main source of tortoiseshell but other species might have been used. Between the 17th and 18th c. tortoiseshell obtained in the Caribbean was traded on North American and European markets. Tortoiseshell was used for making combs, fans, boxes, in bookbinding, and as veneering for furniture. Excavations in European workshops (Paris and Amsterdam) attest of the use of this exotic material into luxurious...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ian Scharlotta.

Provenance analysis of obsidian and rhyolite artifacts from four Late Prehistoric sites located on the edges of the western Mojave Desert suggest direct procurement practices and the presence of a trade network through the Antelope Valley. Less clear is whether evidence for the movement of materials can effectively be used to infer particular cultural territories or specific cultural interactions. Ethnographic work in the Antelope Valley suggests that areas surrounding rhyolitic formations may...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Abigail Varlan. Olivia Navaro-Farr.

The Balearic Islands, located off the coast of Spain, were occupied by the Romans beginning in 123 B.C.E. Under Roman occupation, the islands saw the development of Roman-style infrastructure and architecture in place of the pre-existing megalithic style of groups such as the Talayotic people. Sanisera and Pollentia are examples of Roman cities developed to facilitate trade and support the military needs of the empire. While excavations of the Balearic Islands have provided a wealth of data,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Wake.

Sitio Drago is a large (18 ha) pre-Columbian settlement strategically located on the NW corner of Isla Colon, Bocas del Toro, Panama. Prior to the 21st Century Bocas del Toro had been characterized as recently colonized, poorly populated, having a relatively low degree of sociopolitical elaboration and isolated. Continuing research over the last 10 years on Isla Colon, focusing on Sitio Drago, illustrates that the site and by extension, the region, has a much longer population history, a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tanya Chiykowski.

Archaeologists study the movement of potters, materials and techniques to understand migration and exchange on both a local and regional scale. Modern international divisions, such as the Mexican- US border, interrupt these research questions in the Greater Southwest culture area. In Sonora, archaeologists have clear evidence of population upheaval after AD 1300; Southern Arizona Hohokam groups migrated into the Altar Valley, bringing with them new ceramic technologies and displacing a resident...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Virginia Rodríguez Domínguez.

This is an abstract from the "Primary Sources and the Design of Research Projects" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The purpose of this research is to identify the types of trade and professions carried out by women who lived on the Puerta de Tierra neighborhood of San Juan, Puerto Rico using data from the population census of 1910. The information contained in the census allows the study of women by looking at specific variables such as their age...

DOCUMENT Citation Only K. Patrick Fazioli.

This paper will survey some of the most interesting and innovative recent contributions of pottery studies to our knowledge of late antique and early medieval Central Europe (circa fifth to tenth centuries CE). Since an exhaustive review of the many national traditions across this culturally and linguistically diverse region is beyond the scope of this paper, the focus will remain on three broad areas of inquiry. First, what insights can pottery offer into changing patterns of exchange and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christina Sampson.

This is an abstract from the "Complex Fisher-Hunter-Gatherers of North America" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper examines changes over time in the ways that fisher-hunter-gatherer communities on the central Gulf coast of peninsular Florida participated in the regional trade of specialized crafted goods. The social landscape of the greater Tampa Bay area appears to have become increasingly politically integrated between the end of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hirokazu Kotegawa.

El sitio arqueológico de Estero Rabón, conocido como un centro secundario de la primera capital olmeca San Lorenzo, se encuentra a unos 12 km hacia el oeste de dicha capital. Según los estudios realizados en esta región y el sitio mismo, el sitio tuvo muy larga ocupación humana a partir de pre olmeca hasta el Clásico Tardío/Terminal llamado la fase Villa Alta. Sin embargo, no existió un proyecto sistemático a través de la excavación arqueológica. Por ello, no habíamos sabido los detalles del...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adelphine Bonneau. Réginald Auger. Bernard Gratuze. Jean-François Moreau.

Hundreds of pounds of glass beads were imported among other goods by European traders to exchange with First Nations communities and to acquire fur, during the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. Once traded, these beads were used as bracelets, necklaces, cloths ornament, etc. or bartered with other Native groups. Nowadays, thousands of these beads are found on archaeological sites in Canada and can be a privileged tool to investigate trade networks in North America. As a starting point, the Saguenay...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Kathleen Pitirri.

The McMichael Canadian Art Collection recently acquired a collection of Great Lakes First Nations clothing (c. 1770-1780), which represents one of only four surviving Chief ceremonial regalia gifted to European diplomats and worn during negotiations (Brasser 2012, 13-33; Roloff 2012, 8). Included in this rare anthology of Woodlands culture are: a pair of men’s deer skin leggings, a pair of moccasins, two finger weaved sashes, a pair of garter pendants, a short strap, armbands, a Wampum belt, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samantha Lee.

A decade of archaeology at Wye House Plantation in Maryland has yielded a multitude of information regarding the institution of slavery and the experiences of enslaved individuals. Whether or not enslaved peoples were deliberately bred systematically to produce children for sale by the master is a topic that has been generally neglected in modern scholarship. This practice demonstrates the inherent inhumanity of slavery and is an example of what the scholar Orlando Patterson describes as "the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jiun-Yu Liu. Yi-Chang Liu.

This is an abstract from the "The Elemental Analysis Facility at the Field Museum: Celebrating 20 Years Serving the Archaeological Community " session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Blihun Hanben (BHB) site in ancient Taiwan, dated between 2,000 and 1,200 years ago, contained a wide range of remains that indicate an iron crafting settlement. The excavation yielded over 9,000 kg of ceramics from two cultural layers, indicating a prolonged period of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Natalia Martinez Taguena. Luz Alicia Torres Cubillas.

The Comcáac (Seri) indigenous community provides a unique opportunity for community-based research in archaeological endeavors. Through a joint effort with several members from different families and of different age, the project constructed methodologies that integrate archaeological data with oral tradition and ethnographic information. In specific, we propose a distinct survey method with the recording of oral histories from landscape segments. This paper presents relevant results from this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicola Sharratt.

In many Andean regions, the shift from the Middle Horizon to the Late Intermediate Period, or LIP, is archaeologically identified by stylistic changes. In the Moquegua valley, southern Peru, LIP (ca. AD 1250-1476) Estuquiña architecture and portable material culture is starkly different from that associated with terminal Middle Horizon (ca. AD 950-1200) Tumilaca populations. Until recently Tumilaca settlements were thought to have been completely abandoned prior to the appearance of Estuquiña...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christina Friberg.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. 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 in the northern hinterland regions, these encounters and affiliations also facilitated interactions...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ricky Nelson. Valda Black. Danielle Kurin.

Minimal research has been done on observing whether there have been incidences of stunted growth in populations, in times of environmental stress and social turmoil. One such example are the populations found during the Late Intermediate Period (~AD 1000-1400, LIP) in the South-Central Peruvian highlands. Utilizing Buikstra and Ubelaker’s Standards, nine measurements were taken on the femora of 37 individuals (N=37) from the sites of Sonhuayo, Masumachay, and Mina Cachilhuancaray in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dawn Ramsey Ford. Owen Ford.

Within the boundaries of the United States’ largest state, 44 million acres of land are owned by Native corporations created under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) of 1971. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, approximately one in seven people (15.2% in 2016) in the state of Alaska are Native Alaskan or American Indian. With a significant amount of the Native population managing and utilizing lands their families have occupied for multiple generations, how is the concept of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joanna Wells. Kathryn Krasinski. David Yesner. Fran Seager-Boss.

The Dena’ina and Ahtna developed a sedentary socioeconomically-stratified lifestyle with material inequality by the time of European contact. The development of permanent villages indicates a shift into a complex society with qeshqas (leaders) who had better food, larger houses, and more wealth. Semisubterranean depressions at Cottonwood Creek, ranging from 802 years cal BP to modern age, are remnants of storage and house pits still present on the landscape. Geochemical testing of sediments has...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Esteban Herrera-Parra. Melanie Pugliese. Shanti Morell-Hart.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past few decades, understandings of cuisine in the Maya area have been radically amplified by the use of new techniques. Some methods offer the opportunity to directly connect artifacts and features with actual plant food residues. The ability to recover microscopic residues of food from sediments, artifacts, and human teeth has revealed not only...

DOCUMENT Citation Only E. Moises Herrera-Parra. Melanie Pugliese. Shanti Morell-Hart.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Archaeobotany Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past few decades, understandings of cuisine in the Maya area have been radically amplified with the use of new techniques. Some methods offer the opportunity to directly connect artifacts and features with actual plant food residues. The ability to recover microscopic residues of food from sediments, artifacts,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Traci Ardren. Scott Fitzpatrick. Victor Thompson.

The Florida Keys have been largely overlooked in models of social interactions within both Florida and the greater Caribbean. Environmentally and culturally distinctive, the more than 1700 islands that make up this coral reef archipelago are consistently viewed from the mainland in models of human-environmental dynamics over time. This paper synthesizes available archeological data on the prehistoric human occupation of the Florida Keys with attention to the island landscapes of these sites that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adrian Burke.

Northeastern North America contains numerous lithic sources that are found in a variety of geologic and geographic settings. These materials vary widely in their knapping quality, color, texture, translucency, and block/cobble size. Access to these sources can also vary greatly, from underwater to the top of mountains. Aboriginal traditional knowledge allowed people in the past to navigate and use these varied sources. I present data from ethnographic and ethnohistoric documents that provide an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paula Lazrus.

This is an abstract from the "Making Historical Archaeology Matter: Rethinking an Engaged Archaeology of Nineteenth- to Twenty-First-Century Rural Communities of Western Ireland and Southern Italy" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Traditional farming, cooking and craft production provided a stable and integrated set of taskscapes to citizens of the Bovese for generations. As a result, the conflicts, and challenges of living in a region of Italy that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anne S. Dowd.

Obsidian and other lithic sources in the Yellowstone region of Wyoming and nearby Montana or Idaho were used up until contact with Euroamericans and information from oral traditions, ethnohistory, ethnoarchaeology, and toponymy provide data on the significance of certain raw material choices made by Native Americans such as the local Shoshone. Why did chipped stone weapons and tools persist even after new metal technologies were introduced? How did the choices of raw materials signal Native...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katelyn McDonough. Perry Chocktoot. Geoffrey Smith. Dennis Jenkins. Richard Rosencrance.

This is an abstract from the "Cultivating Food, Land, and Communities" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Foodways, culture, and health are closely intertwined. As such, food is a central aspect of Indigenous identity and the subject of much anthropological research. Traditional knowledge and archaeological records show that plants have always played important roles within Indigenous foodways in the Great Basin, yet nutritional information for those...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristina Bowie. Jillian Harris.

While Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools completed its mandate in December 2015, pursuit of the truths and movements towards reconciliation of past residential school practices continue. Efforts to identify missing former students and locate unmarked cemetery, grave and burial sites are continuing at the former Kuper Island Industrial School on Penelakut Island. This work is structured as both a collaborative and community based archaeology and is being...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Boero.

There is general agreement that past Native American populations significantly modified Sierra Nevada landscapes in California leading to a variety of beneficial resource outcomes. Further, many argue that through their lengthy history in the region, Native peoples initiated cascading regional effects on forest composition and structure in the Sierra Nevada. With this in mind, agencies and researchers are turning to the past to develop more effective resource management protocols. Concordantly,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Medchill. Reylynne Williams. Teresa Rodrigues. Chris Loendorf.

This is an abstract from the "Collaborative Archaeology: How Native American Knowledge Enhances Our Collective Understanding of the Past" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The O’Odham of southern Arizona continue to participate in traditional sporting events, and a variety of organized competitions are still held today. Although they are one people, the O’Odham are currently organized into four Communities, which are collectively known as the Four...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dylan Davis. Kristina Douglass.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The environmental impacts of human societies are generally assumed to correlate with factors such as population size, whether they are industrialized, and the intensity of their landscape modifications (e.g., agriculture, urban development, etc.). As a result, small-scale communities with subsistence economies are often not the focus of long-term studies...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patrick Julig.

Ancient quarry extraction locations on elevated bedrock outcrops continue to be used in the modern era for traditional activities such as constructing bent wooden sweat lodges and wooden shelters for fasting and meditation, which are built and maintained in modern times, over at least several decades. Other special "powerful" locations such as a cave in a Bar River Formation quartzite adjacent bluff are visited and used for spiritual activities by local First Nations members. As part of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Cox. Douglas Craig.

This is an abstract from the "Hot Rocks in Hot Places: Investigating the 10,000-Year Record of Plant Baking across the US-Mexico Borderlands" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Earth ovens (hornos) have been documented at many sites across the Hohokam region of south-central Arizona. These features were commonly used to cook large amounts of food at public gatherings. They were part of a long-standing tradition of communal feasting that served, among...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gavin Davies. Maria de los Angeles Corado.

Following an intensive socialization campaign, the Lake Atitlan Archaeological Project (PALA) conducted systematic surface collections for over 50 properties within the municipios of San Pedro and San Juan La Laguna in the southwestern Lake Atitlan Basin. These investigations identified more than 30 archaeological sites including three large population centers with monumental architecture, a large number of smaller ritual and domestic sites, and several individual rock art locations. Test...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julia Earle. Lina Macedo Molina.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Late Intermediate period (900–1400 CE), many communities throughout the Andean highlands built funerary towers (*chullpas) to inter the dead. The distribution of *chullpas has often been understood to materialize ethnic identity, territorial boundaries, and claims to natural resources. However, results of fieldwork carried out in the Vilcanota...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kevin M. O'Briant. Clay Jenkinson.

During their 1803-05 westward journey, the Lewis and Clark Expedition described the presence of native graves, mounds, abandoned villages, and rock art. Previous archaeological research, centered around the 2005 Bicentennial, focused on the verification of campsites used by the members of the Corps of Discovery. Public interpretation of their Trail has likewise focused on the explorers themselves, neglecting both the Native context in which they traveled as well as the deeper history of their...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Glenn Darrington. Kathryn McDonald. Mary Rogers. Kevin Askan.

The Jocko Wilderness Area is located in the southest corner of the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana. In 2015 a cultural resource study involving the Jocko Wilderness Area was initiated to assess the past, current, and future effects of an existing NorthWestern Energy electrical transmission line that was constructed in 1964. This study, undertaken by the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes (CSKT) Preservation Office, integrated multiple avenues of research including historical records...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Renae Campbell. Mark Warner.

This is an abstract from the "The Future of Education and Training in Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A familiar refrain among archaeologists working outside of academia is the myriad of training shortcomings in higher education anthropology programs. There is no doubt that there is room for improvement within the academy. However, there is also room for CRM, state, and federal archaeologists to collaborate in training students more...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kitty Emery. Ashley Sharpe.

This is an abstract from the "Unraveling the Mysteries of the Isthmo-Colombian Area’s Past: A Symposium in Honor of Archaeologist Richard Cooke and His Contributions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological research in Central America is often seen as quite disparate between the northern regions of Mesoamerica (primarily Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and northwestern portions of Honduras and El Salvador) and the more southerly Intermediate Area...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alison Weisskopf. Ling Qin. Dorian Fuller.

Using data from modern and archaeological phytolith assemblages we follow the trajectory of wild rice cultivated on wetland margins at 5000 BC through early domestication and the first artificial arable systems in dug out fields at c. 4000 BC to fully developed irrigated paddy fields in the Lower Yangtze Valley. Using multivariate analysis with phytolith assemblages from ecological communities of rice weed flora across a range of arable systems we create modern analogues of ancient systems which...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carolina Belmar. Silvia Alfaro. Luciana Quiroz.

It has been stated the groups ascribed to the Early Ceramic Traditions of the Choapa Valley had a mobile hunter-gatherer life style, representative of the archaic period. This is reinforced by the absence of permanent and long term occupations in the valley. This scenario suffered an interesting shift with the discovery PTF MLP 13, a domestic site associated to a cemetery that counts with an important stratigraphic deposit, great amount of ceramic sherds and milling stones. These findings...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Donna Glowacki.

Our understandings of how socio-complexity developed and the role households played in those developments are often hampered because we lack adequately fine-grained chronological data to identify when and how the relationships among households change. A detailed analysis of architecture and 260 tree-ring dates at Spruce Tree House cliff dwelling has produced a new reconstruction of how the village grew and changed over time at a decade-by-decade level. The village was occupied during the 1200s –...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dong Guanghui. Fahu Chen.

The Hexi Corridor of Northwest China was an important area for cultural exchange between west and east parts of the Eurasia during both historical and prehistoric times. Here we present new dataset of archaeobotanic, zooarchaeological and bone isotopic analysis, and radiocarbon dating from late Neolithic and Bronze sites in Hexi Corridor, and discuss the history of trans-continental cultural exchange in Hexi Corridor before Han Dynasty (202BC-220AD). Our results revealed the chronology of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kunlong Chen. Jianjun Mei. Thilo Rehren. Congcang Zhao.

The production of ritual bronze vessels is an internationally recognised feature of Bronze Age China, contrasting strikingly with other early civilizations across the world. Their manufacture exploded in the Shang period (16th to 11th centuries BC), when bronze metallurgy spread across the whole territory of present-day China. However, while the production of ritual bronze vessels predominated in the Central Plains, resent research is showing how surrounding regions exhibited strong local...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Wholey.

Transitional Period settlement ecology and material culture in eastern Pennsylvania indicates the emergence of a cultural complex expressive of trans-egalitarian society. This includes centralized riverine settlements characterized by large thermally altered features, concentrations of soapstone vessels, and proximity to seasonally predictable food resources, such as migratory fish and drought tolerant herbaceous plants, that could be intensively managed or cultivated. This presentation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amita Gupta. Vinod Nautiyal.

Trans-Himalayan archaeology was always neglected by the historians and Archaeologist. But some recent excavations and my Ph.D field work presented an interesting view of Trans-Himalayan culture. The burial culture of this region dated back to 600-200BCE. I found here the remains of Pyro-technological activities. Steatite bead was first time found in Trans-Himalaya. They are in size from 2 to 4 mm in diameter, 1to3 mm in height, and hole width is about 1 mm. The beads were examined by using SEM...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Todd Braje. Hannah Haas. Matthew Edwards. Jon Erlandson. Steven Whitaker.

This is an abstract from the "Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Black abalone (Haliotis cracherodii) were an important subsistence resource in southern California for 10,000 years, first for coastal Native Americans, then as a commercial shellfishery. By 1993, however, black abalone populations declined dramatically, resulting in the closure of the California fishery. Recently, black abalone are showing signs of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Zimmer-Dauphinee. Steven Wernke. Parker VanValkenburgh. Grecia Roque.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since late prehispanic times, peoples throughout the central Andean highlands have created highly productive anthropogenic agricultural landscapes on a monumental scale through terracing. Yet a large proportion of these terrace systems fell into disrepair and abandonment through the Spanish colonial period, even in the face of food shortages. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ian McNiven.

This is an abstract from the "Embodied Essence: Anthropological, Historical, and Archaeological Perspectives on the Use of Body Parts and Bodily Substances in Religious Beliefs and Practices" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although created by people, marine mammal bone (e.g., whale, seal, dugong) ritual installations on land and in the sea are also expressions of marine mammal agency given that the sites are materializations of a social and moral...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Fitts. John Mintz.

The North Carolina Office of State Archaeology reviews information about hundreds of newly-identified archaeological sites each year and advises the State Historic Preservation Office regarding their ability to provide important information about the past. The need to synthesize accumulated data so that assessments of site significance can better reflect our potential state of knowledge is both pressing and daunting. Updating prehistoric contexts for North Carolina is a particularly challenging...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cheryl Blanchard.

This is an abstract from the "Transcending Boundaries and Exploring Pasts: Current Archaeological Investigations of the Arizona-Sonora Borderlands" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) manages nearly a million acres of public lands near the Arizona-Sonora borderlands. Most of the area is remote back-country that has a long and interesting cultural history. Volunteers, cultural staff members, and researchers have all...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yawei You. Dorian Fuller.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study investigates the influence of climate change on the distribution and adaptation of wild soybeans and how it impacted ancient gathering/farming practices related to soybeans. Through quantitative pollen-based reconstruction and ecological niche modeling, it traces the effects of climate change on soybean domestication and post-domestication...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Glenn Gmoser. Adie Whitaker.

This is an abstract from the "Byways to the Past: An American Highway Archaeology Symposium" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeology within highway corridors is too easily hampered by an inability to adequately address bigger research issues due to the narrow slices of landscapes crossed, access restrictions, project-specific limitations on funding and focus of attention on isolated or smaller pieces of larger archaeological resources. ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Vicki Szabo. Brenna Frasier. Michael Buckley. Thomas McGovern. Ingrid Mainland.

This is an abstract from the "Celebrating Anna Kerttula's Contributions to Northern Research" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This ongoing project, funded in 2015 by Anna Kerttula and the Arctic Social Sciences Program, uses historical, literary, aDNA, ZooMS, and archaeological data to identify patterns in marine mammal exploitation across the North Atlantic and Subarctic from ca. 800 -1800 CE. With over 230 samples of archaeological whale bone...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Vicki Szabo. Brenna McLeod Frasier.

Historical, literary and archaeological evidence suggests frequent use of marine mammals by the Norse across the medieval North Atlantic and Eastern Subarctic, circa 870 – 1500 CE. Written records indicate the importance of cetacean species in Norse economies from Norway to Newfoundland, but especially in medieval Iceland. Archaeological assemblages from Iceland reveal an abundance of worked and waste cetacean bone, most of which are morphologically undiagnostic. As such, details on the economic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Reitz.

In 1977, an American Museum of Natural History team lead by David Hurst Thomas began an ambitious survey of St. Catherines Island, Georgia. The intent was to systematically survey 10% of the island following a series of transect lines using a research design from plant ecology. The survey collected hundreds of small vertebrate samples, none of which met zooarchaeological standards for adequate sample sizes and analysis. These hundreds of small samples, however, proved invaluable because they...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Weber. Terry Powis. George Micheletti. Jaime Awe.

The ancient Maya site of Pacbitun, Belize was first systematically recorded in the 1980s. Since then, archaeologists have continuously worked on recreating the site’s ancient landscape. In addition to traditional survey methods, the Pacbitun Regional Archaeological Project (PRAP) has implemented non-invasive survey tools like terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) and, more recently, the analysis of aerial LiDAR (light detection and ranging) data. In this poster we present a comparative analysis of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Catarina Guzzo Falci. Marlieke Ernst. Thomas Breukel. Corinne L. Hofman.

This is an abstract from the "The Movement of Technical Knowledge: Cross-Craft Perspectives on Mobility and Knowledge in Production Technologies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, we examine the development of craftsmanship and knowledge transmission in the pre-colonial and early colonial Caribbean. By adopting a chaîne opératoire approach to different crafts, we aim to investigate processes of circulation of materials and knowledge...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Arthur.

This is an abstract from the "The Movement of Technical Knowledge: Cross-Craft Perspectives on Mobility and Knowledge in Production Technologies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. How do we identify the transfer of technological knowledge on the local scale and how it might change through time and in regional contexts? The Gamo of southern Ethiopia offer that their Indigenous way of knowing the world enlightens understanding of transformations in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Diane Lyons.

The transfer of pottery making skills and knowledge is well studied in Africa using the chaîne opératoire methodology. Chaîne opératoire is understood as a social practice in which technological choices are guided by social choices that potters learn as members of a potter community. The complement of technological choices of this group of potters creates a unique technological style. Africanists use technological styles to study the history of potter communities through time and space. But...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alberto Aguirre.

Se presenta una síntesis del uso del agua en la Cuenca del Lerma en su paso por el Bajío, en particular en donde se unen Michoacán y Guanajuato, así como su transformación en energía eléctrica. A partir de un repaso histórico, se toman en cuenta las obras realizadas para generar electricidad y sus transformaciones más significativas en relación con el paisaje que las alberga. Asimismo, se discute el cambio tecnológico implicado y el del paisaje que conllevó el uso social de la electricidad en la...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Anderson.

This paper presents evidence from the Central Valley of Cochabamba, a key peripheral region of the Tiwanaku state. It addresses Tiwanaku expansion, state collapse and post-Tiwanaku transformation and continuity using data from ceramic styles and other material culture traditions. Also presented are new radio-carbon dates from the Central Valley site of Piñami covering Tiwanaku expansion and collapse and how these dates fit into the larger regional context and suggest that Tiwanaku influence...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Napolitano. Matthew C. Sanger.

A copper band recovered from a Late Archaic burial located on St. Catherines Island, Georgia, demonstrates the earliest use of metal objects in the region. This discovery shows that copper usage in the American Southeast, largely thought to relate to Hopewellian and Mississippian influences, has a greater antiquity and distribution than previously assumed. A reassessment of the copper found within the burial dates to the Archaic throughout the Eastern Woodlands; chemical analysis shows the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yael Rotem.

The EBA Southern Levant experienced a dramatic pathway to complexity, creating a small-scale urban society. The transition from EBI to EBII periods was characterized by urbanization processes, in which sweeping changes in social structure, political landscape, and economic networks occurred. While the majority of research centered on the nature of the fully urban society in the region, there is no consensus for the specific mechanics and causes of the emergence of these early towns, and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kaitlyn Davis. Scott Ortman.

This paper analyzes the artifact assemblage from Tsama, an ancestral Tewa community along the Rio Chama in north-central New Mexico. This site was excavated by Florence Hawley-Ellis during a field school in 1970, but basic analyses of the resulting collections were only completed recently by the laboratory at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center as part of a project investigating Tewa origins. We present the results of these analyses and compare the artifact assemblage from Tsama with that of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Valentina Martinez. Michael Harris.

This is an abstract from the "Working with the Community in Ecuador" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For the past 20 years, we have conducted research along the Ecuadorian coast in the province of Manabí. Over time, our work has evolved from that of strictly scientific issues to the incorporation of local community-based participatory research models. As other anthropologists have discovered, a continuous commitment with a research site leads to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joshua Englehardt. Michael Carrasco.

This paper explores theoretical and methodological issues associated with the etic conceptualization of Mesoamerican deity systems and the identification of individual supernaturals in cross–cultural contexts. It critically focuses on previous classificatory systems of Olmec deities. Iconographers often identify individual deities on the basis of defining attributes or material accoutrements, frequently extending these identifications across contexts (as in Covarrubias’ famous "evolution of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yo Negishi.

It has long been claimed that the Jomon-era cultural and ritual system was probably replaced by a new early farming cultural system (Yayoi Culture) brought by immigrants from the Korean peninsula. Recently, however, Japanese archaeologists have been working to determine the variability of ritual practices in each region of the Japanese archipelago. This paper analyzes the transformational process of ritual items (e.g., clay figurines and stone implements) of the Tohoku (northeastern part of main...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Johannes Loubser.

Water helps breach the rock surface in both physical and perceptual ways. The addition of water facilitates the production of petroglyphs not only by weakening the bond between particles in sedimentary rocks but also with the moist particles acting as an effective abrasive slurry. The addition of water to natural earth pigment powder allows the colorant to effectively enter pores and interstices. Many virtually invisible petroglyphs and pictographs "magically' appear when covered with a thin...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan Conger.

Native North Americans began to engage in exchange with European explorers, merchants, and missionaries during the mid-to-late 16th century. Previous studies of these initial exchange interactions in Northern Iroquoia (including the Lower Great Lakes, Saint Lawrence Lowlands, and Northern Allegheny Plateau) have been narrow in spatial and social scale, focusing often on the initiation of trade relationships between Europeans and a specific nation (for instance, the Mohawk) and the rate at which...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arthur Demarest. Chloe Andrieu. Ronald Bishop. Paola Torres. Melanie Forne.

The Classic period archaeology and history of the Pasion River "highway" and its connecting land routes demonstrate the vital role of riverine exchange systems and also register major changes in routes, agents, and economies. The riverine port city of Cancuen held a critical position at the intersection of both river and land routes that connected the southwest Classic Maya cities to other Peten centers, to southern highland trading partners, and to the more distant realms of Tabasco and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Suanna Crowley.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Most professionals in archaeology emerge from educational centers hosted within departments of Anthropology, where the four field approach has dominated training. Market forces and preference for the STEM fields are now constraining educational opportunities for the humanities and social sciences. Declines in post-secondary enrollment, programs unable or...