Society for American Archaeology

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lucas Bond Reis. Thiago Umberto Pereira. Walderes Cocta Priprá. Fabiana Teerhag Merencio. Gabriela Oppitz.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Upper Itajai Valley, nestled within Santa Catarina, Brazil, has stood as the enduring homeland of the Laklãnõ-Xokleng people for centuries—a testament to their remarkable resilience despite persistent struggles for land and social rights. Against this backdrop, we present new archaeological findings from the Tobias Wagner site, which comprises 18...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Che-Hsien Tsai.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Taipei Basin holds archaeological significance, particularly in illuminating the Neolithic era in Taiwan. The sites of Yuanshan and Botanical Garden each represent distinct Neolithic cultural phases. However, the coexistence, contemporaneity, or transition between Neolithic cultures has been a subject of debate. The nationwide site survey,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fumiyasu Arakawa.

Archaeologists that conduct research in agricultural societies of the American Southwest have contributed little discussions and interpretation regarding sociopolitical organization using lithic data; several negative factors may be at the root of the problem. These factors include 1) archaeologists in the American Southwest have developed a remarkable level of pottery analysis that allows for the reconstruction of some aspects of sociopolitical organization, 2) none has developed a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Brown. Hubert Quispe-Bustamante.

This is an abstract from the "Beyond Borders at the End of a Millennium: Life in the Western Andes circa 500–50 BCE" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite the archaeological significance of the Cusco region, research on societies that preceded the Inka in their heartland have lagged behind other areas. In particular the Late Formative (600 BCE–CE 200) presents a time of increasing social complexity, increased participation in interregional trade...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dennis Ogburn.

Colors of cords in Inka khipu are of great interest because it has long been understood that they were meant to convey specific meanings, namely indicating the individual category being encoded in a particular position on a khipu. Colonial authors such as Calancha and Garcilaso de la Vega made claims regarding what certain colors symbolized, but studies of extant khipu have yet to definitively correlate colors with specific meanings. Before we can begin to understand the correlation between...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rolfe Mandel. Paul Goldberg. Tony Layzell. Jennifer Haas.

The Finch site is a multicomponent open-air habitation located in southeastern Wisconsin. Archaeological excavations conducted at the site yielded numerous artifacts and cultural features indicating recurrent and/or continuous occupation (or use) spanning twelve thousand years, from the Early Paleoindian through Late Woodland periods. The site is situated on the rim and side slopes of a kettle basin formed in matrix-supported glacial till overlying outwash and glaciolacustrine deposits. The till...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susannah Clinker.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, wealthy Europeans flocked to Egypt to see the ‘exotic’ and ancient land first-hand. On their journey, many tourists accumulated souvenirs, but none were so admired and desired as Egyptian mummies. The exploitative nature of European interest in Egyptian mummies meant little historical and personal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jerome Robitaille. Lisa-Elen Meyering. Sabine Gaudzinski-Windheuser. Olaf Jöris. Paul Pettitt.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Our AHRC/DFG-funded Household Art project explores the content and wider context of the 15,800-year-old Gönnersdorf/Andernach Upper Palaeolithic engraved plaquettes (portable schist) curated at MONREPOS, Neuwied (Germany). We use state-of-the-art 3D scanning microscopic and use-wear technologies in MONREPOS’S TraCEr laboratory and visual psychological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Salywon. Wendy Hodgson.

This is an abstract from the "Frontiers of Plant Domestication" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Botanical exploration over the last thirty years in Arizona has revealed at least six putative domesticated agaves still surviving in their archaeological context. These agaves share characteristics of relictual domesticated plants including clonality, reduced genetic diversity compared to wild agaves and reduced seed set or complete sexual sterility....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tamara Varney. Treena Swanston. Ian Coulthard. A. Reginald Murphy. David M. L. Cooper.

An exploration into various aspects of lead exposure in the British Royal Navy stationed in 19th Century Antigua, West Indies has contributed to some unexpected insights. This research was facilitated by study of human remains mitigated from a Naval Hospital cemetery in response to modern development. The interred at the site were lower ranking naval personnel including enslaved individuals. Other work on lead exposure in the region focused on enslaved plantation laborers revealed high levels of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kayeleigh Sharp. Carlos Osores Mendives. Izumi Shimada.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the last 30 years, perspectives on the Gallinazo and Virú have changed significantly. Results of 2022 intensive surface survey and accompanying drone-based mapping of sites on the south bank of the mid-La Leche Valley show that reassessment must continue. Comparable to the monumental crafting center of Cerro Songoy-Cojal in the mid-Zaña Valley to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only George Nicholas.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology and Indigenous Issues in Hokkaido Island, Japan" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ainu conceptions of “heritage” connect worldview and place, knowledge and object, intent and action. As is the case in North America and elsewhere, current protection of Indigenous ancestral sites in settler countries foregrounds the tangible and its scientific value, at the expense of cultural values and needs. In the wake of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Monica Katz. Emily Kaplan. Richard Newman. Maria Cecilia Alvarez-White.

This is an abstract from the "Plant Exudates and Other Binders, Adhesives, and Coatings in the Americas" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. *Mopa mopa is the collective name given to the resin from species of the plant genus *Elaeagia (family Rubiaceae) that grows in regions of Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia. The resin has been used from prehispanic times to the present day to decorate a range of objects from colonial Inka *qeros to highly decorated and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Deborah Huntley. Suzanne Eckert.

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. As graduate students, Keith Kintigh shaped each of our careers in significant ways. Keith introduced us to the archaeology of the Cibola region, a place that remains dear to us. He also inspired an enthusiasm for the use of statistics, particularly for ceramic typological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Sportman.

The Connecticut State Historic Preservation Office contracted AHS, Inc. to conduct a multi-phase archaeological survey at the National Historic Landmark Old New-Gate Prison and Copper Mine in East Granby, Connecticut, prior to planned repairs to the ca. 1790 prison guardhouse. Beginning in 1773, the Old New-Gate copper mine was used as a prison and criminals, Tories, and POWs were incarcerated there during the Revolutionary War. In 1790 Old New-Gate became the first state prison in the U.S. and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Richards. Sissel Schroeder. Jarrod Burks.

Lynne Goldstein’s compilation of a GIS-based map of the Aztalan site, portraying all investigations through 1996, visually integrated almost two centuries of archaeological work at the site in southern Wisconsin. Lynne’s map made two things startlingly clear. First, decades of excavations were not all referenced to a common datum and few had left visible surface indications, making it difficult to relocate earlier excavations and avoid re-excavating disturbed contexts. Second, just 10% of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Supriya Varma.

The peninsula of Saurashtra is a distinctive physiographical region in western India that is surrounded by the sea on all sides except the east, where it is attached to the mainland of South Asia. This square peninsula, virtually a cul-de-sac, is somewhat isolated when compared to the Gujarat plains that are located to its east. Farmers, pastoralists, crafters and traders have left behind their signatures through settling and unsettling in a region, which is characterized by shallow,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Butler.

This is an abstract from the "Unsettling Infrastructure: Theorizing Infrastructure and Bio-Political Ecologies in a More-Than-Human World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The eastern Great Plains of North Dakota and west-central Minnesota are home to the remnants of one of the world’s largest ancient glacial lakes, Lake Agassiz, as well as the United States’ longest river, the Missouri. These two powerful water entities shaped and disrupted the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zev Cossin.

This is an abstract from the "Unsettling Infrastructure: Theorizing Infrastructure and Bio-Political Ecologies in a More-Than-Human World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Through European colonization, plantations and haciendas became infrastructures that “settled.” These colonial infrastructures transformed social and ecological relations throughout the Americas as they displaced Indigenous peoples from the land. Later, other forms of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Travis Chai Andrade.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Often thought of as a discipline that concerns itself with ruins—that which is in the past—archaeology also serves the settler-colonial project, in the present and the future. For that reason, archaeology inherently functions as a political tool, even if typically imagined as an apolitical means of “preserving” the past. In other words, archaeology offers...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Patton. Krista Maxwell.

This is an abstract from the "Pedagogy in the Undergraduate Archaeology Classroom" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For well over a decade, archaeologists such as Pyburn (2005) and Arnold (2005) have highlighted the need for teaching to engage with the larger, core issues that shape our research. Nevertheless, high-profile archaeological conversations about decolonization have tended to focus exclusively on research theory and practice. Yet Atalay...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gustavo Neme. Adolfo Gil. Eva Peralta. Fernando Franchetti.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The south of Mendoza province, Argentina, has been characterized as the southernmost limit of pre-Hispanic agricultural dispersion in South America. This limit, originally defined by the presence of macrobotanical remains, was re-discussed in light of the stable isotope data of δ13C and δ15N obtained on collagen and apatite from human remains. These...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alleen Betzenhauser. Madeleine Evans.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. People who rely on corn for significant portions of their diets must process it to improve its nutritional quality, or risk severe malnutrition. A common method historically employed throughout Mesoamerica and North America consisted of soaking corn kernels in an alkaline solution created from wood ash or burned limestone, a technique referred to as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carla Lancelotti. Jonas Alcaina Mateos. Javier Ruiz perez. Alessandra Pecci. Marco Madella.

Jandhala is a small village in the rural countryside of North Gujarat (India) where many of the activities related to food processing are still non-mechanized. One compound within the village has been investigated ethnographically to test a novel methodology to unravel activity areas. In this paper we present the results of investigations in the courtyard of the compound. Over 170 samples were collected, in a regular grid of 2x2 meters, and analyzed for multi-element geochemistry. We compare our...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jamie Forde.

This is an abstract from the "Disentanglement: Reimagining Early Colonial Trajectories in the Americas" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, I draw on both archaeological and documentary evidence from the site of San Miguel Achiutla, in the Mixtec region of Oaxaca, Mexico, to examine the complex relationships that residents of this indigenous community had with colonial Spanish rule. At certain points, members of the community harassed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew O'Leary.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper details preliminary analysis of a selection of the R.W. Robbins collection excavated at the Crown Point State Historic Site, New York in the 1960s. It leverages differential trends in ceramics from mid-eighteenth century French and British military occupations to better interpret the practices of the French fort community at Fort St. Frédéric....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claire Alix. Owen Mason. Lauren Norman.

Birnirk culture is well-known for driftwood structures that were repeatedly re-assembled to form low mounds. The structures were "hopeless tangle[s] of logs" to pioneering 1930s archaeologists whose reports lack details on construction techniques. Birnirk houses diverge from the preceding Old Bering Sea and later Thule single room houses with lengthy entrance tunnels. Our 2016 fieldwork "followed the wood," employing enhanced photography within two exceptionally preserved houses at Cape...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Klassen. Jonathan Weed. Damian Evans.

One of the largest puzzles for archaeologists at Angkor is untangling the extremely complex chronological development of the site. The region was host to hundreds of years of urban occupation arising out of a long tradition of habitation through the Bronze and Iron Age. Decades of archaeological investigations have established relational frameworks through which it is now possible to do more precise dating. Recent LiDAR investigations and the associated mapping and ground truthing have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stefanie Bautista. Justin Jennings. Willy Yépez Alvarez.

The seventh century AD marked a period of great social change in the coastal valleys of Arequipa, Perú. During this time, an increase in violence, population growth, and social complexity was met with foreign influences from the Wari state of the central highlands. While scholars have long asserted that Arequipa fell under Wari control at this time, the evidence for direct state control has never been demonstrated conclusively in the region. This presentation reports the results of our...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gerard Chouin.

The sudden emergence of deadly infectious diseases compels societies to improvise ways to manage the dead, explore causations, and save lives. Such overwhelming demographic events are sources of trauma but also opportunities for individual survivors and for the social fabric as a whole. Sub-Saharan Africa, like many other parts of the Old World where past mass mortalities were not documented, has been omitted from the debate about the impact of pandemics on deep historical trajectories. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elie Pinta. Birgitta Wallace. Kevin Jenkins.

This is an abstract from the "Current Research and Challenges in Arctic and Subarctic Cultural Heritage Studies" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. L’Anse aux Meadows, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the first European settlement in North America, is located in the northernmost part of modern-day Newfoundland, Canada. During the eleventh century, Norse Greenlanders established a frontier site for short periods of time, a “gateway to resources”...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan Kassabaum. Ashley Peles.

During the Coles Creek period (AD 700–1200), people constructed three earthen mounds at the Feltus site in Jefferson County, Mississippi. Before, during, and after the construction of these earthworks, Feltus was a location for ritual gatherings characterized by communal feasts and ritual post activities. Archaeological investigations at Feltus produced not only a large amount of bear bone, but a range of skeletal elements that are unusual at prehistoric sites. The nature of these remains and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lucas Bond Reis. Thiago Umberto Pereira. Lucas Bueno. Julia Reis Cordeiro. Simon-Pierre Gilson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation builds on research conducted by the LEIA/UFSC team in the Upper Itajai Valley (Santa Catarina State, Brazil) to put together components of a deep Laklãnõ-Xokleng history associated with the data archaeologically labeled as Southern Je. Contexts related to this archaeological category indicate that sites composed of pithouses began to be...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lubna Omar.

This is an abstract from the "Thinking with, through, and against Archaeology’s Politics of Knowledge" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper delves into the glaring disparities faced by Middle Eastern archaeologists in disseminating their invaluable knowledge about their own heritage, elucidating how prevailing Western-centric ethical codes fail to redress these issues effectively. A profound asymmetry exists, wherein Middle Eastern...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emiliano Melgar. Reyna Solís.

This is an abstract from the "Approaches to Cultural and Biological Complexity in Mexico at the Time of Spanish Conquest" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent studies have demonstrated that the cultural provenance and diversity of the goods found in the offerings from the Sacred Precinct of Tenochtitlan are more complex than the archaeologists thought, overlapping their acquisition by tribute, exchange, war prizes, or looting. In the case of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eleanna Prevedorou. Jane E. Buikstra. Stella Chrysoulaki.

Ancient Athens is cited as the contentious caldron from which the western political tradition emerged. During the formative Archaic period (ca. 700-480 BC), Athenian history was marked by major political developments (e.g., early law codification, citizenship formalization), social stratification (e.g., classes), and conflict (e.g., tyrants). To date, such processes are known to us through texts, artistic representations, and elite-centered mortuary grounds. The collaborative Phaleron...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Simmons.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Colonial Archaeological Research in the American Midcontinent" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Clay smoking pipes fragments proliferate archaeological sites in colonial North America. Clay pipes were in regular use, did not last for very long, and were often replaced. Pipe bowls and stems found at sites across New France not only provide evidence of daily life on the frontier, they also introduce and strengthen...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stéphen Rostain.

Sangay, Ecuador, is probably the most prestigious and impressive site in Amazonia. It is indeed an immense establishment regrouping dozens complexes of artificial earthmounds and a network of endless paths dug along the edge of a terrace of the left bank the Upano. Many archaeological sites have been found in this narrow and straight Upano Valley has been modified over tens of kilometers in length by the pre-Columbian, but few of them have been excavated. Does this multitude of interconnected...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kenneth Gobalet. Robert Leidy.

It has been a decade since Gobalet et al. (2004: Trans. Am. Fish. Soc. 133:801-833) summarized the fishes found in archaeological sites on San Francisco Bay. Numerous additional excavations have been completed in the last ten years and this report adds 32,000 bones to the totals from 23 archaeological sites from seven counties. By number of specimens found at the sites collectively, bat ray, sturgeons, herrings and sardines, northern anchovies, salmon and trout, New World silversides,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erich Fisher. Stephan Winkler. Shara Bailer. Hayley Cawthra. Irene Esteban.

This is an abstract from the "From Veld to Coast: Diverse Landscape Use by Hunter-Gatherers in Southern Africa from the Late Pleistocene to the Holocene" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Excavations at Waterfall Bluff, South Africa, document evidence of occupation in a persistent coastal context from MIS3 to the Middle Holocene. Remains of marine mollusks and fish show for the first time that coastal foraging was a component of some hunter-gatherer...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ben Marwick. Pham Thahn Son.

This is an abstract from the "Geometric Morphometrics in Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Understanding stone artefact variation in northern Vietnam can be challenging because of the underspecified cultural taxonomies that have dominated analytical frameworks. For example the Hoabinhian is often thought to be a descendant taxa to the Sonvian. Our recent excavations at Mau A challenge this sequence. We apply statistical shape analysis...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Craig Goralski. Alexis Gray.

In 2014, the Unidentified Persons Project transitioned from being a small scale volunteer-based project to a twenty-three student forensic archaeology field school, allowing for the exhumation and DNA sampling of a much larger number of individuals than had been previously possible. This paper will summarize the opportunities and challenges associated with this transition from the perspectives of multiple stakeholders, and will discuss the evolution of the project’s research questions and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily R. Edmonds. J. Cristina Freiberger. Kathleen Stansbury.

This is an abstract from the "Continued Advances in Method and Theory for Commingled Remains" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The cave site EDR 9-7 is located in the Rio Zape Valley of Durango, Mexico, within a transitional region between Mesoamerica and the American Southwest. EDR 9-7 can answer questions about environmental variation and cultural resiliency due to its initial use as a mortuary feature during a period of environmental stress, as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erich Fisher. Jamie Hodgkins. Curtis Marean.

Zooarchaeology continues to suffer methodological problems in that analysts use methods for calculating skeletal element and surface modification abundance that vary widely, are non-transparent, and almost certainly produce data that is not comparable across analysts. In 2001, Marean, Abe, Nilssen, and Stone presented a method to overcome these problems by using a GIS-based approach to calculate minimum numbers of skeletal elements (MNE) and surface modification frequencies corrected for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jon Carroll.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From gypsum reliefs that once decorated the walls of the Assyrian capital at Nineveh, archaeologists know that Sennacherib’s army laid waste to the city of Lachish, Judah (now Israel) in 701 BC. There remains no consensus on how these events unfolded, but many researchers agree that the Lachish reliefs were intended to serve as both historical record and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Conolly. Daniel Smith.

This is an abstract from the "Dating Iroquoia: Advancing Radiocarbon Chronologies in Northeastern North America" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Middle to Late Woodland transition in southern Ontario extends over approximately 500 years and encompasses several changes in subsistence and settlement patterns, ritual practices, and ceramic and lithic crafting traditions. The last major review of the radiocarbon chronology related to these changes...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Risa Carlson. James Baichtal.

New Early Holocene sites were discovered during the 2014 field season using a predictive model based on the age and elevation of Saxidomus giganteus shells in relic raised marine deposits in the Alexander Archipelago of Southeast Alaska. Additionally, three new higher elevation sites were found inadvertently during road construction activities which fit the criteria of the predictive model. This paper presents the preliminary findings of latest discoveries and updates on the first Early Holocene...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ellen Lofaro. Megan Buchanan. RaeLynn Butler. Amanda Roberts Thompson. Nina Schreiner.

This is an abstract from the "In Search of Solutions: Exploring Pathways to Repatriation for NAGPRA Practitioners (Part IV): NAGPRA in Policy, Protocol, and Practice" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over 33 years have passed since the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 (NAGPRA) was ratified. As practitioners, we recognize the progress that has been made and acknowledge the vast amount of repatriation work that still...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gregory Cook.

This presentation focuses on the ongoing investigations of shipwrecks from the Spanish fleet of Tristan de Luna, who attempted to colonize northwest Florida in 1559. Fieldwork conducted during the last year has yielded exciting new insights into the expedition, and the ships that made up the fleet.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessi Halligan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Page-Ladson site in the Aucilla River basin in northwestern Florida, a drowned terrestrial locality, contains strata with well-preserved organic materials in archaeological contexts, allowing us to create absolute cultural chronologies, recreate paleoenvironments, and discuss human subsistence strategies. For the past several years, we have been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Lagle. Laura Niven. Teresa Steele.

This is an abstract from the "Current Zooarchaeology: New and Ongoing Approaches" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Logistical challenges of managing large zooarchaeological projects mean that researchers must often conduct faunal analyses in phases and implement sampling strategies, including studying subsamples that do not fully incorporate screened materials. However, screened portions may contain specimens that can provide depth to studies of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Boehm. Chris Widga. Daniel Gilmour.

This is an abstract from the "Future Directions for Archaeology and Heritage Research in the Willamette Valley, Oregon" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Near the end of the Pleistocene, 35 genera of mostly large mammals became extinct in North America, yet the cause of these extinctions remains debated. The Willamette Valley in western Oregon boasts a robust record of up to nine megafaunal taxa (*Mammuthus, Mammut, Equus, Paramylodon, Megalonyx,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Conlogue. Severin Fowles.

This is an abstract from the "Collaborative Archaeology at Picuris Pueblo: The New History" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper reports preliminary results from intensive surface mapping and test excavations of precolonial agricultural systems at Picuris Pueblo. Our work alongside collaborators from Picuris has uncovered one of the largest continuous agricultural systems in the northern Rio Grande region. After five field seasons of mapping...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rhiannon Stevens. Hazel Reade. Sophy Charlton. Jennifer Tripp.

Human mobility and environmental interactions at the end of the Palaeolithic were undoubtedly influenced by large-scale and rapid climate change. With the melting of ice sheets and expansion/contraction of ecosystems, new landscapes and resources became available to late and final Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers. The UP-NORTH project is examining the dispersal of people and animals into Northern Europe after the Last Glacial Maximum. Using a range of techniques, including stable isotopes,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexis Mantha.

This is an abstract from the "After the Feline Cult: Social Dynamics and Cultural Reinvention after Chavín" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While the Late Intermediate period (LIP) in the upper Marañón region is well known for its unique surface stone architecture such as tall multistoried tombs, the periods immediately following the Early Horizon are still poorly documented and understood. Nonetheless, excavations at the site of Rapayán in Ancash...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Sterner.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research investigates community organization as an approach to understanding the shift from typologically complex to a simpler lithic technology after circa A.D. 500 in the Prairie Peninsula. I compare the lithic practice of Upper Mississippian groups settled in western Wisconsin (A.D. 1400-1700) at the La Crosse locality to that of groups in eastern...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mietje Germonpré. Martina Láznicková-Galetová. Mikhail Sablin. Hervé Bocherens.

With this contribution, we would like to present our ideas concerning the first steps in the domestication process of the dog. Two main hypotheses on the origin of the dog have been proposed: 1)"Self-domestication" by wolves: Some wolves were following Paleolithic hunter-gatherers to scavenge on the remains of prey left by the prehistoric people at the human settlements. Generation after generation, these wandering wolves adapted themselves to the human dominated environment. 2)"Social...

DOCUMENT Citation Only J. Christopher Gillam. Nicolas Zwyns. Masami Izuho. Biambaa Gunchinsuren. Guunii Lkhundev.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The distribution of Upper Paleolithic sites in northern Mongolia indicate that maintaining social networks, subsistence and shelter were all significant factors in the cultural landscapes of these ancient hunter-gatherers. In 2018, 12 new Upper Paleolithic sites were documented in the Naryn Tolberiin Gol (Narrow Tolbor River, n=21) valley of the greater...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brea McCauley. David Maxwell. Mark Collard.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Handprints with missing fingers occur at a number of Upper Palaeolithic rock art sites in Europe. It has been argued that they represent hand signals or a counting system, but there are reasons to believe that they were actually produced by individuals whose fingers had been amputated. Here, we report a cross-cultural study that was designed to shed light on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Sarig. Ofer Marder. Omry Barzilai. Bruce Latimer. Israel Hershkovitz.

The study on the partial calvarium discovered at Manot Cave, Western Galilee, Israel (dated to 54.7 ± 5.5 kyr BP, Hershkovitz et al. 2015), revealed close morphological affinity with recent African skulls as well as with early Upper Paleolithic European skulls, but less so with earlier anatomically modern humans from the Levant (e.g., Skhul). The ongoing fieldwork at the Manot Cave has resulted in the discovery of several new hominin teeth. These include a lower incisor (I1), a right lower...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rory Becker. Ivor Jankovic. Darko Komšo. Siniša Radovic. James Ahern.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Research on the Paleolithic in the Mediterranean Region" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Abri Kontija 002 rockshelter and cave located in the Istria Peninsula of Croatia provides a wealth of archaeological material dating to the Upper Paleolithic. Excavations beginning in 2014 produced several thousand artifacts, some of which can be traced to distant sources. This paper presents recently identified evidence...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julien Riel-Salvatore. Ingrid Ludeke. Fabio Negrino.

We present an analysis of the spatial distribution of various features (hearths, dripline, etc.) and of four broad artifact classes (lithics, fauna, ochre, shell) in the proto-Aurignacian levels of Riparo Bombrini. The site is a collapsed rockshelter in the Balzi Rossi site complex and is interesting in part for having yielded very late Mousterian and very early proto-Aurignacian levels. The site thus offers an ideal setting in which to study behavioral differences between late Neanderthals and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Huffman. Frank Lee Earley.

On the High Plains of North America, geographical separation and cultural isolation were not the same phenomena. Upper Republican and Apishapa archaeological units, for example, represented separate ethno-linguistic groups, but they were not isolated. Apishapa pottery at the Wallace site (Upper Republican) and Upper Republican pottery at Cramer (Apishapa) demonstrate reciprocal interaction. We argue that the calumet ceremony facilitated this interaction, rather than residential mobility....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ronald Canter.

Like other major rivers the Usumacinta had parallel land routes. Unlike most rivers the Usumacinta lies bound within whitewater canyons below Yaxchilan, cut off from its flanking trails except at gaps dictated by the geography. In the Classic Period, the river and its trails formed a ladder-like grid offering great mobility, but requiring tradeoffs between speed and safety. For both the ancient Maya and modern boatmen the Usu’ was a fast, efficient, and dangerous route to the lowlands. Two...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Guy Hepp.

This is an abstract from the "Leveling Up: Gaming and Game Design in Archaeological Education and Outreach" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, I discuss an analog role-playing game (RPG) entitled “The Uprising,” which I designed for an undergraduate university course on the archaeology of the senses. I reflect on how gaming in the classroom builds on recent pedagogical research and promotes participation not possible with traditional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rick Schulting. Petrus le Roux. Yee Min Gan. Gary Lock. Chris Gosden.

As in any mixed farming system, the management of animals doubtless played an important part in Iron Age societies in southern Britain. Economically, they furnished meat, milk, wool and manure, and served as draught animals for transport and tillage. Intersecting with their economic uses, they were also important socially, politically and ritually. It is relatively straightforward to determine the proportional representation and mortality profiles of the major species – cattle, sheep/goat and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Renee Walker. Tanya Peres.

Uploading faunal data from eastern Archaic sites to the Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR) as members of the Eastern Archaic Faunal Working Group (EAFWG) was a very exciting prospect. We are pleased to be involved in a project that will address significant questions about animal use during the Archaic period. However, making the data comparable entailed some challenges and compromises. While most zooarchaeologists agree on taxonomic designations, developing ontologies for elements, portions,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only George Bey. Rossana May. Tomas Gallareta Negron. Kyle Winters. Magill Grunfeld.

This is an abstract from the "The Bolonchen Regional Archaeological Project: 25 Years of Research in the Puuc" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Beginning around AD 800 the Puuc region experienced a major construction boom of monumental architecture, including large palace complexes. At Kiuic, in the Bolonchen region of the Puuc, the early Yaxché Palace (AD 550–800) was replaced by a much larger complex of structures, still under construction at the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wendy Ashmore.

Archaeological study of ancient water management has grown tremendously in recent decades. Vern Scarborough has contributed centrally to advances in this domain, in the Maya area of Mesoamerica, as well as in cross-cultural examinations extending to the U.S. Southwest, and more distantly, South and Southeast Asia. Even his early concerns with ancient American ballcourts and ballgames link to water, with regard to the watery underworld to which the courts were entry portals. Scarborough’s...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ari Caramanica.

Mobility among smallholders or campesinos is a crucial element for understanding the development of both ancient and modern-day Peru. In the case of the ancient agricultural landscape of Mocán, the movement of people, products, and possibly plants, lead to increasing network complexity eventually culminating in the area’s incorporation into an important coastal polity. Archaeological evidence suggests changing approaches to landscape and water management over the 2,000 years of occupation in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anthony Tricarico.

The use of GIS to determine the spatial boundaries between terracing and the ceremonial center at Late Classic Monte Alban (250-700 CE), will validate or falsify current Late Classic population estimates. The determinants for what defines agricultural versus residential terracing and whether both types are present at Monte Alban, has been highly contested. Archaeological investigations yielding residential debris, does not indicate the total sum use of an individual terrace, nor does it indicate...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nadia Waski. Zachary Nason.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Intact cultural deposits providing a “glimpse” into domestic life in rapidly transitioning urban communities, such as Boston, are rare archaeologically. The constant, natural movement of people in city landscapes complicates results of excavations at these urban archaeological sites. Investigations in 2020 and 2021 by SWCA Environmental Consultants at the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chris North. Scott Courtright.

PaleoWest Archaeology recently completed two data recovery projects at the east and west ends of the seminal Hohokam village of Pueblo Grande in Phoenix, Arizona. The two projects were in the last two undeveloped parcels of Pueblo Grande, which was the largest and most influential Hohokam village in the lower Salt River Valley. Despite more than a century of historic use of these parcels, which included residential and commercial developments, substantial prehistoric archaeological deposits...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Furlong Minkoff. Teresa Moyer.

The Urban Archaeology Corps was created as a way to rethink youth employment, archaeological education, the contributions young people can make, but also how the National Park Service can more effectively serve the next generation of Americans. An experimental youth employment program in the National Capital Region, the UAC employs underserved and minority youth in the Washington, DC area. What has resulted is a program that is a mix of school, summer camp, and work unlike any of the youth...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marilyn Masson.

A usually predictable attribute of Postclassic Maya settlements (in Belize and Yucatan) is the abundance of faunal remains relative to preceding Classic Period contexts. This discrepancy is not attributable to taphonomy or bone age, given the recovery of human bone from both periods and the abundance of fauna in even earlier Preclassic deposits. Robust forest environments, balanced human predation levels, and variable animal husbandry practices represent the best explanations for the wealth of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zachary Nissen.

This is an abstract from the "Households at Aventura: Life and Community Longevity at an Ancient Maya City" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cities are locations of diverse human interaction where persons from different families and social affiliations can gather, exchange goods, and participate in community events. However, the management of these diverse interactions and activities requires social and political systems that do not value the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Liye Xie.

Archaeological evidence and ancient Chinese text imply that the construction of early urban settlements in China were planned events initiated by rulers relocating their settlements in order to legitimize their arising power and establish hierarchical social systems. Accordingly, the construction of the urban settlements may have been the transformative social environments in which power was legitimized and enacted and new social structure was created. I hypothesize that whether this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Miriam Stark. Peter Grave. Lisa Kealhofer. Darith Ea. Boun Suy Tan.

Angkor’s agro-urban capital covered more than 60 square miles, and its landscape housed farmers and artisans. Constraints of the archaeological record limit our ability to document production scale of most activities; the genealogical skew of Angkor’s epigraphic record in another reason. Yet Greater Angkor’s gardens and fields must have fed residents in the Angkorian state’s epicenter. Artisans built its temples, sculpted temple images, and cast metal goods; specialists and communities tended...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arianna Campiani.

This is an abstract from the "The Urban Question: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Investigating the Ancient Mesoamerican City" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper I will explore the extent of planning and its social dimension at the ancient Maya city of Palenque, Chiapas, Mexico. Between the seventh and ninth centuries, during the Classic period, the plateau where Palenque is located was extensively modified resulting in a prosperous,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabriela Zygadlo Vera.

This is an abstract from the "Hydro-Ecological System of the Maya in Petén, Guatemala" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Nixtun-Ch'ich', a Middle Preclasssic settlement along Lake Peten Itza is known for its city organization. Nixtun-Ch'ich' has been surveyed in a variety of ways including a theodolite with an electronic distance measurement (EDM), total station, lidar, and photogrammetry. These various maps of Nixtun-Ch'ich' show how the central...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Clayton. Michelle Elliott.

This is an abstract from the "The Legacies of The Basin of Mexico: The Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization, Part 1" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The extensive surveys of the 1960s that culminated in Sanders, Parsons, and Santley’s pivotal 1979 volume put numerous archaeological sites on the map and advanced knowledge of the changing sociopolitical landscape of the Basin of Mexico through time. Data resulting from this work,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Wattenmaker.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dramatic demographic growth is a hallmark of the urban process, yet reasons for population growth in emerging urban systems are not well understood. This paper draws on archaeological and textual evidence pertaining to ideology of the house and cultural values to explore why populations increased so dramatically in third millennium Mesopotamia. Additional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Cohen.

This is an abstract from the "Approaches to Cultural and Biological Complexity in Mexico at the Time of Spanish Conquest" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. When Cristóbal de Olid arrived in Tzintzuntzan, Michoacán c. 1522 CE, he encountered the powerful king (irecha) of the Purépecha (Tarascan) Empire who controlled approximately 75,000 km2 of western and central western Mesoamerica. Never defeated by the Mexica, the Late Postclassic (1350-1530 CE)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dylan Kemp. Kelly Dixon. Nikki Manning.

Urban locations have an entire component of the landscape that is often overlooked, historic underground spaces. Not to be confused with the underground art and culture scene that occurs in a thriving, modern city; the historic underground can provide insight into a city’s past social, cultural, and ecological heritage. Because this particular part of the landscape is often neglected in anthropological research, there are not a lot of resources available to understand the historic uses of these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Piphal Heng. Miriam Stark. Alison Carter. Rachna Chhay.

This is an abstract from the "The Current State of Archaeological Research across Southeast Asia" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Angkor was premodern Southeast Asia’s largest city from the ninth to fifteenth century. Centered in northwest Cambodia near the Tonle Sap Lake, this agro-urban agglomeration comprises extensive settlements linked through a series of road and water management systems. Research on Angkorian urbanism has focused on either...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Smith.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. I describe a new approach to understanding life and social dynamics in premodern cities around the world. Early cities varied considerably in their political and economic organization and dynamics. My approach is transdisciplinary in scope, scientific in epistemology, and anchored in the urban literature of the social sciences. The central concept is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nathan Acebo.

The Market Street Chinatown archaeological collection offers a diverse assemblage of artifacts that shed light on the urban social lives of Overseas Chinese communities in San Jose, California during the late 19th century (1866-1887). Glass objects constitute a considerable percentage of the total archaeological collection and includes a massive assortment of medicinal and cuisine containers, architectural features, and domestic objects. The bricolage collection of glass permits discriminate...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Davis.

Lithics are one of the most common artifact classes encountered at nearly every site of the urbanized landscape of the Indus Civilization of Pakistan and Northwest India. This paper examines the lithic assemblage at the urban center of Harappa (3300-1900 BCE), one of the type-sites of the Indus, focusing on the chipped stone assemblage collected by the HARP excavations from 1986-2001. This assemblage is contextualized within the specialized production and the complex inter-regional distribution...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Kulick.

Transitional phases between settlement periods on Bronze Age Crete are often associated with ‘natural’ destructive events. However, it is unclear whether these ‘natural’ destructive events and subsequent shifts in material practices were influenced by anthropogenic or environmental processes. For example, the end of the Neopalatial period on Crete occurred in the LM IB period; some researchers view LM IB destructive fires as indicative of human action during a phase of social and political...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Kulick.

Sequences at Bronze Age Cretan settlement sites are defined by destructive events, natural or anthropogenic, that capture cultural material in a particular time and space. The traditional approach of studying urban archaeological contexts based on these snapshots of material culture is not completely suitable for analyzing transitional phases that occur between these events. However, detailed micromorphological examination of the sediments present in these transitional stratigraphic sequences...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Roland Fletcher.

This is an abstract from the "Regional Settlement Networks Analysis: A Global Comparison" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Residential densities within the settlements of sedentary communities vary between about 1,000 p/ha and less than 10 p/ha. Some regional settlement networks consist predominantly of settlements with compact, high-density residence patterns while others are dominated by settlements with dispersed, low-density residence patterns....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Manuel Fernandez-Gotz.

This is an abstract from the "Regional Settlement Networks Analysis: A Global Comparison" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Urbanization is a social process, rather than a final destination. More important than debating whether one specific settlement within a system should be classified as "urban," "proto-urban," or "nonurban" is to analyze the wider processes of settlement nucleation and centralization that take place within the larger landscape,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jordan Dalton. Alexis Rodríguez Yábar. Irving Aragonéz Sarmiento. Tiffiny Tung. Nessel Jurado.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In modern times the Chincha Valley is one of the most productive agricultural valleys of Peru, and its offshore islands were rich in guano — bird excrement that is a potent fertilizer — that was exploited by foreigners from the Colonial into the Republican Periods (AD 1523-1879). While the importance of the valley’s agriculture and resources is well known...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher von Nagy. Mary Pohl. Paul Schmidt. Eliseo Padilla Gutiérrez. Isaac Lima Astudillo.

The large Early to Late Formative site of Quiotepec-Oxtotitlán, best known for Oxtotitlán Cave and its associated Middle to Late Formative polychrome murals, is the site of on-going archaeological research since 2012 by the Urban Origins Project. Our goal is twofold: to develop a richly detailed documentation of the art and its physical and chronological context at Quiotepec-Oxotitlán and to investigate the political economic underpinnings of the artistic production and possible elements of a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nawa Sugiyama. Tanya Catignani. Ariel Texis. Saburo Sugiyama.

This is an abstract from the "Journeying to the South, from Mimbres (New Mexico) to Malpaso (Zacatecas) and Beyond: Papers in Honor of Ben A. Nelson" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With 54% of the world’s population living in urban zones, investigating the nature and impact of urban centers has never been more relevant. Archaeology’s unique ability to reconstruct prehistoric urban systems across the long dureé makes the Pre-Columbian metropolis of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Bernstetter. Kate Trusler. Amie Green.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The process of urbanization and urban planning plays an important role in understanding how people utilize their space to access resources. Pompeii’s water system includes a combination of household water collection features, primarily cisterns. However, an aqueduct system was installed in the first century AD providing new access to water leading to a variety...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Whitten. David Chicoine.

This paper examines and compares the spatial organization of residential compounds in order to reconstruct patterns of neighborhood and urban life at the Early Horizon of Caylán (800-1 BC), Nepeña Valley, north-central coast of Peru. Systematic surface mapping combined with limited horizontal excavations indicate that the urban core of the ancient city was composed of more than 40 residential complexes articulated through a series of streets and corridors. Detailed first-hand mapping of streets...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gerardo Gutiérrez. Kim Richter. Irad Flores.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Mesoamerican and Andean Cities: Old Debates, New Perspectives" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this presentation we explore political arrangements, settlement organization, and urban dwelling in northern Veracruz during the Postclassic Period. We use the spatial distribution of royal Huastec sculpture, and its placement within the sites. We aim to address Huastec cities and urbanism at the local level.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kerry Boutte.

This is an abstract from the "*SE New Orleans and Its Environs: Historical Archaeology and Environmental Precarity" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. New Orleans experienced considerable social change between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the economic participation of its residents varying widely according to race, gender, and immigrant status. In the two decades following Hurricane Katrina, federal aid disaster response and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Rubertone.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Urban renewal and historical preservation are implicated in Indigenous erasure. Focusing on Providence, Rhode Island, I argue that the geographies of race and class of mid-20th century urban renewal have a longer-term history in 19th century land clearance projects. Among the disproportionate number of nonwhites affected were the city’s Indigenous people...