Society for American Archaeology

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dustin Kennedy. Kim Przewlocki. Viktor Gabriel.

Low mound sites, often referred to as Calapooia Mounds in western Oregon, are prevalent throughout stream systems within the Willamette Valley. Archaeologists postulate that the Willamette Valley mounds, which date to within the last 4,000 years, were created through the accumulation of occupational debris over time. Many of these late Holocene sites are located on private property and are continually impacted by farming activities while others, located in riparian zones, are less effected....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Raghda El-Behaedi. Douglas Gamble. Eman Ghoneim. Eleanora Reber.

The Abu Simbel temples, commissioned by Ramesses II in Upper Egypt, are vulnerable to inundation due to the ancient structure’s proximity to the Nile River. Because of the rapid rise of water in the Lake Nasser reservoir, large swaths of land are becoming submerged. In order to monitor the recession of the peninsula in which the structure is located on, remote sensing techniques were employed. Using Landsat 5, 7, and 8 multispectral images coupled with SRTM data, change detection and risk maps...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennie Sturm. Wetherbee Dorshow. W.H. Wills.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Remote sensing has been used extensively the past several years to study prehistoric land use in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. Previous land use models for Chaco predict economic activities such as agriculture and water management near some of the major sites within the canyon, and these models have been critical to understanding how land use contributed to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeremy Freeman.

As budgets grow slimmer and curricula become more rigid, teachers are often faced with the necessity to either eliminate or limit the number of school fieldtrips. With tightened budgets teachers are compelled to choose which fieldtrips to retain and which ones to eliminate. These choices are often based on cost, availability of transportation, or are based on what the teacher hopes students will gain from the experience. The goals of the fieldtrip generally align with the educational...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jon Harman.

The Great Mural rock art region of Baja California is unique in several ways. The content and style of the art is severely constrained and well differentiated from other nearby rock art styles. Within the Great Mural region there is some variation over time and space. This variation combined with the overall conservative nature of the art allows for inferences about the movement of people making the art. There are stylistic elements of Great Mural panels in the Sierra de San Borja that indicate...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kim Cox. Carolyn Boyd.

Four principal rules of interpretation for Pecos River Style rock art of the Lower Pecos region of Texas are proposed. These rules were proposed based on a commonality between Pecos River Style and the iconography of historic Corachol-Aztecan speaking tribes such as the sixteenth century Mexica of central Mexico and the present-day Huichol of western Mexico. This presentation shows how the same rules can be applied to the interpretation of the rock art of other prehistoric Corachol-Aztecan...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Nicolas.

Caves are natural spaces, but like other natural settings, they can be perceived by people through highly variable cultural lenses. Caves are not generally used as utilitarian spaces, but are more often sacred spaces where rituals are performed. The material record of these subterranean features can provide insights for how past peoples connected to the symbolic landscapes of caves, thus affording opportunities to assess behaviors. Research on the ritual uses of caves is fairly new in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only E. Cory Sills. Heather McKillop.

This is an abstract from the "Underwater Maya: Analytical Approaches for Interpreting Ancient Maya Activities at the Paynes Creek Salt Works, Belize" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Soil chemistry is used in the Maya area to evaluate ancient activities not readily identified through architecture and artifact assemblages. We evaluate ancient activities at Ta’ab Nuk Na salt work, one of the largest underwater sites in Paynes Creek National Park, with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Gadsby. Lindsey Cochran.

Heritage sites worldwide are threatened by human action and inaction; archaeologists are observers of the era of human-induced global change. We are specially positioned to use our data to examine such change through the material record. Additionally, archaeologists have been recording observations about the condition of sites for many years, even if those observations are not always intended to monitor site condition or integrity. Archaeologists in the National Park Service have, in maintaining...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Schott.

The Petrified Forest National Park in northeastern Arizona has a long record of prehistoric occupation, including within extensive deposits of semi-stabilized dunes and sand sheets. It has been hypothesized that during the Pueblo periods, inhabitants farmed these eolian soils. Eolian sands are not typically conducive to dry-farmed agriculture; however, dune farming is known ethnographically, and has been inferred in archaeological contexts on the southern Colorado Plateau. This paper...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Khori Newlander.

In many regions of the world, archaeologists use sourcing studies to document patterns of toolstone procurement and conveyance that, in turn, inform their understanding of prehistoric lithic technological and socioeconomic organization. This is certainly true of Charlotte Beck and George T. Jones’s research in eastern Nevada, where the sourcing of obsidian, andesite, and dacite artifacts has figured prominently in their study of Paleoindian lifeways. In this paper, I briefly reflect on Beck and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Green. Nicole Pezzotti.

The Wedgworth Midden Site (8PB16175) is a newly identified pop-up tree island site southeast of Lake Okeechobee, in Belle Glade, Florida. It is the last stratified muck site to be excavated in Palm Beach County since Belle Glade Mound in 1977. The site presents with cultural occupations from the Late Archaic into the Woodland Period and is considered a part of the Belle Glade Culture. We compared Wedgworth to the nearby Bryant Site (8PB46) specifically because the ceramic types present at the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Detlef Wilke.

Meanwhile absolute concentrations rather than relative, instrument and setting specific values are requested as scientific standard in publishing provenancing results. Recent publications suggest that there is no reliable vendor software for elemental quantification of pottery with pXRF. It is unclear whether this is due to a lack of precision in the given trace element values of reference standards, or uncorrected matrix effects, or both. We faced similar problems when using >30 reference...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Guiry. Michael Richards.

This presentation explores the utility of stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analyses as a method for tracing the geographical origins of meat products from major livestock species. Samples (n= 250) from pigs and cattle consumed in the historical city of York, later renamed Toronto, in Canada are compared with animals raised in other areas, in both local as well as distant regions. Results show how cultural as well as environmental isotopic variables can be used to distinguish between animals...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dominic Bush. Mark Schurr.

Previous research on the faunal assemblage recovered from the Collier Lodge site (12PR36) centered on the presence and absence of taxa to reconstruct a possible diet breadth for inhabitants of this historic Indiana site. However, the focus of this year’s research is the inferences drawn from stable isotope analysis of said assemblage; specifically, the ratio of 12C to 13C and 15N to 14N. The former provides insights into the source of carbon obtained through diet, while the latter gives clues to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anneke Janzen. Patrick Roberts. Nicole Boivin.

The spread of pastoralism through Kenya may have been slowed by novel disease challenges presented to livestock by wild taxa. In particular, wildebeest-derived malignant catarrhal fever (WD-MCF), which is extremely fatal to cattle, would have been encountered by pastoralists for the first time as they moved south of the Lake Turkana Basin into the native range of East African wildebeest (Connochaetes taurinus). Today, migratory wildebeest have well-known annual migration patterns. However, while...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christina Stantis. Hallie Buckley. Amy Commendador. John Dudgeon.

Though many ethnohistoric sources in the tropical Pacific recount chiefly feasting events, few describe the feeding practices of children despite the impact childhood nutrition has on morbidity and mortality throughout an individual’s life history. The Namu burial ground (circa 750 — 300 BP) on the island of Taumako in the southeast Solomon Islands provides a direct means of understanding prehistoric life on a Polynesian Outlier. Twenty individuals from the 226 excavated were sampled as part of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jorge Hernandez. Susan Snow.

This is an abstract from the "NPS Archeology: Engaging the Public through Education and Recreation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Twice a year Western National Parks Association has a Mexican Art Exhibit featuring pottery from Mata Ortiz at the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park Visitor Center. The pottery from Mata Ortiz follows the centuries-old ceramic tradition of Casas Grandes culture of the Chihuahuan desert. Park interpretive...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kimberly Sheets.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological bighorn sheep (O. canadensis) have been recovered in high frequency from the Homol'ovi Settlement Cluster (HSC), northeast Arizona. This is salient because these animals are non-endemic to the Middle Little Colorado River Valley, with the nearest source being the Grand Canyon approximately 160 km away. This study uses strontium isotope analysis...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam Stack. Sarah Martini. Matt Liebmann.

Determining the population of ancestral Pueblo villages has beguiled inquisitive observers from the 16th century down to the present day. Spanish explorers and colonial settlers floated wildly variable population estimates upon their initial visits to Pueblo villages. Today archaeologists are no different, offering demographic estimates that often differ by orders of magnitude. This "population problem" plagues the Jemez region of northern New Mexico in particular. In this paper, we present the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jan Pérez. Isabel Rivera-Collazo.

Human activities leave chemical traces in the sediments, which can give us clues about the content of the subsoil and the activities that might have occurred in the past. In this study we evaluate the potential of the geochemical evaluation of sediment samples collected from surface survey for the identification of buried patterns of human activity at the site of Tierras Nuevas, is an archaeological site in a tropical environment. Based on topographical characteristics, we had identified...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Murray. Jacob Harris. Simen Oestmo. Curtis Marean.

The heat treatment of stone to enhance flaking attributes was an important advancement in the adaptive toolkit of early humans. The earliest evidence for this is the heat treatment of silcrete 164 ka at the Middle Stone Age site Pinnacle Point 13B in South Africa. Heating stone prior to knapping alters the physical and chemical composition of the stone, and it has long been recognized that flaked heat-treated stone has a glossier surface. We expect this glossiness to result from a smoother...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeanne Binning. Jennifer Thatcher. Craig Skinner.

This is an abstract from the "Debitage Analysis: Case Studies, Successes, and Cautionary Tales" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For a cultural resource to be eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, it must meet specific criteria. For significant archaeological sites, this usually means the resources can produce data that address important questions about the past (i.e., National Register Criterion D). The integrity of design is of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Byers.

The purpose of this study is to prevent the loss of important archaeological information by examining a collection of faunal remains from the Anasazi Origins Project (AOP) that have been virtually untouched since their excavation. Re-evaluation of these collections will allow us to identify their research potential, as well as possible cultural significance that was not identified during initial investigations. The collection being examined for this study is the Anasazi Origins Project....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Davies. Simon Holdaway. Patricia Fanning.

In Australia’s desert regions, different conceptual models are sometimes used to explain patterning in late Holocene surface deposits. Among these patterns are distributions of radiocarbon determinations, which have been concurrently explained as generated by intermittent occupation by hypermobile foragers, or growing semi-resident populations of broad-spectrum hunter-gatherers. This paper shows how models connected to the language and logic of record formation can help resolve competing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sandra Pentney. Stephen Bourne.

The SAA has held sessions on how climate change is affecting cultural resources for several years now. We began with characterizing the impacts and concerns on how to preserve or mitigate. We have discussed ongoing studies, and strategies to engage the public and local government in conservation and recordation initiatives. This year, Atkins will be presenting a newly developed tool to help planning organizations visualize physical impacts to built environment, traditional cultural properties,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alecia Schrenk. Debra Martin.

Bioarchaeology has come a long way in using differential diagnosis, attending to the Osteological Paradox, using biocultural frameworks to integrate different levels of analysis, and developing ways to work with small sample sizes and fragmentary remains. Designed by Lorna Tilley (U. Aukland), the Index of Care offers a new scientifically-based and systematic tool to collect and integrate a range of information in life history, disease processes, and cultural context. This online tool tests...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Noll.

Volcanic rocks such as obsidian were commonly used for the formation of chipped stone tools by people during prehistoric times. Archaeologists have been able to learn a great deal about the movements of prehistoric people by charting the procurement sites and use locations of these stones through x-ray fluorescence (XRF). Typically XRF can determine the procurement location of volcanic tool stone within a few square kilometers. Occasionally sources are characterized that are widely scattered and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Veres. Suzanne Pilaar Birch. Jack Williams. Eric Grimm. Russ Graham.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Neotoma Database (neotomadb.org) functions as an interdisciplinary, open access database for the paleoecology community. Primary data types include proxies such as pollen, vertebrate remains, diatoms, and middens. As stable isotope data become ever more ubiquitous in our study of the past, a new repository within Neotoma has been created, allowing for the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Cvinar.

In 2016, the National Park Service celebrated its centennial anniversary thus reminding the public that places of historical significance matter to our national cognizance. Using the National Historic Landmark designation as a means for public education, this papers draws upon my Master’s thesis project, which focuses on building a bridge among CRM, research, and public education at the national level. It serves as a model for how graduate-level, archaeological training contributes to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Yaquinto.

This presentation will explore the opportunity to increase scientific driven data into the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) Section 106 compliance process particularly relating to Bureau of Land Management (BLM) undertakings. The absence of empirical data available to the BLM to analyze how different activities’ development and/or management affect archaeological sites can result in unfounded assumptions and unnecessary complications during project planning and implementation. Using...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Brooke. Curtis Marean. Jacob A. Harris. Jan A. Venter.

This is an abstract from the "Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Understanding the ecological role of extinct large mammals is an ongoing challenging research problem. The use of species traits (physical and behavioral) to characterize functional communities is becoming common in ecological modelling and is key to understanding the ecological role that species would have filled under historic conditions. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Doershuk. John Cordell. Teresa Rucker. Stephen Lensink.

This is an abstract from the "How to Conduct Museum Research and Recent Research Findings in Museum Collections: Posters in Honor of Terry Childs" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The University of Iowa (UI) Office of the State Archaeologist has maintained the State Archaeological Repository of Iowa since 1959. During its 60-year history, the repository’s curation strategy has modernized from strictly housing UI-generated collections to meeting the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Cardoso. Benjamin Fuller. Pauline Méjean. Andre Strauss. Klervia Jaouen.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The study of shell mounds can shed light on human occupation and adaptations at coastal environments worldwide. In South America, human groups occupied the territory close to the Atlantic Ocean for millennium (ca. 8000 to ⁓1000 years BP), building hundreds of shell mounds, some with impressive dimensions. After 2000 BP, it is assumed that these populations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Weston McCool. Joan Coltrain.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Non-state warfare has the potential to effect myriad aspects of people’s lives. The last several decades of archaeological research have revealed that conflict has shaped much our evolutionary history and regional population trajectories. Despite the importance of prehistoric warfare, it remains a substantial challenge to elucidate the basic characteristics of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aurore Val. Guillaume Porraz. Marina Igreja.

This is an abstract from the "Animal Resources in Experimental Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bone retouchers were first recognized in European Paleolithic assemblages at the turn of the nineteenth century. They have since been documented from sites across Eurasia, from Lower Paleolithic to Neolithic contexts. Notwithstanding their abundance in the archaeological record, the association between the characteristics of the retouch on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matt Peeples. Anthony Wende. Matt Kroot.

This is an abstract from the "Training a New Generation of Heritage Professionals in the Valley of the Sun: The ASU Field School at S’eḏav Va’aki" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As part of the Arizona State University field school at S’eḏav Va’aki, the research team reached out to ASU faculty from the Unmanned Aerial Systems department to develop a plan for capturing true color and infrared imagery and photogrammetric data from the project area....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maximilian Jewett.

Developments in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) over the past five years have allowed for their use among non-experts and the rapid development, at relatively low cost, of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UASs) or drones. UASs use the UAV platform to carry a variety of sensors. One of the most important developments coming from this technology is the ability to collect aerial photos for photogrammetry at relatively low cost. In an effort to better understand the uses, practical issues of operation, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeffrey Vadala.

The Oculus Rift virtual reality headset used alongside 3D site reconstructions provides a huge potential for a phenomenologically based landscape analysis. This presentation explores the methods and results of a study using these technologies that focuses on understanding the diachronic changes in the construction of ritual space at the Maya site of Cerros, Belize. Site maps were modeled in 3D according to each historic phase and converted for use in a highly immersive and interactive video game...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam Sellen.

Since the inception of thermoluminescence dating we have known that a significant number of Zapotec effigy vessels in museum collections are fakes, manufactured sometime in the early twentieth century. Some of these forgeries are composites that combine ancient and recent materials, but it is not clear how they were assembled, or how a conservator could restore such an object. In order to fully understand how these composites were manufactured and in what way they differ from ancient ceramics,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kevin Wright. Elliot H. Blair.

In partnership with Tennessee Valley Archaeological Research (TVAR), this poster presents the results of an x-ray fluorescence spectrometry (XRF) analysis of ceramics recovered from historic Choctaw (Late 17th - Early 19th century) contexts at sites (22KE630 and 22KE718) located along Chickasawhay Creek, Kemper County, MS. In the fall of 2017, a sample of ceramic sherds was selected for chemical sourcing at the University of Alabama. XRF was used to non-destructively identify ceramic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pam Crabtree. Taylor Zaneri.

This is an abstract from the "Animal Bones to Human Behavior" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The origin of urbanism is one of the most significant transitions in human history. Archaeologists and historians have been interested in the origins and development of early medieval urbanism since the days of V. Gordon Childe and Henri Pirenne in the early twentieth century. While most of the early studies of medieval towns were based on historical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pam Crabtree. Douglas Campana.

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. The development of urbanism in northwestern Europe has been of interest to medieval archaeologists and historians since the days of Henry Pirenne, and these questions have been central to anthropological archaeology throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. One of the critical features of early...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristin Oliver. Camilla Speller. Jynnifer Zhu.

This is an abstract from the "Stability and Resilience in Zooarchaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In a large estuary off the central coast of eastern Vancouver Island lies a series of fish trap complexes, which were used for catching herring and salmon in the past. Nearby, the large Pentlatch Village site contains the zooarchaeological remains of these harvests and provides an opportunity for researchers to obtain species-level...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yige Bao. Matthew Collins. Eugène Morin. Marta Alegre. Gilliane Monnier.

This is an abstract from the "The Late Middle Paleolithic in the Western Balkans: Results from Recent Excavations at Crvena Stijena, Montenegro" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Crvena Stijena is one of the most significant Paleolithic sites in southeastern Europe. Although scientific excavations conducted here in the 1950s, 1960s, and since 2004 have uncovered several Middle Paleolithic faunal assemblages, the results of the early excavations were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Faber. Kristine Richter. Aurora Allshouse. Sonia Gabriel. Christina Warinner.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Large scale fishing of small fish in the Scombrid and Clupeid families as well as hunting of tunas was part of the economy in the Roman empire through the production of fermented fish sauces (including garum), pastes, and other fish products. These products were produced in various grades at large factories on the Mediterranean and exported throughout the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only José Alvarez Estrada. Lilia Lizama. Guadalupe Zetina. Miguel Covarrubias.

This is an abstract from the "La Práctica Arqueológica en México en Tiempos de Crisis: Escenarios, Problemáticas Claves, Actores, Acciones y Propuestas" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Desde sus orígenes de relativamente baja tecnología, la arqueología ha evolucionado en una disciplina altamente tecnologizada, que emplea instrumentos para localizar, caracterizar y exhibir al sitios y yacimientos. Los arqueólogos con acceso a tecnología novedosa...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rocio Velasco Fuentes. Marisol Reyes Lezama. Mayra León Santiago. Everardo Tapia Mendoza.

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. Nopiloa y El Zapotal se localizan en una sub área cultural conocida como la Mixtequilla, en el estado de Veracruz, México. Durante las excavaciones, realizadas en los años 1940s y 1970s, en ambos lugares se recuperaron varios sahumadores y braseros, objetos cerámicos relacionados a prácticas rituales, en lo que...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arlen Mildred Talaverano Sanchez. William Mc Collum. Steven A. Wernke.

Los espacios rituales han sido desde siempre lugares importantes dentro de las comunidades humanas pues son la expresión material de sus creencias y su fe. En el caso del Virreinato del Perú, la invasión española del siglo XVI significó un cambio radical en la concepción y materialización de la religiosidad practicada, donde la construcción de edificios de carácter religioso encarnó el cambio de vida y costumbres de los pueblos conquistados. Esta ponencia explora el espacio arquitectónico de la...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ian Buvit. Irina Razgil'deeva. Steven Hackenberger. Viktor Golubtsov.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With implications affecting numerous anthropological debates, Paleolithic discoveries in Siberia are important to understand how humans initially spread across Eurasia and into the Americas. Here we introduce Lagernaya, a middle Upper Paleolithic site in the Transbaikal Region of southern Siberia. Three 14C dates from the site's oldest cultural layer...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adrien Martinet.

This is an abstract from the "Materials in Movement in the Isthmo-Colombian Area" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Usulután wares are ubiquitous throughout Central America during the Late Preclassic period. These ceramics likely originated in eastern El Salvador and quickly spread to neighboring regions of western Honduras, forming the so-called Uapala Ceramic Sphere. Recent Investigations suggest that this Sphere covered a larger area than...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caitlin Davis.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Usulután is a type of resist-decorated pottery which was a prominent component of the ceramic assemblage for many Late Formative archaeological sites in the Southern Maya Region. Originating in Western El Salvador, this resist decoration is found on serving wares across Mesoamerica. This paper presents the results of compositional analyses of Usulután...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cassandra Atencio. Alden Naranjo. Garrett Briggs.

This is an abstract from the "Braiding Knowledge: Opportunities and Challenges for Collaborative Approaches to Archaeological Heritage and Conservation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Tribes regularly fight the destruction of their cultural resources and the appropriation of their culture. But what happens when someone appropriates a cultural resource that never existed in the first place? The three Ute tribes have been regularly engaged over the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Terry Knight. Jessica Yaquinto. Nichol Shurack.

This is an abstract from the "Transcending Modern Boundaries: Recent Investigations of Cultural Landscapes in Southeastern Utah" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Nuche, or Ute people, have been in their homelands across Colorado and Utah since time immemorial. Southeast Utah formed part of the larger movements of the Ute bands with connections to the area, which in turn formed part of the overall Ute movements across the entire Ute homeland. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nichol Shurack. Terry Knight.

This is an abstract from the "Braiding Knowledge: Opportunities and Challenges for Collaborative Approaches to Archaeological Heritage and Conservation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Ute Mountain Ute Tribal Historic Preservation Office has worked regularly with archaeologists. While archaeology focuses largely on scientific understanding, the effects of this work on tribes and other stakeholders also needs to be considered. Through this talk,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Horowitz. Damien Marken. Damaris Menéndez.

This is an abstract from the "An Exchange of Ideas: Recent Research on Maya Commodities" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Economic studies in the Maya region have illustrated that the Classic period Maya utilized a variety of exchange networks to circulate commodities such as market exchange, redistribution, and gifting. The study of specific types of goods provides information on how different materials circulated through these exchange mechanisms...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Slobodan Mitrovic.

This is an abstract from the "Power to the People: Cultural Resource Investigations along Utility Lines Giving a Voice to Past and Present Communities" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the regulatory side of archaeology we call cultural resource management, some of the utility line work undertaken in the last several decades has created enormous repositories of information. The volume of excavated soil has been equally immense, in the process...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dominique Meyer. Eric Lo. Aliya Hoff. Mike Hess. Falko Kuester.

With the emergence of low-cost multicopters on the market, archaeologists have rapidly integrated aerial imaging and photogrammetry with more traditional methods of site documentation. UAVs serve as simple yet transformative tools that can rapidly map archaeological sites with increased efficiency and higher resolution than manual measurements while contextualizing the site within the landscape at costs significantly cheaper than plane-based aerial LIDAR systems. Though structure from motion...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kevin McBride.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Science Outside the Ivory Tower: Perspectives from CRM" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Metal detectors are rarely employed in CRM research yet their utility in locating historic sites of low visibility and artifact density have been effectively demonstrated in Battlefield Archaeology studies. This paper will argue for the importance and utility of metal detector surveys in CRM through several case...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Asia Alsgaard.

Nestedness analysis suggests that the presence of specific ichthyofauna in assemblages from seven different sites from the northern Yucatán peninsula may be a result of the life-histories of those species or cultural preferences rather than being driven by environmental barriers. The results suggests that the assemblages may be derived from different populations suggesting that they are not coming from the same source. I argue that while trade is playing a role, it is also likely that ancient...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Kennedy. Sarah Kelloway.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Field portable x-ray fluorescence spectrometry (pXRF) has seen an increase in use for testing potentially toxic levels of heavy metals in modern mining and industrial waste sites. Understanding the spatial variation of pollutants in soil is necessary for identifying proper prevention measures for soil contamination and long-term effects on human health. While...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thaddeus Bissett. Martin Walker. Sean Taylor. Michael Russo.

This paper evaluates the utility of high-resolution LiDAR-derived elevation data for remotely surveying difficult-to-access coastal areas to identify possible archaeological sites, which can then be targeted for further investigation. To determine the effective limits of the elevation data to visualize low-relief structures, locations of previously-recorded Archaic and Woodland-period shell rings along the lower Atlantic coast were examined. Thirty-four rings were identified, including two...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marisol Cortes-Rincon. Jonathan Roldan. Cady Rutherford. Byron Smith. Walter Tovar Saldana.

Airborne LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) is an active remote-sensing technique which records the surface of the earth using laser scanning. The recent acquisition of LiDAR data for a portion of the Three Rivers regions in northwestern Belize offered the opportunity for a new way to analyze settlement and landscape utilization by the ancient Maya. This paper will focus on the systematic analysis of the dataset, ground verification, and post-processing methodologies. ArcGIS was used for the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Roxanne Wildenstein. Aubrey Cannon. David Burley.

Analysis of archaeological fish remains from the Hopoate site, on Tongatapu in the Pacific Island Kingdom of Tonga, identified 18 different families. Significant change in relative abundance was evident in Lethrinidae (emperors) and Acanthuridae (surgeonfish, unicornfish), two families common as food fish in Tonga. Frequencies of the families were compared between the early settlement period (~2850-2900 cal BP) and the subsequent Plainware/Aceramic period. Larger-bodied Lethrinidae, which are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Evan Sternberg. Alexander Kurota. Virgil Lueth.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Research at Jornada Mogollon Sites in South-Central New Mexico" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past several years, the Office of Contract Archeology has conducted fieldwork in the southern Tularosa Basin on White Sands Missile Range. This project has resulted in the documentation and testing of more than 36 sites ranging from the Paleoindian through Jornada Mogollon periods. Lithic raw materials...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Weyrich. Raphael Eisenhofer. Bastien Llamas. Keith Dobney. Scott Fitzpatrick.

This is an abstract from the "When the Wild Winds Blow: Micronesia Colonization in Pacific Context" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient human migrations underpin the origin of past cultures, health, ecological interactions, and identity. However, recent or rapid migrations are difficult to track using classical demographic tools that monitor human genetic mutations over time. A new method—tracking human migrations by assessing microbial genome...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shannon Horton. Karen Harry.

This poster will examine the variation of corrugated ceramics from the Virgin Branch Puebloan sites located on the Shivwits Plateau and in the lowland region of the Moapa Valley. Variation between these two regions is examined, as well as changes in corrugated designs over time and differences between wares. These data allow us to evaluate patterns of social interaction, trading networks and learning interactions between sites and regions. SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marty Kooistra.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology of the Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Prehistoric habitation structures located in the Mount Trumbull region of northwest Arizona are constructed across a diverse topographic landscape. Several archaeological site records for the Mt. Trumbull region allude to the exceptional views from habitation structures despite their often non-obtrusive locations. The following...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ian Beggen.

This is an abstract from the "American Foragers: Human-Environmental Interactions across the Continents" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Regional archaeological survey is notably difficult in continental Aysén, Chile. Many researchers mark the difficult terrain and dense vegetation of forest and forest-steppe biomes of this region of Central Western Patagonia as major factors limiting our ability to identify new archaeological sites. Thus far, most...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Keith Merwin.

Providing adequate lighting for subterranean work at a remote site in the Peten of Guatemala usually involves flashlights or gasoline generators and CFL lights on homemade power cords. Because of the cost of generators and the difficulty and cost of transporting fuel to the field site most tunnel work uses head lamps and flashlights. In an effort to be environmentally sensitive and to be more efficient the Holmul Archaeological Project has started using 12 volt LED light strips powered by a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Corey Hartley. Lap Kwan Tang.

This poster session illustrates the effective utilization of tablet computers in archaeology using a cultural resource management (CRM) case-study. CRM in British Columbia requires rapid turn-around times between site identification, investigation, reporting, and project development. This dynamic makes tablets ideal for generating complex datasets from archaeological sites in short periods of time. Digital data can be imported into GIS or database management systems immediately, without...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Morgan.

This paper will provide an overview of using the established Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Visual Resource Management (VRM) system to assess indirect visual effects on historic properties. Per Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, the introduction of visual elements that diminish the integrity of the property’s significant historic features constitutes an adverse effect. The VRM system was designed to inventory landscapes, identify those with high scenic values worth...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jaime Marroquín. Jamie Ford.

This is an abstract from the "Polychromy, Multimediality, and Visual Complexity in Mesoamerican Art" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Following the arrival of Europeans to the New World, one of the most fascinating early exchanges of knowledge and technology that ensued was the introduction of the silk industry to Mexico. While in some places this was unsuccessful and/or short-lived, particularly in Oaxaca, it flourished for the better part of a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gregg Jamison. William Belcher. Charles Konsitzke. Brett Hoffman. Ella Axelrod.

This is an abstract from the "Applying the Power of Partnerships to the Search for America's Missing in Action" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since 2014, the University of Wisconsin Missing In Action Recovery and Identification Project (UW MIA Recovery and Identification Project) has partnered with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) to help recover, identify, and repatriate the remains of missing armed services personnel. Our approach...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Horton.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There is a wealth of historical archaeological resources in Yellowstone, and the development of the park is directly connected to larger socioeconomic changes occurring across America. Recent investigations of refuse dumps associated with late-19th to mid-20th century tourism in Yellowstone National Park provided insight into the various beverages, foods and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only R. Alexander Bentley. William Brock. Michael O'Brien.

Under the conventional view of evolution, species over time come to exhibit those characteristics that best enable them to survive and reproduce in their preexisting environments. Niche construction provides a second evolutionary route to establishing the adaptive fit, or match, between organism and environment, viewing such matches as dynamical products of a two-way process involving organisms both responding to problems posed by environments as well as setting themselves new problems by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Frankie Pack. Kathryn Kulhavy. Graciela Cabana.

The destructive nature of traditional DNA extraction techniques presents one of the primary obstacles to accessing genetic information from museum and archaeological collections. Here we assess a recently published "non-destructive" DNA extraction protocol by Bolnick and colleagues in terms of the amount and quality of DNA extracted from a set of samples of even greater antiquity than those tested in the original analysis. DNA was successfully extracted from archaic period samples from the Eva...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jesús De La Rosa-Díaz. Ciprian Ardelean.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Valle de Bonanza (northeast of the Mexican state of Zacatecas) is a surface-only archaeological site located in a highly eroded desert landscape on the edges of a vast endorheic basin in Concepcion del Oro county. The site consists of a sand-and-dust surface affected by intensive deflation that caused the formation of a palimpsest of crudely made flaked stone...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sophia Marques.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sometime during the Late Intermediate Period or the Late Horizon, the Valle de Mairana, Bolivia became part of the farthest reaches of the Inka empire, which at its height spanned the Andean mountain range from Colombia to Argentina. However, relatively little is currently known about the people who lived in this valley during these centuries. How did the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniela Klokler. Fernando Almeida.

Field schools, and Methods and techniques in Archaeology classes are mandatory steps to achieve Master’s or a PhD degree in most graduate programs in Brazil. We, as instructors noticed a certain mismatch in students’ behavior in regard to decision-making in both situations: reticence during field activities, boldness during class discussions and debates. This dichotomy seemed to be related to field experiences in which the students had fewer opportunities to engage with other "more...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kaitlyn Cometa. Allen Denoyer.

Antelope Creek is a part of the important larger obsidian source at Mule Creek in Southwestern New Mexico. Antelope Creek contains an abundance of both poor and good quality obsidian that appears to have developed from the same volcanic event. In this experiment, a large sample of Antelope Creek obsidian was collected and tested for quality through the process of flintknapping. Results indicate that knappers can readily tell a poor quality nodule from a good quality nodule from this source by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Gould.

In an era of globally declining government funding for culture, including archaeology and heritage, the philanthropic sector will loom increasingly important to funding this discipline. Major philanthropic organizations and individual philanthropists increasingly are seeking to define and measure the impact of the causes they fund. That "impact" may be social, economic, political or cultural, but in all cases the essential element is a set of clearly defined impact metrics. This change in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lindsay Holman.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster demonstrates the pedagogical value of 3-D models of ancient artifacts for teaching ancient history. I produced 3-D replicas of two examples of Herzog’s tesserae, with permission of the museums that hold the original artifacts, to teach classes about Roman material culture, ancient Mediterranean slavery, and Roman freed persons. The 3-D models...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joanne Murphy.

This paper aims to explore the value of faience and glass in Bronze Age Pylos with a view to reconstructing the wealth and status of the people with whom they were buried. These beads must have been imported to Pylos as finished objects since none of the raw materials are found locally and we have no evidence for their manufacture or production at Pylos. Indeed our analysis of a sample of the vitreous beads shows that some of these beads, or at least their substance, originated in Egypt and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joseph Talachy.

This is an abstract from the "From Collaboration to Partnership in Pojoaque, New Mexico" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Like many of my community, I grew up here, learning about the landscape by living within it and walking over it. Evidences of our long history are found everywhere and I always wanted to know more. Our older members taught us about our land too. But it was difficult to recognize Pojoaque when I read archaeology; I also noticed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caroline Arbuckle MacLeod.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Children have long been considered one of the "invisible" communities of the ancient world. As they are infrequently mentioned in texts and incapable of constructing their own mortuary narratives, Egyptologists and archaeologists have contented themselves with only a basic understanding of the position of children in ancient Egyptian society; however, through...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sean Devlin.

Archaeologies of colonialism have presented models that draw out the complex political interactions of meaning making via material practices that take place at the intersection of daily lives between populations of colonized and the colonizer. Traditional approaches to the archaeology of slavery within the Anglo-Caribbean have tended to transpose these categories onto enslaved Africans and white settlers. The result is a tendency to emphasis meaning making through material in terms of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Martin McAllister. Brent Kober.

Law enforcement officers working for agencies not directly involved in land management, such as county sheriff’s departments, traditionally have not been trained to recognize evidence of crimes related to resource protection, for example, artifacts and human remains stolen in the commission of archaeological crimes. In a recent class presented by our firm and cohosted by the Lake County, California Sheriff’s Department and two California tribes, sheriff’s deputies and evidence technicians...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeffrey Alvey. Evan Peacock. Joseph Mitchell.

This is an abstract from the ""Re-excavating" Legacy Collections" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. All data accumulated in field studies directed at the determination of formal variation in the archaeological record contain a source of variation that results from analytical error. This type of error, if of sufficient magnitude, may significantly affect interpretation. Recent ceramic and faunal analyses from the Southeast have identified important...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lexie Lowe. Amy Roache-Fedchenko. James Nyman. Margaret Wilkes.

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. From 2021–2022, the Northeast Archeological Resources Program (NARP) began partnering with five National Park units to pilot a new initiative: the design and facilitation of a region-wide volunteer archeological site monitoring program. Working with park staff and stakeholders at the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Wonson.

This is an abstract from the "The Vanishing Treasures Program: Celebrating 20 Years of National Park Service Historic Preservation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Vanishing Treasures (VT) began its training program in 2014 with five trainings and 90 trainees. Today, we have trained over one thousand people and hosted 90 trainings. Our growth has been guided by A Technical Preservation Needs Assessment and Training Strategy completed in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chris Loendorf. Barnaby Lewis. Glen Rice.

This is an abstract from the "Collaborative Archaeology: How Native American Knowledge Enhances Our Collective Understanding of the Past" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Vapaki is plural in the O’Odham language for Vah’ki, which is the name used to refer to what archaeologists now call Classic period (ca. 1250–1450) platform mound villages. Importantly, Vah’ki is specifically applied only to platform mound sites, and the term is not used to refer...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Sutter.

Recent bioarchaeological and archaeological research regarding the environmentally influenced demise of the Moche (AD 200 – 800) of the Jequetepeque Valley, Perú, indicates a variety of responses, including population dispersals, political fragmentation, cultural hybridization, and new political alliances with recently arrived foreigners at ceremonial centers. Biodistance analyses suggest that adjacent highland Cajamarca peoples from the adjacent highlands arrived in the Jequetepeque and likely...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Lewis. RE Burrillo. Joan Brenner Coltrain.

Recent stable isotope and phytolith studies suggest that desert succulents (in particular Yucca sp. and Opuntia sp.) were a non-trivial component of Ancestral Puebloan diets. However, isotopic variability in such resources is poorly documented. We present 𝜹C13 and 𝜹N15 values for fruits and seeds of thirty modern Banana Yucca (Yucca baccata) specimens from Cedar Mesa, Utah. Experimental roasting and simulated mastication of yucca ‘crowns’ allow separate assays of whole tissue, fiber, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Smith. Brendon Asher.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Blackwater Draw Locality 1 site provides one of the most unique perspectives of Paleoindian behavior in North America. Spatial evidence surrounding faunal and lithic assemblages have inspired researchers to hypothesize site function to represent kill, scavenging, caching, or domestic activities. Its setting relative to other localities of resource...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Natalie Munro.

This is an abstract from the "Breaking the Mold: A Consideration of the Impacts and Legacies of Richard W. Redding" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In his 2002 paper “Breaking the Mold,” Richard Redding wrote that “by focusing on the emergence of tactics of animal use that characterize the Neolithic, we may be missing aspects of the process that are not only interesting but critical to building and testing explanations.” Twenty years later, our...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jarrod Burks.

Many Ohio Hopewell earthworks present an interesting challenge to archaeological geophysics: they are very large and contain vast amounts of what seems to be empty space. Both have limited our understanding of the breadth of the archaeological record at these complex sites; that is, until very recently. Large-area surveys at three Hopewell earthwork complexes in Ross County, Ohio (Hopewell Mound Group, High Bank Works, and Hopeton Works, ca. 30 ha each), have uncovered a wealth of new features,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Jane Berman. Ieva Juska. Perry Gnivecki.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in the Archaeology of the Bahama Archipelago" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We compared molluscan faunal assemblages from two neighboring Lucayan sites, the Pigeon Creek dune 1 (Late Lucayan) and the Pigeon Creek dune 2 (Early Lucayan) sites located on San Salvador, Bahamas. Two species, Lombatus gigas (Queen Conch) and Codakia orbicularis (Tiger Lucine), demonstrated the most significant temporal change in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Margaret Homko.

The Orkney archipelago, at the northern end of Scotland, has a rich and well preserved record of Neolithic settlement. Radiocarbon dates from northern Scotland indicate the establishment of farming communities quite soon after those in southern England. However, the process by which agriculturalists reached these far northern territories is still not well understood. Faunal analysts (Watson 1931, Noddle 1983) have drawn attention to an apparent distinction in morphology between the cattle...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Malpass.

Lomas formations in coastal Peru form when moisture off the Pacific Ocean condenses on hill slopes that rise between approximately 400-800 masl. These formations are distributed over broad regions in the southern part of Peru, but become more dispersed as one moves north. Depending on their extent, lomas formations can support a broad range of plant and animal life. As a major resource zone prior to the advent of agriculture, lomas were exploited by hunters and gatherers throughout this period...