Society for American Archaeology

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Rubertone.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Indigenous people’s urban experiences represent some of latest chapters in their stories of survivance. Yet they remain largely invisible archaeologically because of urban renewal, historic preservation practices, and the myth that U.S. cities do not have modern Indigenous histories. Geographies of race and class underwriting mid-twentieth century urban...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Mixter.

This paper begins with a question: What does it mean to live amongst ruins? The literature on ancient Maya urbanism focuses to a large extent on how urban spaces are arranged and what this says about social and political organization. However, the long occupations of many Maya centers resulted in urban centers that reflect a palimpsest of decision-making over centuries rather than a single grand plan. Indeed, evidence at many Maya sites suggests that urban plans were reworked as buildings were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kyle Brunner.

There has been much debate on what defines an Islamic city (madīna) and what made cities become "Islamic" after the Islamic conquest. These studies have often marginalized the Islamic period, associating street encroachment and overall shifts away from the "classical" model as signs of decline. Scholars have relied on western notions of what defines a city and have used strict urban typological models, which do not conform to the region or period. In addition, these studies have neglected to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dan Penny. Tegan Hall.

The transition from the sprawling Angkor kingdom with its vast, low-density urban forms, to a constellation of smaller cities on the Mekong River was accompanied by profound changes to urban ecology and to landscapes – both in the failing low-density cities, and in the burgeoning trade-based centres that replaced them. Here, we present a paleo record of urban ecology that responds, in part, to changing population dynamics across Cambodia during the 15th to 19th centuries C.E. Implications for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Silvia Valenzuela-Lamas.

Mobility is key to the survival and adaptation of human and animal populations. In all cases, having the ‘right of way’ is necessary to move across territories. How was it in the past? How humans decided about mobility in the context of demographic growth and increase of social complexity that occurred in Europe in the first millennium BC? Strontium isotopic ratios are a powerful tool for investigating mobility in the past. This paper offers a review of strontium isotopic ratios for Western...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Carballo.

Teotihuacan’s Tlajinga district comprises a cluster of neighborhoods of primarily common status apartment compounds, covering approximately 1km2 in the south of the city. Previous investigations at one of them, 33:S3W1 or “Tlajinga 33,” provided valuable information concerning daily life in the urban periphery. The Proyecto Arqueológico Tlajinga Teotihuacan (PATT) has thus far involved excavations at two other compounds (designated 17:S3E1 and 18:S3E1) and along the southern extension of the...

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

Greater Angkor (9-15th centuries CE) was mainland Southeast Asia’s largest low-density urban area. Some of the most visible aspects of this landscape are the large stone temples constructed by Angkorian kings and elites. While many scholars have hypothesized that these temple enclosures were loci of habitation, few have documented this archaeologically. In this paper, we present the results of two field seasons of excavation at the temple site of Ta Prohm, part of a broader research program that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rodrigo Solinis-Casparius. Anna S. Cohen. Kyle R. Urquhart.

Despite over 70 years of research in the Lake Patzcuaro Basin of Michoacan, there has been limited work focusing on pre-Purepecha and Purepecha urbanism in the region. In this paper, we discuss how recent survey and excavation data from the ancient city of Angamuco (c. 250-1530 CE) is helping us to evaluate whether suggested urban models from different parts of Mesoamerica are applicable in western Mexico. Alternatively, is there evidence for a distinct type of west Mexican or Purepecha city?...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elissa Bullion. Farhad Maksudov. Michael Frachetti.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology of Medieval Eurasian Steppe Urbanism" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ninth to thirteenth centuries in the western Eurasian steppe and Central Asia were a period of intensive urban growth. Cities such as Bukhara and Marv boasted large populations in the hundreds of thousands, were home to large communities of scientific and religious scholars, and were transformed by large-scale construction, commonly...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eduardo Neves.

This is an abstract from the "States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives." session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Middle Horizon was a time of political centralization in the Andes. During the same period one sees in the Amazon clear evidence of population growth, settlement nucleation and landscape transformation, as it is attested by the increase in site size, the production of anthropic soils, construction of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anne Underhill.

Previous studies about the production, distribution, and consumption of craft goods in complex societies emphasize social relations at the household, site, and regional scales. An often neglected component is the nature of economic organization within different neighborhoods of large settlements. This paper argues that we should attempt to understand neighborhoods as meaningful communities for inhabitants of urban centers. These smaller communities can have a major impact on the nature of social...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anne Underhill. Fengshi Luan. Fen Wang.

This is an abstract from the "Ceramics and Archaeological Sciences" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Excavations at the Longshan period settlement of Liangchengzhen in southeastern Shandong have uncovered large quantities and diverse forms of ceramic vessels from contexts representing each phase of occupation. This paper explores consumption patterns for ceramic vessels in one neighborhood during eight phases of occupation estimated to represent...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Phillip Parton. Geoffrey Clark.

This is an abstract from the "Theorizing Prehistoric Large Low-Density Settlements beyond Urbanism and Other Conventional Classificatory Conventions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The concept of low-density urbanization has been an important development in recognizing the diversity of past human settlements. However, the key challenge to studying low density urbanization with archaeological data, particularly in tropical zones, has been the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melissa Burham.

This is an abstract from the "Preclassic Maya Social Transformations along the Usumacinta: Views from Ceibal and Aguada Fénix" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Excavations and geospatial analyses of outlying residential settlement at Ceibal, Guatemala, shed light on the relationships between ritual and urbanization during the Preclassic period. The site epicenter, which consists of an E-Group assemblage carved out of bedrock, was established around...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristyn Hara.

Upon his ascension to the throne, King Yaśovarman I (r. 889-910 AD) founded a new capital at Angkor in northwestern Cambodia that was to become the major center of the Khmer Empire and a dynamic religio-political landscape marked by extensive urbanization and environmental change. Religious institutions played a particularly important role in localized human-environment engagements while contributing to broader processes of polity-building. Drawing on historical ecology, this paper underscores...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Colin Quinn.

Communities of the Wietenberg Culture in Middle Bronze Age Transylvania (2000-1500 BC) participated in diverse and dynamic social, economic, political, and ideological institutions. Traditional approaches to the mortuary practices of this period, however, have obscured diversity in the archaeological record in favor of a more homogeneous characterization of burial practices as cremation and burial in urn cemeteries. This paper traces the many different pathways that Middle Bronze Age...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barry Kidder. Jacob Welch. Scott Hutson. Shannon Plank.

Often overshadowed by the splendor of massive monumentality to the south, Late Preclassic life in the Northern Maya Lowlands is a period of material and social experimentation, a balancing act between emerging social differentiation and an ideology of communal integration. During the latter half of this period, the secondary site of Ucanha in Yucatán was physically integrated into a micropolity via an 18-km long sacbe and experienced the creation of integrative civic spaces, a population apogee,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Welsh. Hayden Bassett.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this poster, we outline the recent cultural property protection (CPP) work of the US Army’s “Monuments Men and Women” (Military Governance Specialist 38G/6V) in response to natural disaster events. The poster will discuss the US Army’s obligations under the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Case of Armed Conflict, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Clark. Danielle Macdonald.

This is an abstract from the "Gender in Archaeology over the Last 30+ Years" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The number of women in Paleolithic archaeology has increased over the last 30 years, following the trend in the field in general. In the United States and Canada, the number of men and women in tenure track positions is nearly equivalent, yet this equality masks considerable imbalance when considering the seniority of these professors. Male...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Witt. Nadia Johnson.

Tlaxcala occupies a unique position in the history of New Spain, due both to its alliance with Cortés against the Aztec and to its mid-16th century flourishing as a model republica de Indios. Spanish and indigenous chroniclers throughout the colonial period spoke of the tlaxcaltequidad—the strong regional identity and patriotism that characterized the state. We believe that this is not merely the product of Spanish favoritism and elite opportunism post-Conquest, but rather, the development of a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tibor Lieskovsky. Milan Kovac. Tomas Drapela.

The paper deals with validation and quality estimation of spatial data acquired in the focus area of the project "Proyecto arquelogico regional – Uaxactun" as a part of a LIDAR project supported by the PACUNAM. The project has 2 high-quality 3D models of the pre-classical city of Uaxactun and the site of Dos Torres acquired by detailed topographical survey of the focus area at its disposal. The DEMs serve as basis for the evaluation of spatial accuracy of the LiDAR DSM and an etalon for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nancy Komulainen-Dillenburg.

This is an abstract from the "U.S. Army Corps of Engineers: A National Perspective on CRM, Research, and Consultation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. St. Paul District Regulatory (Corps) implemented measures to build upon and improve relationships with our Tribal Nations and ensure open and transparent communication. A multi-year effort occurred in stages to assess tribal concerns and needs, and develop and share tools and materials to address...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caitlin Baker.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1975, 41 sites surrounding the USACE Wister Lake, located in Latimer and LeFlore counties in Oklahoma, were designated as part of a National Register Historic District. Unfortunately, due to extreme local looting and fluvial action, less than 21 of these sites are still present today. USACE Tulsa District is beginning a site preservation project...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cristina Gonzalez Esteban. James Bacon. Angel Morales Sanchez.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The advantages of LiDAR survey applied to the identification of Archaeology under forested areas has been evident since the early 21st century. Most LiDAR studies have been done by placing the laser devices on aircraft, and in more recent years, drones. However, this is still quite an expensive endeavour that relies on several variables to succeed (forest...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Brody. Andrew Bair.

This is an abstract from the "The State of the Art in Medieval European Archaeology: New Discoveries, Future Directions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper addresses the value of an integrated geophysical survey approach, which includes the application of GPR, DGPS, and magnetic gradiometry, to identify archaeological areas of occupation non-invasively. This approach was applied to RathMaol, as part of a larger ongoing research project,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Hernández Castillo. Gabriel Prieto.

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 exploitation and consumption of seaweeds is a thriving matter of research, arguably started in the 1980s by the ethnographic work of Shozo Masuda in the Andes. This study goes beyond local discussions or milestones about proxies...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Patton. Trevor Orchard.

Eulachon was an important resource for many NWC First Nations. Ethnographers such as Garfield and Boas note the particular importance of this fish among the Tsimshian. One of the primary eulachon spawning locations on the coast is at the mouth of the Nass River, north of PRH, and rights to fish at particular locations in this area were owned by Tsimshian descent groups. Access to this fish, its processing, and storage played an important role in structuring subsistence and settlement patterns,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bukhchuluun Dashzeveg. Lisa Janz. Odsuren Davaakhuu. Asa Cameron.

This is an abstract from the "New Directions in Mongolian Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the late second millennium BC, communities in the Gobi-steppe of Mongolia began to build unique burial structures made of stone. The Late Bronze Age builders of these mortuary features employed new forms of surface demarcation and for the first time in this region, individuals were interred in a prone position. At the turn of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Sterner.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Fossil shark teeth recovered from Ohio Hopewell sites represent a quintessential example of an exotic good representative of the Hopewell Interaction Sphere. As with most artifacts, the primary questions asked of fossil shark teeth in archaeological contexts are (1) what were they used for and (2) where did they come from? Answers to date are that these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marcelo Ibarra López.

The cultural core of the Tarascan society settled in the region of what is now Michoacán, western Mexico. For the Tarascans, gathering firewood was a sacred activity, and the maintenance of a never-ending fire within their temples or "cues" was an essential part of their religion. This sacred element was an offering for their most venerated god, Curicaueri. Collecting wood was an activity so sacred that even the tools used to retrieve it were transformed into consecrated objects sharing the same...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nathaniel Kitchel.

Red Munsungun chert from northern Maine has long been recognized as an important lithic raw material during the fluted point period of New England. Building upon this observation, recent lithic sourcing efforts using visual and XRF geochemical techniques, have demonstrated that this material is virtually ubiquitous in fluted point sites from the region. This same study also shows that red Munsungun chert is transported over longer distances than other raw materials commonly used at this time....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Hora. Ian Wright. Matt Podolinsky. Lexi Carson.

This is an abstract from the "Site Stewardship Matters: Comparing and Contrasting Site Stewardship Programs to Advance Our Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1996, the SAA enshrined Stewardship as Principle No. 1 for a reason: without stewards of the archaeological record, there is no hope for its long-term preservation. Many of us are satisfied with our own roles as site caretakers, but in Utah, it was not enough. Repeated and dramatic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristi Miller Nichols. Clint Laffere. Laurie M. Steves. Richard A. Sample.

Archaeologists at Raba Kistner Environmental, Inc. (RKEI) have been utilizing 3-D ground penetrating radar (GPR) surveys to rediscover the locations and document the construction techniques of irrigation ditches in San Antonio, Texas. Using 3-D GPR, in conjunction with EM-31 surveys, archival research, and archaeological backhoe trenching has allowed us to determine under what geomorphological and burial conditions the GPR yields reliable results. This paper reviews recent RKEI projects...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Sheppard.

Thanks to the efforts of Bill Dickinson petrographic analysis of ceramic thin sections has been able to make an almost unparalleled contribution to sourcing studies in Oceania. In this paper I will report on use of one of the new generation desktop SEMs which will help us continue and build on Bill’s work. Examples will be drawn from studies of Lapita period ceramic assemblages in the Solomon Islands. SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Whitridge. James Williamson.

This is an abstract from the "Arctic Pasts: Dimensions of Change" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A photogrammetric revolution has occurred in archaeology with the appearance of software that allows objects, features, sites, and landscapes to be finely rendered as automatically stitched photomosaics and navigable 3D models. The simultaneous emergence of reasonably priced remotely piloted aircraft (RPAs, or drones) that can produce suitably...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Fine. Beth Shapiro. Diane Gifford-Gonzalez. Gabriel Sanchez. Kent Lightfoot.

This is an abstract from the "Current Insights into Pyrodiversity and Seascape Management on the Central California Coast" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The integration of genetic research on contemporary and ancient organisms into archaeological studies represents a novel approach in the analysis of long-term landscape management practices by small-scale societies. Our project employs methods in genetics (aDNA, phylogeographic research on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Diana Carvajal Contreras. Martha Mejia. Paola Olivera.

This work derives from research in the ongoing research project "Evaluation of Zooarqueológica de Concheros cerca al Canal del Dique". We present the preliminary results of the archaeological research of three sites sampled near Canal del Dique: Monsú (5000 a.C.), Puerto Hormiga (4000 a. C), and Leticia (a shellmound from the 12th century A.D.). Samples of animals remains were recovered from 1/8 inch mesh screening. These samples were analyzed for taxonomic, taphonomic, and quantification...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Randall Dean.

It is very probably the case that more archeology is done in San Francisco than in any other major city in the U.S. Yet this archeological work is done without the benefit of any archeological ordinance or adopted archeological guidance but rather through the City’s implementation of State environmental laws. To overcome the vagueness and generality of these regulations, the City Planning Planning Department has initiated an Archeological District Project (ADP), with the aim of creating...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dana Sukau. Virginia Butler.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Public archaeology has grown in recent decades with increased recognition of the need to garner public support and increase accessibility of archaeology to a range of publics. While public outreach efforts have been increasing, there have been limited reflections on how we measure the effectiveness of our efforts. One approach used in the field of Education is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jordan Dalton.

This is an abstract from the "Political Economies on the Andean Coast" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In prehistory, scales were used by both merchants and bureaucrats and their use had profound impacts on economic and administrative practices. Research in the Andes has not critically addressed the role of balances in political economies, but their presence throughout the Andean coast highlights the need to explore how they were used and by whom....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Philip Hitchings. Edward Banning.

This is an abstract from the "Bayesian Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Today, many archaeological surveys have the goal of documenting, as completely as possible, the locations and character of sites, many of which are rare, unobtrusive, or both. Increasingly over the last three decades, archaeologists have used predictive models in a GIS to help them target spaces that are most likely to contain sites of interest, or sites under...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Thulman.

Many archaeologists struggle to make sense of radiocarbon dates, especially those with large overlapping sigmas. Even with modern analytical techniques that increase precision, the results can be confusing. Bayesian statistics, which employs prior information to constrain posterior results with sets of radiocarbon dates, can lessen confusion and increase precision without using ad hoc measures, such as averaging or ignoring dates with large errors. The power and utility of Bayesian analyses is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Xinyi Liu. Zhijun Zhao.

This article reviews the use of Chenopodium plants in Chinese archaeobotanical record. We will draw attention to two regions particularly, Northeast and Southwest China. We will consider the use of Chenopodium food in the context of origins of agriculture in China.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shera Fisk. Laure Spake. Luisa Marinho. Ellie Gooderham. Hugo F. V. Cardoso.

The onset of puberty, characterized by menarche in females, marks the important transition from the juvenile to the adolescent life-history stage. Limited research has been done to investigate the relationship between this transition and indicators of skeletal and dental maturation. This study examines the association between age of menarche and stages of skeletal and dental development seen in radiographs of the hand/wrist and dentition, using a sample of 33 females followed longitudinally in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leonor Pena-Chocarro. Guillem Pérez Jordà.

This presentation focuses on the various examples collected from northern Morocco during ethnographic fieldwork on the use of dung. Apart from the most known use of dung as fuel, traditional communities in the Moroccan Rif used dung for other purposes such as flooring, tempering, manuring, making containers for storage, etc. This paper will discuss the various uses of this important material and results will be compared to other examples from other Mediterranean areas.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aleta Baxley. Rhododendron O'Boyle. Rachel Pinkman. Alexandra Ritter.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Faunal analysis and taphonomic observations of marine invertebrates in a legacy collection from 45WH10 in Birch Bay, Washington, demonstrated a shift in taxonomic abundance that we hypothesize may be indicative of seismic activity such as an earthquake-induced tsunami. Samples from three units showed a significant shift in the abundance of Nucella...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alex DeGeorgey. Dwight Simons.

Site CA-CCO-297 (a Stege Mound) is a prehistoric shell mound located on the northeastern margin of the San Francisco Bay. Recent archaeological investigations at CA-CCO-297 suggest that fish, water fowl and sea otters were exploited as commodities for exchange rather than purely subsistence items. Emphasized production of locally available resources for participation in inter-regional exchange systems appears linked to demographic pressures and reduced foraging efficiency. This paper explores...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alice Samson. Jago Cooper.

The focus of this paper is on the actions of human fingers, hands, and bodies in the emergence and creation of the extraordinary subterranean cavescapes of Isla de Mona in the pre-Columbian and early colonial Caribbean. The interiors of around 30 of the island’s 200 caves have been extensively modified by scraping substances off, and applying substances to cave walls, leaving marks, extractive patches, meanders, and designs on hundreds of square metres of cave surfaces. These activities were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rita Dias. Cleia Detry. Nuno Bicho.

The onset of the Holocene in the Iberian Atlantic coast is associated with the appearance of the Mesolithic shell middens, which reflected new subsistence patterns that have been commonly characterized by the intensification of aquatic resources exploitation. Recently, sclerochronological analysis of shell midden faunal remains has been seen as fundamental to infer climatic and environmental changes, human settlement, resource exploitation and seasonal occupation. However, fish bone and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Britney Radford. Kirsten Green. Keith Biddle. Meradeth Snow. Elena Hughes.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. "Historic" is a term commonly used in archaeology and bioarcheology but is not typically associated with forensic anthropology. However, historic cases have been brought to forensic anthropology labs, where biological profiles are built using forensic anthropological methods. These osteological methods used within forensic anthropology can be applied to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ravid Ekshtain. Erella Hovers. Shimon Ilani. Irina Segal.

Amud Cave (eastern Upper Galilee, Israel) is known for its Middle Paleolithic deposits, containing thousands of animal bones and lithic artifacts from 3 anthropogenic stratigraphic units, dated to 68-55 ka. Excavations revealed hominin remains, including Neanderthal burials. Technological characteristics of the lithic assemblage show that the knapping sequence started off-site. However, related mobility patterns remained poorly understood. In order to understand the organizational decisions made...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Hasenstab.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are typically used in Archaeology to analyze the patterning of sites in a region. Part of this patterning is the result of past human social behavior. Such patterns are manifested in the spatial arrangement of sites on the landscape. These patterns and arrangements can be analyzed using certain GIS methods. This paper presents GIS methods sensitive to analyzing prehistoric social dynamics. Demonstration of the methods is shown by way of example as well as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Neeshell Bradley-Lewis. Larry R. Kimball. Keith C. Seramur.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Geophysical surveys were conducted at the Broyhill Mound, a protohistoric late Burke village in the foothills of the Southern Appalachians ~30 km northeast from Fort San Juan/Berry (1566-1568), to guide investigations. The site was first discovered by John Rogan for Cyrus Thomas in 1883, and then rediscovered by Richard Polhemus in 1964 and Appalachian State...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicaela Cartagena. Sheldon Skaggs. Terry Powis.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeological site of Pacbitun is located in west central Belize between the ecozones of the Belize River Valley and the Mountain Pine Ridge. The ancient Maya occupied the site from the beginning of the Middle Preclassic (900 – 300 BC) and continuing through the Terminal Classic (AD 800-900). The use of geographic information systems (GIS) is becoming...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cheryl Johnston. Jennifer Jordan Hall. Kevin Schwarz. Andrea Crider. Taylor Bryan.

This is an abstract from the "Canine Resources for the Archaeologist" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Remote sensing techniques, including magnetic survey and ground penetrating radar, are commonly used in archaeology as part of cultural resource management projects. In this presentation, we share our experience using a complimentary and nascent remote sensing technique to locate human remains on archaeological sites, human remains detection (HRD)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Florence Dickens. Samantha Blatt.

This is an abstract from the "Canine Resources for the Archaeologist" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological practice demands international preservation of the cultural integrity of Indigenous and historical burials informed by decedent communities. Therefore, it is paramount to explore efficient, minimally invasive methods limiting burial disturbance, while allowing documentation. Coupled with ground-penetrating radar (GPR), human remains...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shuzhi Wang. Zenglin Wang. Xuelian Zhang. Maolin Ye. Linhai Cai.

Hulijia site was located in Minhe County, Qinghai Province, western China and was the earliest Neolithic site (5000 BP) in Qinghai Province. Two pieces of roll carbonized remains similar to steamed twisted rolls made of wheat were unearthed from this site. The remains were analyzed by means of stable carbon isotope firstly and the results showed that the value of δ13C was -25.1‰. So roll carbonized remains were tree remains. Then the anatomic structure of the remains was observed by means of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Virginia Butler. Kristine Bovy. Sarah Campbell. Michael Etnier. Sarah Sterling.

On the northern Pacific Coast of North America, animals play an extremely important role in conceptual models related to hunter-gatherer evolution and social dynamics of household production and resource control. Our ability to rigorously apply faunal remains to these models is limited by substantial data requirements including well-documented contexts, high-resolution chronology, control over complex site formation processes and taphonomy, as well as large sample sizes. Unique circumstances...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hiroo Nasu.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeobotany of Early Peopling: Plant Experimentation and Cultural Inheritance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents recent archaeobotanical findings on the use of plants by early humans in the Japanese archipelago. The first humans arrived in the Japanese archipelago about 38,000 years ago. Although there are not many archaeobotanical records from this period, pine seeds, hazelnuts, and acorns have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy McCoy.

This is an abstract from the "From Hard Rock to Heavy Metal: Metal Tool Production and Use by Indigenous Hunter-Gatherers in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Iron meteorites are among the most exotic raw materials used for Hopewell ceremonial objects. The sourcing of these meteorites via chemical comparison to known meteorites has implications for acquisition and exchange. Some large meteorites (e.g., Brenham, KS; 4 tons in hundreds...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mikaela Razo. Cindy Muñoz.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Center for Archaeological Research (CAR) at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) offers semester long internships to undergraduate students from UTSA’s Anthropology Department. The internship program offers students an opportunity to gain hands-on experience in laboratory methods, independent research, curation standards, and collection...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justine Buchler.

This is an abstract from the "Liquid Landscapes: Recent Developments in Submerged Landscape Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Marine geophysics has been increasingly used to identify and study submerged landscapes and the archaeology thereof. Techniques such as side-scan sonar and sub-bottom profiling have been used to locate submerged archaeological deposits. Marine magnetics offer another method that can be used in the study of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mavis Greer. John W. Greer.

Historic photographs are particularly useful in rock art studies for assessing early and changing site conditions that show effects, rates, and chronology of natural weathering and vandalism. This includes such alterations as removed and added figures, altered figures, entire affected panels, chalking, latex recording, and deleterious effects of well-intentioned physical conservation. Such changes indicate not only physical changes in the art but also influences on possible direct dating and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kandace Hollenbach. Jillian Galle.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From 1804 until 1865, The Hermitage was home to Andrew Jackson, his descendants, and over 130 enslaved men, women, and children, often invisible in the historical record, who labored in the fields of Jackson's cotton plantation near Nashville, Tennessee. After emancipation, freed households continued to live in the former domestic quarters. For three decades...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nydia Ponton.

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. Research at Hacienda La Esperanza, a nineteenth century sugar plantation in the municipality of Manatí, Puerto Rico, was conducted to study the material culture of its enslaved population and document their unwritten experiences. The use of primary sources proved indispensable during the early research design stages of the project....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Johnston. Michael Buckley.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Biological age at death (AAD) is an important component of the biological profile, to aid investigators in cases with skeletal remains, also in archaeology to aid establishing site context. Current methods rely on predictable patterns of bone or teeth mineralization, growth and fusion or damage over time, though these methods are often subject to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alan Farahani. Hanna Grossman.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Advances in the last decade of open-source computation have improved the capability of archaeologists to store, analyze, and visualize ever-increasing amounts of data. Developments in the R and Python programming languages specifically have made once-proprietary radiocarbon calibration, stratigraphic analysis, and statistical modeling available to a wider...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Barber.

Iron Age brochs, drystone-built towers unique to Scotland, are typically 18m in external diameter, 9m internally, and 12m to 14m high. Calculation of the volume of stone required for the construction is relatively simple. Calculation of its standard bulk density, only marginally more difficult so that the mass of stone involved can be calculated with confidence. The calculation of the number of kWhs of energy required to quarry, lift move, horizontally and vertically and place into the monument...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine Lange.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent excavations of Early Agricultural Period (circa 1200BC-AD 50) sites in the Tucson Basin of southern Arizona have produced a number of ornaments of personal adornment manufactured from marine shells that are found in either the Gulf of California or the Pacific coastal region of southern California. Thriving shell ornament manufacturing industries in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine Lange.

Recent excavations at the site of Las Capas, located along the Santa Cruz River in the Tucson Basin in southern Arizona, have given us an opportunity to examine an Early Agricultural period site in this area. Along with other pieces of material culture such as flaked stone and ground stone tools, ornaments manufactured from marine shell were also part of the lifeway of the local inhabitants. Deriving from locales in California and northern Mexico, where established marine shell ornament...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Esmeralda Agolli.

The question of settlement pattern during the Late Prehistory (Late Bronze and Early Iron Age 1300 – 900 BC) in Albania comprises an unresolved topic constantly discussed over during the last few decades. The high presence of the tumuli mounds and the lack of the contemporary data from a settlement context complicated increasingly the understanding of the way these communities conceptualized their space and exploited the environment. However, recent excavation campaigns in the cave of Tren and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rory Becker. George Holley. Jakob Jensen.

Monochrome ultraviolet (UV) photography provides a new method in the analysis of incised imagery on stone artifacts. In this study, the technique is used to enhance the interpretation of figures on a collection of finely incised catlinite tablets from the Red River Valley of Minnesota and North Dakota. The nine hand-sized tablets included here are commonly associated with the Oneota tradition, although these display designs rooted in Plains themes. These tablets are ideal for the method as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachael Smith.

This is an abstract from the "The Arch Street Project: Multidisciplinary Research of a Philadelphia Cemetery" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During early excavations of the Arch Street Project collection, remains were commingled. Reassembling commingled remains is a long, difficult, and technically advanced process that can take years if not decades to complete. This study uses XRF on eight individuals from the Arch Street Project to assess the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steven Holen. Kathleen Holen.

Patterns of use wear and distinctive breakage are caused when a bone is broken on an anvil surface.The use wear on cortical bone surfaces consists of high polish and linear striations. Breakage patterns can include negative cones of percussion, cone flakes, rebound flakes removed from the cortical surface and V-shaped or U-shaped projections. In sites where there is only evidence of bone processing, these features, and other distinctive breakage patterns, can help identify human activities in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tanner Guskey. Kelly Jenks.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The acquisition of metal tools on the Spanish Colonial frontier of New Mexico was a rare occurrence, but it is an activity we may be able to better understand through analysis of their production, modification, and utilization as well as sourcing their elemental makeup through XRF. Metals of various types were utilized by settlers for agriculture, cooking,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Walton.

Obsidian was one of the most important commodities for residents of ancient central Mexico before and after the great city of Teotihuacan. While previous research on stone tools in Mesoamerican archaeology has focused mostly on identifying production sequences, workshop locations, and market exchange, this presentation highlights how different technological forms of obsidian tools were actually used by household residents for specific tasks. A sample of 464 obsidian artifacts from the sites of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ángel Vega-deJesús.

Functionality of lithic assemblages from Puerto Rico has been traditionally based on tools morphology. These suggestions, which are rarely proven, are put to test in the present study in using use-wear analysis of 87 chert flakes from the early site of Cueva Ventana (2400 – 1010 b.C.). Experiments were conducted on 28 flakes of the same raw material, in which microscopic traces present on stone tool surfaces were compared with those present on the tools from the site. These experiments included...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Qi-Long Cui. Juzhong ZHANG. Yuzhang YANG.

Word Count =147. 200 maximum. Jiahu is one of the most important settlement sites of the Chinese Middle Neolithic Age (ca.7000-5500 BC) and is located in the upper Huai River Valley, China. During excavations, a number of ground stone tools were uncovered. Use-wear analysis and replication experiments were conducted in order to understand the functionality, usage and contact materials of these tools. Our experiments involved stone shovels, axes, adzes, gouges and other common stone tools from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Chase.

This is an abstract from the "Exploring Culture Contact and Diversity in Southern Peru" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Use-wear analysis is a qualitative method of study that observes abrasion patterns on material remains. Wear traces can come from stirring, lids, storage techniques, and other culinary practices. Apparent wear patterns and abrasion coarseness are features that help infer the use of different vessel forms. I applied this technique...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chihhua Chiang.

This is a multi-stage project intending to extrapolate the possible usages of various stone tools excavated from the Neolithic Wansan site in Northern Taiwan. In this poster, I want to demonstrate the preliminary results of the first stage that tries to identify possible patterns of tool use-wear. There are abundant finely ground lithic tools uncovered from the Wansan site. Previous research categorized these tools based on their morphology, and classified these tools as projectile points,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yichao Zhao.

Some preliminary research on ceramic vessels of the Longshan culture had indicated li vessels as the most important type of cooking vessels. Vessel's categories might not exclusively indicate a vessel type. As was observed for the Tonglin site, an important site of Longshan culture at Linzi, li, guan, and pen vessels are the most abundant categories type. However, li vessels of Tonglin site have small rim diameter sizes on average, and it is necessary to collaborating use-wear analysis for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yanhua Song. Xiaoling Zhang. Chen Shen.

In this paper, I report on the use-wear analysis of quartzite artifacts. This is one of the first systematic examinations in China for raw materials other than chert and obsidian. The experiments demonstrated that different use-wear patterns were observed on the different raw materials when the contact materials, use-motion and experimenters were the same. So our research supports the idea that there is no single solution for use-wear analysis. The different characteristics of use-wear...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Nisch.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Shells feature prominently in prehistoric archaeological assemblages in the southeastern United States. However, serrated freshwater mussel shells, of the type found at a Late Woodland site in North Carolina and other area sites, have not been studied and their use been unknown. These freshwater mussel shells were given a serrated edge, with evenly spaced...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zhuang Lina. Zhou Runken.

he Dongshancun Site is located in Zhangjiagang city in Jiangsu Province in the eastern area of China. The site is only 2 kilometers from the Yangtze River. During 2008-2010, the Nanjing Museum excavated about 37 tombs belonging to the Songze Culture (3900-3100BC). Excavations revealed that some of interred were buried with abundant pottery vessels, jade artifacts, and other well-made stone tools such as the stone yue axe, stone adze and stone chisel. In this paper, we employ a low-power method...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Womack.

Excavated in 1978, the cemetery at the site of Dibaping in southern Gansu Province, China revealed hundreds of Banshan period (2600-2300BC) ceramic vessels. The elaborately painted geometric motifs on many of the vessels led to them quickly being touted as an example of the pinnacle of artistic achievement in Neolithic northwestern China. Aside from typology, however, no other analyses have been done on these objects. The result is that little is known about how these vessels were created, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joy Tatem.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Eagle Nest Canyon, Texas: Papers in Honor of Jack and Wilmuth Skiles" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The focus of this research was to analyze potential plant-processing chipped stone tools from several rockshelter and terrace sites in Eagle Nest Canyon within the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas, excavated by Texas State University from 2013 to 2017. The chipped stone tool assemblages’...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jorge Rios Allier.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper analyzes how polycentricity governance is articulated around cultural heritage (CH) performance in an overview of changing contextual factors and focal action situation in Mexican Cultural System (MCS). This paper adds to conversation historical analysis from law changes across time in both countries, and also uses the Network of Adjacent Action...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Bisson.

The Sangoan, a late Middle Pleistocene technological tradition widely distributed in Sub-Saharan Africa, follows the Acheulean and is considered by some to represent the earliest manifestation of the Middle Stone Age. It may coincide with the evolution of Homo sapiens and the initial appearance of evidence for complex cognition. Unfortunately, this archaeological construct has fallen in and out of favor and remains poorly defined. It has uncertain dates and environmental associations, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Ojeda Rodríguez. Jeffrey B. Glover.

Previous zooarcheological research has focused on knowing the patterns of wildlife exploitation in the different archaeological sites of the Maya area. In this sense, the present work intends to approach the different uses of the different species of animals in activities carried out by the pre-Hispanic Maya people located at the site of Vista Alegre, Quintana Roo, Mexico. The simple has c. 23,000 remains of fauna, coming from three architectural constructions: Structure 9 (Operation 3A),...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicola Howard.

Do you have a collection of tiny teeth, bones or seeds?? Photomicroscopy might be for you! This poster demonstrates the results of a four month contract position to digitize a small section of the Quaternary Palaeontology’s collections at the Royal Alberta Museum in 2013/14. Photomicroscopy is an effective, non-invasive digitization technique for museums and educational institutions to be able to expand the accessibility of collections for display and education purposes. Taking several photos of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Vincas Steponaitis. Megan Kassabaum. John O'Hear.

Excavations at Feltus (Jefferson County, Mississippi) have yielded considerable evidence on how the summits of platform mounds constructed during the middle Coles Creek period (AD 900-1100) were used. These summits showed multiple veneers of black and yellow sediments, portions of which were heavily burned. Also present were small pits that may have been votive deposits, as well as large, bathtub-shaped cooking pits. The summits were kept clean, but dense middens accumulated on their flanks....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Livio Dobrez. Patricia Dobrez.

This is an abstract from the "The Role of Rock Art in Cultural Understanding: A Symposium in Honor of Polly Schaafsma" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Polly Schaafsma has made a major contribution to rock art studies with her detailed analysis of rock art styles in the American Southwest. The joint authors wish to investigate the concept of style, with its roots in art history and application in archaeology and anthropology. In so doing, we...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandra Cox.

This paper examines the usewear related modifications on an assemblage of North American lithic artifacts that is held by the Blue lake Museum. The collection consists of a variety of material and tool types. There are a number of flaked projectile points and scrapers, as well as groundstone tools. All pieces were acquired by the Blue Lake museum through donation by private individuals and not all of the pieces have a known context. There has not been any intensive analysis carried out on this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Loebel.

Historically, microwear studies have focused around resolving issues centered on tool form and function. However, microwear also offers the opportunity to investigate site level activities surrounding "soft" technology, particularly in situations where organic preservation is poor or absent. In addition, when combined with a holistic approach to assemblage composition, microwear can provide larger insights into the organization of technology and larger patterns of adaptation. In this paper I...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Folan. Terance L. Winemiller. Lynda Florey Folan.

In 1982, fifty years after the Carnegie Institution of Washington surveyed and mapped sections of Calakmul, a project under the direction of William J. Folan began mapping the site. The completed map published in 2001 covers 30 square kilometers of the ancient site. Many printed maps or datasets like those from Calakmul created with laser total stations or conventional surveying equipment can provide the essential geospatial information to produce accurate topographic maps and 3D map objects...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melanie Damour. Robert Church. Daniel Warren.

3D imaging creates a permanent digital record that allows scientists to study minute site details and also serves an important outreach role by allowing the public to virtually explore archaeological resources. While 3D imaging of archaeological sites using laser and lidar is a growing trend in terrestrial archaeology, its application in marine archaeology has only recently emerged. Marine archaeologists are now beginning to use 3D laser- and sonar-derived models as new tools for interpreting...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lewis Borck. Leslie Aragon.

Between approximately A.D. 800—1450, politically oriented religious movements flourished and withered throughout the Hohokam world of the Greater Southwest. The public architecture associated with these movements is some of the only remaining evidence that archaeologists have for their occurrence. While researchers have started to investigate how these movements were politically intertwined, in this paper we lay out an argument that their physical remains can also be used to ontographically...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Merritt.

Assemblage-scale proportions of modified specimens are difficult to link with hominins’ early versus late carcass access because fragmentation and other taphonomic processes affect assemblage composition and taphonomic trace visibility. This work advocates butchered specimen interpretation and describes the skeletal location of butchery traces inflicted during the sequence of carcass consumption behaviors. Tool-assisted carcass consumption is divided into early (defleshing limbs), middle...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cameron Howell. Dominic Day.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the course of a cultural resources survey in Bartow County, Georgia for the Georgia Department of Transportation, several features related to past mining activities were identified on the surface. These features, consisting of mining cuts and collapsed tunnels, could be identified from LiDAR available from the USGS. This project takes these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claudine Gravel-Miguel.

Anthropological research suggests that climate and environmental resources influence the lifestyle of hunter-gatherers. My research uses an agent-based model to generate test expectations related to the impact of different geographical and social environments on the social networks formed therein. It focuses on Magdalenian social networks created in the Cantabrian and Dordogne region, and visible through similarities of portable art representations. The regional resources and climate of the...