Society for American Archaeology

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Boudreaux. Matthew Helmer. John Mayer. Rachel Feit.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2020, unauthorized excavations and Hurricanes Laura and Delta extensively damaged sites 16RA1758 and 16RA1811 on the Calcasieu Ranger District of Kisatchie National Forest, Louisiana. To address the adverse impacts and gain a deeper understanding of pre-contact lifeways, Kisatchie National Forest initiated comprehensive excavations at both sites....

DOCUMENT Citation Only A. Dudley Gardner. William Gardner.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Formative period in the upper Colorado Drainage has been variously defined but broadly extends from 2000 B.P. to 400 B.P. Recent investigations indicate there was a high degree of variability in the cultural assemblage during this period. Specifically, habitation structures, maize storage facilities, and maize types show a great deal of variability. In...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alice LEPLONGEON. Erella Hovers. David Pleurdeau.

The Middle Stone Age (MSA) is traditionally defined by flake, point and elongated blank production associated with retouched tools (e.g. scrapers and retouched points). However, a great cultural variability is observed, whether it is linked with spatial (e.g. Brandt 1986, Clark 1988), or temporal (Early vs Late MSA, e.g. Douze 2011) variability. Here we present results from a comparative analysis of the lithic assemblages from Porc-Epic Cave (e.g. Clark and Williamson 1984, Pleurdeau, 2005) and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ismael Sánchez-Morales.

This is an abstract from the "Variability: A Reassessment of Its Meaning, Afforded Range, and the Relation to Process" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Clovis populations have been traditionally characterized as wide ranging, highly mobile foragers, as reflected most notably in the intense utilization of high quality, nonlocal cryptocrystalline lithic raw materials. However, in Sonora, Mexico, local non-cryptocrystalline tool stones dominate Clovis...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Woollett. Céline Dupont-Hébert. Paul Adderley. Guðrun Alda Gísladóttir. Natasha Roy.

Recent studies have identified an important reorganization of the Svalbarð estate, north-east Iceland around AD 1300. The initial coastal-focused settlement of the region was followed by the founding of new farms in the deep interior. Most were not sustained and some farm sites on the coast were also reduced. Initially, the magnate’s farm of Svalbarð had a herding economy supplemented by fishing while Hjálmarsvík, its coastal neighbor, exploited a diversity of marine resources. Around AD 1300...

DOCUMENT Citation Only J. Gregory Smith. Charles L. F. Knight.

The nature and degree of interaction between the Classic period centers of Teotihuacan and Cantona is investigated through two types of obsidian artifacts that characterize Early to Late Classic period obsidian use in the central-east highlands of Mexico: prismatic blades and bifacial dart points. At the Zaragoza-Oyameles source area in eastern Puebla, Mexico the recovery of dart point preforms next to obsidian quarries, combined with chemical analysis indicates that these points were crafted at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ainara Sistiaga. Sepideh Parkour. Mathilde Poyet. Roger Summons.

Fecal biomarkers have proven to be a valuable tool to identify the likely source of fecal matter and have successfully been applied in archaeology. They provide direct evidence of the digestive physiology and diet of the source, and critical data to assess the origin of fecal deposits. 5βstanols can be used as fecal biomarkers because they uniquely form in the gut of higher mammals during metabolic reduction of sterols. However, the actors of this microbial conversion still have to be elucidated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Walsh.

Late Holocene occupants of Housepit 54 at Bridge River participated in complex strategies of food acquisition that were much more varied than the oft-cited reliance on storable anadromous fish resources practiced throughout much of the Pacific and inland/riverine Northwest of North America. While acquisition and storage of fish, particularly salmon, was (and is) a vital part of aboriginal subsistence, permeating many aspects of Native life, seasonal and spatial variations in animal procurement...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jamie Hodgkins.

The archaeological assemblage and long stratigraphic sequence at the site of Pinnacle Point 5-6 in Western Cape, South Africa affords the opportunity to explore temporal (and possibly environmentally-mediated) changes in human behavioral regimes in the late Pleistocene. Here, examination of butchering intensity is used as a preliminary test of the hypothesis that humans would have intensified the processing of terrestrial prey in times of cooler, dryer climates, when sea levels were low and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Prentiss. Ashley Hampton. Matthew Walsh. Megan Denis. Haley O'Brien.

This is an abstract from the "AD 1150 to the Present: Ancient Political Economy to Contemporary Materiality—Archaeological Anthropology in Honor of Jeanne E. Arnold" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Jeanne Arnold left us with a legacy of archaeological research into households, social change, and technological variation in the various contexts across the North American west coast. Her work was always characterized by attention to multiple sources of...

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

Recent research does not support the common view that the numerous large sites from the Longshan period of northern China ca. 2500-1900 BC represent a homogeneous type of settlement with respect to developmental process, scale, and organization. Most publications regard these large settlements as cities and expect they share specific features indicative of organizational homogeneity. The focus has been on large Longshan and later, early Bronze Age settlements in Henan province. We discuss...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Max Seidita. Whittaker Schroder. Alejandra Roche Recinos. Charles Golden. Andrew Scherer.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Obsidian Studies of the Old and New Worlds" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. More than a decade of archaeological research has characterized the political landscape of the middle Usumacinta river valley as a tense political rivalry between the Classic period Maya (250 – 900 C.E.) kingdoms. Recent archaeological work in the kingdoms of Piedras Negras and Yaxchilan has sought to unravel how the internal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicolas Hansen. John Murray. Alexa Ferrer. Hanah Edington. Kathryn Ranhorn.

This is an abstract from the "Human Origins Migration and Evolution Research Consortium Poster Symposium" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The heat treatment of lithic raw material is a globally dispersed technology that improves the flaking quality of toolstone. While not all types of stone respond to heat treatment, many forms of microcrystalline silicates do, including jasper. Here, we aim to better understand how Perkinsville jasper responds to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Peart. Sara Watson. Hannah Keller. Naomi Cleghorn.

Fluctuating sea levels during Marine Isotope Stage 3 (MIS3) resulted in radically shifting environmental zones and shoreline position along the southern African coast. Investigation of the intensity of site use and find types relative to modeled coastline proximity provides insight into early human responses to such environmental perturbations. Knysna Eastern Heads Cave 1 (KEH1), a coastal cave site in Western Cape Province, is the only documented locality along the modern coast that preserves a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Mongelluzzo.

Ancient Maya palaces from the Classic Period exhibit a high degree of similarity in terms of architectural layout. While the significance of the similarities has been explored previously, the differences have not been understood as well. This paper attempts to explicate differences in morphology and begin to understand their meaning.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joseph Wardle.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology on the Edge(s): Transitions, Boundaries, Changes, and Causes" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The configuration of the various elements of a river system can have significant impacts on the availability, abundance, and nutritional profitability of aquatic organisms utilized as food by groups of human foragers. These factors may have influenced where and when Late Archaic foragers decided to fish along the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Nowell. Anna Prentiss.

The degree of preservation of Housepit 54 at the Bridge River site located in south-central British Columbia provides a rare look at a long series of intact occupational floors within a single pithouse. As data collection continues, a vast number of opportunities emerge to examine behavioral variation at the household level. During the 2014 field season, excavation revealed a household transition that reflected shifts in the organization of space within the household. Changes included...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mechell Frazier.

Changes documented from the pre-Classic to Classic period (A.D. 475-1450) suggest that a larger social or political movement was occurring within the Hohokam regional system, but the motives behind this change are poorly understood. To fully understand this phenomenon it is necessary to examine how the change differed within the Hohokam regional system. Researchers can observe this relationship through the study of what Nelson (2006:345) calls "interaction markers", artifacts and architectural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aric Archebelle-Smith. Cassandra S. Koontz. Lisseth Rojas Pelayo. Manuel Angel Mamani.

Cranial vault modification was a prevalent type of body modification practiced throughout the ancient Andes. It was achieved by binding the head during childhood, which left the crania permanently altered into adulthood. Different methods of binding led to visually different forms of modification, which likely marked membership in different ethnic groups. Researchers have documented three major modification styles in the Andes: tabular oblique, tabular erect, and circumferential. Recent...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jason Nesbitt.

The Caballo Muerto Complex is well known for the presence of numerous Initial Period platform mounds thought to have functioned as temples. What is less known, is that some of the mounds, including Huaca Herederos Grande and Huaca Cortada were associated with smaller-scale buildings that also seem to have functioned as religious structures. In this paper, I discuss investigations of a square abode building found at the base of Huaca Cortada. Excavation of the structure demonstrated that the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Urban.

Research conducted in the adjoining Naco and Middle Chamelecon and Cacaulapa River (MCC) valleys of northwestern Honduras has revealed a wide array of ceramic firing facilities and implements used in fabricating pottery vessels during the Late (AD 600-800) and Terminal Classic (AD 800-1000). The diversity of manufacturing processes is especially well represented at two major workshops, one located at the Naco valley center of La Sierra and the other at the site of Las Canoas in the MCC. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alicia Boswell. Ellen Howe. Joanne Pillsbury. Deborah Schorsch.

In the last thirty years, archaeological investigations on the north coast of Peru have produced a wealth of new information leading to nuances in our understanding of Moche sociopolitical organization (AD 200-800). These discoveries have included excavations of intact tombs of Moche male and female elites, interred with their ritual regalia and other grave goods. Metal ornaments made up an important part of this regalia, yet our understanding of Moche metallurgy technology and its relationship...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Helmer. David Chicoine.

This paper examines forms of proto-urban settlements in coastal Ancash, north-central Peru, centered on the Nepeña Valley. During the Early Horizon (800-100 BC), the region witnessed the development of culturally and economically interrelated settlements with varying degrees of architectural density and complexity. Most of these centers were organized around clusters of walled enclosures with duplicate domestic facilities interpreted as multi-functional residential complexes, or compounds....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wanda Raschkow.

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. Site stewardship programs enlist volunteers to monitor for and report disturbances at archaeological sites. The majority of stewards are older, often retired, with flexible schedules that allow them to visit remote sites on a regular basis. In order to expand participation, and to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lissette Jimenez.

Throughout the Roman Period in Egypt, decorated shrouds with images of the god Osiris were used in mortuary rituals and wrapped around the mummified body of the deceased. Full-length painted images of the dead in the guise of Osiris, flanked by Egyptian funerary scenes, were effective modes of representation that reveal how gender was used to facilitate the transfiguration of the deceased and aid his or her journey in the afterlife. This paper examines gendered expressions of self-presentation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Barna.

This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Hinterlands in Polynesia" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Beginning in the late 18th century CE, the Hawaiian archipelago's sustained interaction with foreigners transformed the islands from independent kingdoms at the center of their world to a globalized frontier, trade entrepôt, military outpost, and, ultimately, an economic and political colony. At the same time, the seats of power and settlement...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Chiou.

This is an abstract from the "Frontiers of Plant Domestication" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Chili peppers (Capsicum spp.) are one of the extremely rich and varied crop genetic resources of the Americas. The independent domestication of five chili pepper species (C. annuum, C. baccatum, C. chinense, C. frutescens, and C. pubescens) across the Neotropics beginning around 10,000 BP was an intricate co-evolutionary process between these piquant...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Payson Sheets.

Research at the Ceren village archaeological site in 2013 and 2014 has made a variety of discoveries. The plant casts, made by pouring dental plaster into the voids, reveal much about agriculture in the middle of the rainy season some 1400 years ago. The maize plants were doubled over to dry the mature ears, but the Loma Caldera eruption occurred just before planting squash and beans. So what was that single mature squash plant doing in the milpa? What are the limits of preservation of weeds,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pierre De Maret. Serge Bahuchet.

A large scale comparative research project on the state of the peoples living in the Rain Forests of Central Africa, the Guyana’s in South America and in Melanesia, has highlighted the anthropic character of tropical rain forests. It has particularly underlined the strong correlation between biodiversity and cultural diversity and how domesticated and wild resources interact in the various subsistence systems. Activities associated with shifting cultivation contribute to man-made biodiversity in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Miquel Molist. Josep Bosch. Anna Gómez. Sílvia Calvo. Mònica Borrell.

This paper presents a synthesis regarding the exploitation of the variscite mineral in the prehistoric mines of Gava, Spain, as well as the manufacturing of ornaments and their dissemination during the Neolithic period. Special emphasis will be given to the results of the latest research in both the mineralogical characterization and archaeological interpretations derived.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicolas Caretta. Finn Ole Nielsen. Michael Thorsen. Poul Otto Nielsen.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Vasagård site is located on the southern side of the island of Bornholm, Denmark. Vasagård is separated by the 100m Læså valley from two nearly identical Neolithic sites and consists of a tomb system where a dolmen and a passage grave can be found close to the settlement. The grave system and causewayed enclosures are dated from 3500 BC., and constitute the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian McCray.

This is an abstract from the "Indigenous Stories of the Inka Empire: Local Experiences of Ancient Imperialism" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Borderlands, like the eastern Andean slopes between highland states and lowland complex chiefdoms, are frequently a destination for peoples fleeing from state control and characterized by complex multiethnic landscapes. Archaeological studies in northeastern Peru, however, often assume a mega-ethnic group,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Holmberg.

Prominent, recent explorations of the role of sensory data in archaeology detail the linkages of bodily senses, material objects, and remembering or forgetting to invoke the ‘vast and secret museum of historical and sensory absence’ in analyses. In this paper, I examine the residues and associations of chthonic power and senses that can cling in social memory to volcanic materials. This serves as a query for why an entirely useful material was not in use in the Chiriqui culture area that spans...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Levi Romero.

This is an abstract from the "Collaborative Archaeology at Picuris Pueblo: The New History" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation seeks to capture the rewards of a neighboring progression that moves away from past conflicts toward reconciliation forming a new history between the Pueblo and Indio-Hispano people. Inter-communal exchanges between the Spanish and Pueblos helped them to endure droughts, famines, diseases, and the eventual...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cristina Castillo. Dorian Fuller.

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. Although Ethiopia is remembered for famines in recent decades, the zone of vegecultural agriculture in the southwest has largely avoided food insecurity. Here agricultural systems are usually centered on Ensete ventrocosum, a tree-like vegecultural starch crop, an endemic staple food for 20 million...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Scharf.

This paper presents pollen data as a proxy of past vegetation at Poverty Point, a large Archaic mound site in northeast Louisiana. The paleoecological focus of this presentation revolves around the rate and nature of change over time. Patterns and changes in taxonomic diversity are presented and discussed in light of environmental productivity. The rate of vegetation change is calculated and related to ecosystem stability. Additionally, changes in individual taxonomic representation are examined...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tegan Hanson. Sherry Higgins.

This is an abstract from the "*SE The New Normal: Approaches to Studying, Documenting, and Mitigating Climate Change Impacts to Archaeological Sites" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Reconnaissance and initial phase fieldwork for the Gulf Resilience COPE Research HUB began in 2022 and continued in Summer 2023. Experimental investigations into potential variations in vegetative vigor, abundance, diversity, and density at a local archaeological site...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Harper Dine. Traci Ardren. Chelsea Fisher.

It is difficult to pin down the objective definition of a weed; rather, the idea of a weed is constructed through a set of characteristics that are, for the most part, dependent on context and relative interactions. Doody et al (2014) use Judith Butler’s (1990) concept of performativity to describe this dynamic, ongoing construction as a product of the agency of both people and plants. Here we interpret studies on ancient Maya agricultural techniques through the lens of plant agency and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Guido Krempel.

This is an abstract from the "New Perspectives on Ritual Violence and Related Human Body Treatments in Ancient Mesoamerica" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper focuses on specific attestations found on Maya monuments featuring human skeletal iconography and to the concave round depressions used in place of their skulls. Such characteristic representation on monuments is mostly limited to the Maya Puuc region of the western Yucatán Peninsula...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Hyde. Lauri Martin.

This is an abstract from the "Manifesting Movement Materially: Broadening the Mesoamerican View" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Data recovered from excavation of the residential Tapir Group at the Maya hinterland site of Medicinal Trail provides evidence for ancestor veneration and pilgrimage. For veneration, the Maya incorporated ancestors into their built environment through the ritual practice of physically including them in the architecture as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lucianne Lavin.

The Venture Smith homestead is an important eighteenth-century rural black archaeological site with a remarkable level of integrity, associated with a person significant to American history. Born about 1729, Broteer Furro was an African prince abducted and sold into slavery when only six years old. Thirty years a slave, he purchased his and his family’s freedom and became a prosperous mariner-merchant-farmer and benefactor to fellow blacks. At his death in 1805, he owned over 100 acres of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Dungan.

Between the end of the Mimbres Classic period in the 12th century C.E. and the beginning of the 14th-century C.E. Cliff Phase, most of the Upper Gila region of New Mexico is thought to have been only sparsely populated if not entirely unoccupied. Recent excavation in Mule Creek has demonstrated a strong 13th-century presence in this area, however. Like the Gila Cliff Dwellings on the West Fork of the Gila, the settlements in Mule Creek show clear connections to contemporary sites in the Mogollon...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephanie Strauss.

This is an abstract from the "Beyond Maize and Cacao: Reflections on Visual and Textual Representation and Archaeological Evidence of Other Plants in Precolumbian Mesoamerica" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Verdant signs abound in the writing systems of ancient Mesoamerica. Hieroglyphic records of abundance, germination, and rebirth ground ritual speech in agricultural metaphors. A robust iconography of vegetal growth reflects both the natural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Derrick Marcucci. Susan Gade. Antonio Martinez Tunon.

In summer 2017 Landmark Archaeology, Inc. conducted data recovery excavations at four Late Archaic sites in southeastern New York within the Wallkill drainage near the town of Goshen. Excavations at the VerHage Site, a Late Archaic Lamoka Phase (ca. 3000-2500 BC) site and the largest of the four investigated sites, identified pit features, post-molds and house patterns, yielded a large lithic assemblage, and found glacial erratics used for food processing and tool production. The recovery of a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only April Smith. Xiaofei Li. Laurie Reitsema.

During pregnancy, women experience lordotic posturing to compensate for the weight of the growing fetus. Biomechanical stress from lordotic posturing causes bone remodeling of the lumbar spine during pregnancy resulting in lumbar wedging, which may persist after giving birth. Persistence of lumbar wedging in skeletal samples has potential applications for estimating parity in the archaeological record. This research analyzes the possibility that lumbar wedging is observable in the skeletal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Spencer Armitage.

Hup’kisakuu7a (93T, DfSh-43) is a small pre=contact site in Tseshaht territory. This site was excavated in 2015 and 2016 in order to determine to what extent smaller sites in Barkley Sound were being used during the late and mid-Holocene (ca 5,000-200 cal BP). Two 2x2 meter units were excavated. A column sample was taken from the north wall of each units in 2016. These column samples reached a depth of 120 cm depth below datum (DBD) in unit 1, and 137 cm DBD in unit 2. The sediment recovered...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rochelle Marrinan.

The Grand Mound Shell Ring (8Du1) is a Mississippi-period site on the southern end of Big Talbot Island in Duval County, Florida. The site consists of an annular shell midden, composed primarily of oyster, with a sand burial mound deposited over the western ring arc. Excavations by faculty of the University of North Florida recovered a large vertebrate faunal sample marked by the presence of numerous avian species, some of which today are extinct. This paper presents the vertebrate faunal data...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jenny Waters. Janet Griffitts.

Researchers have recovered large faunal assemblages containing several hundred bone artifacts at Las Capas, a San Pedro phase site in Tucson, Arizona. Artifacts include utilitarian and non-utilitarian objects with a variety of technical and symbolic uses. Excavations at Los Pozos, a large Cienega phase site in the Tucson Basin, yielded a very large collection of animal bone with a rich bone artifact assemblage. Bone technologies were often used to make items from plant fibers, wood, animal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nichelle Lyle. Kenneth Tankersley.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper examines vertebrate species from Fort Ancient archaeological sites in the Ohio River Valley, which date to the Little Ice Age. They are compared to vertebrate species from archaeological sites, which predate the Little Ice Age and from modern contexts. The results of this comparison suggest that vertebrate species exhibited individual responses to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michal Gilewski.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The prehispanic and indigenous cultures of the Pacific coast of Guatemala are usually known from ethnographic research and ethnohistorical sources that relate to specific local communities and to local archaeology that relates to specific sites. In this paper, I present how environmental diversity leads to interdependence and integration of the whole...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ye Wa. Weilin Wang. Liping Yang. Mitchell Ma. Mathew Fox.

Of all features excavated at the late Neolithic site of Yangguanzhai since 2005—including houses, hearths, postholes, kilns, child and adult burials, and ditches—pits features, known by the generic term "huikeng" or "ash pit" in Chinese archaeology, account for about 80%. Detailed studies of such features are important not only because of their sheer number, but also because their contents are often used as criteria for site dating and chronology. As our excavation of one such feature (H85)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rob Mann. Charles Peliska. Jacob Dupre.

In August 1862 long-simmering tensions between the Dakota and Euro-American traders, settlers, soldiers, and government officials boiled over into open warfare. For nearly two months militant Dakota warriors, ostensibly under the leadership of renowned chief Little Crow, attacked Euro-American settlements and military installations. In response, settlers across southwest and central Minnesota either fled the region or attempted to fortify their settlements. These so-called "settlers’ forts" of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Davis. Lucas Martindale Johnson. Elsa Carpenter. Lee Drake. Daron Duke.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists continue to push the limits of nondestructive X-ray fluorescence (XRF) analysis in efforts to geochemically source small obsidian artifacts. Building on numerous prior investigations, this study examines a statistically large sample of unmodified obsidian flakes to better define the size threshold for acceptable precision and accuracy and to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Craig Fertelmes. Michael Withrow. Letricia Brown.

Vesicular basalt was a preferred material for groundstone manufacture in central Arizona, and identification of source areas for raw materials will provide important information regarding prehistoric and historic exchange and interaction patterns in the region. As part of archaeological research under the Pima-Maricopa Irrigation Project, the Gila River Indian Community’s Cultural Resource Management Program has recently devoted considerable effort to the creation of a vesicular basalt...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kyle Winters. Rossana May. George Bey III.

This is an abstract from the "The Bolonchen Regional Archaeological Project: 25 Years of Research in the Puuc" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the PARB project’s 2023 excavations of the Terminal Classic (AD 800–1000) Grupo Kuche palace throne room (N1050E0815) at Kiuic, we unearthed two major and distinct ritual offerings. The first was thought to be a lip-to-lip cache located on the northwest corner near the top of the structure beneath a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caitlin Earley.

This is an abstract from the "The Rollout Keepers: Papers on Maya Ceramic Texts, Scenes, and Styles in Honor of Justin and Barbara Kerr" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Rollout images of Maya vases and the database developed by Justin and Barbara Kerr allowed unfettered access to Classic Maya depictions of tribute, palace life, and mythic history. The Kerr Archive also brought into focus marching warriors and captured enemies, some of them...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melissa Baltus.

By replacing representational thinking with a relational perspective, archaeologists hope to better understand the past-as-lived and experienced. Here I seek to locate the relational in the “mundane”, with a consideration of pottery production, use, and deposition as part of the many changing relationships associated with the urbanization and abandonment of the pre-Columbian city of Cahokia. These relationships include pastes as well as potters, engaging humans and non-humans, in the shifting...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Seifried.

This paper offers a glimpse into the roles played by religion during the decline of one empire and the emergence of another, from the perspective of a historical case study: the Mani Peninsula. Mani is a peripheral region in the Peloponnese, Greece, that converted to Orthodox Christianity under the Byzantine Empire, and its occupants maintained this religious identification throughout the subsequent periods of Ottoman and Venetian rule. This unbroken religious continuity, which can be traced in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gibránn Becerra. Marcie Venter.

This is an abstract from the "Olmec Manifestations and Ongoing Societal Transformations in the Tuxtlas Uplands: A View from Matacanela" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. En el año 2015, Venter dirigió un programa de excavación arqueológica en Matacanela. En la unidad 2, realizada al oriente del conjunto arquitectónico principal, se registró una secuencia estratigráfica que permitió documentar y distinguir dos momentos de ocupación en el área del...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Morgan.

The Terrace Building Complex at the Iron Age site of Gordion in Turkey has been called the most complete picture of organized textile production at a Mediterranean palatial center. Artefactual analysis of the numerous textile tools discovered in the Terrace Building has provided a foundation for ambitious models of the Phrygian political economy: it’s been suggested that textiles produced in this ‘industrial quarter’ were intended as payment for the Phrygian army, or tribute. Analyses of the...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Katie Leslie. Melissa Frederick.

The Saint Louis laboratory of the Veterans Curation Program processes several archival investigations throughout each five month term, but few have been to the scale of the Harry S. Truman Reservoir Project. This project produced 23 boxes worth of documentation spanning over 268 linear inches. The Harry S. Truman Reservoir is the largest man-made lake in Missouri and covers over 100,000 acres of government owned and flood easement lands. To prepare for the construction of the dam, a number of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Giffin. Vanessa Armenta. Leah Grant.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since 2009, the Veterans Curation Program (VCP) has been at the forefront of the effort to address the build-up of at-risk archaeological and archival collections in storage facilities around the United States. The VCP has the added mission of working with veterans to provide vital job skills and assist in the transition from military to civilian life. In...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Jessica Mundt. Jasmine Heckman.

The Veterans Curation Program was created with the mission to rehabilitate U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) archaeological collections while providing temporary employment and vocational training to veterans. In the nine years that the VCP has been in operation, it has evolved into a dynamic public archaeology effort that engages non-archaeologists in the field of archaeology on a daily basis. This paper explores the varied approaches to public archaeology within the Program, as well as the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carly Whelan.

The ethnographically documented Mono Lake Paiute of Eastern California regularly crossed the Sierra Nevada to procure acorns from Yosemite Valley; a total journey of fourteen days. It is not clear whether such trips are economically efficient in their own right, or were undertaken as components of social excursions to visit and trade with the Yosemite Me-Wuk, or as journeys of necessity in years with poor piñon pine nut harvests. To evaluate the economic productivity of procuring acorns from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Baires.

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 city of Cahokia sits in a landscape occupied by bodies of water, distinctive biota, and unique stone and mineral deposits. This flood plain landscape of the Mississippi River served for millennia as home to Indigenous peoples who lived in semi sedentary communities...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Barzilai.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In several Mississippian sites circa 1050 CE, shrine houses and some other features were lined with a special bright yellow clay or clay mixture. This study looks at the variability and composition of these clay linings to determine what is the key vibrant ingredient in these ceremonially active clay linings. In this study methods of texture analysis, X-Ray...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Chicoine.

This is an abstract from the "Casma State Material Culture and Society: Organizing, Analyzing, and Interpreting Archaeological Evidence of a Re-emergent Ancient Polity" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In coastal Ancash, archaeologists have been puzzled by the presence of Casma style objects (~AD 800-1300) at archaeological sites with earlier cultural components. This has led to significant cultural historical and chronological confusion including...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kevin Gilmore.

This is an abstract from the "Vicksburg Is the Key: Recent Archaeological Investigations and New Perspectives from the Gibraltar of the South" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Based on recent archaeological work at Vicksburg National Military Park, the Late Woodland to Mississippian transition in the Lower Mississippi Valley extended beyond the traditionally defined end of the Woodland period, with evidence suggesting the Coles Creek-Kings Crossing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Guilhem Olivier.

This is an abstract from the "Bringing the Past to Life, Part 1: Papers in Honor of John M. D. Pohl" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since the seminal studies by Alain Testard, there has been debate over the function of victims in royal funerals in different parts of the world. In the case of Mesoamerica, did the wives, servants, dwarves, slaves, and other immolated individuals serve as “companions of the dead,” as “belongings” of the deceased...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Marla Toyne.

Human sacrifices are frequently referred to as ‘victims’ of ritual violence, which presupposes that the sacrificed had no control over their fate or were unjustly harmed. Many examples of human sacrifice have been identified recently across the north coast of Peru involving a range of time periods and bodily treatment to suggest that there was incredible variation in practice, including in the identity of those sacrificed. Both males and females have been identified as sacrifices, but rarely are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Virginia Clifton.

By 1875 Ouray, Colorado was a booming mining town with a prosperous red light district (Vanoli Site 5OR30) after rich silver veins were discovered in the surrounding mountains. As the town rapidly expanded and prospectors flooded into the mines, the red light district flourished, entertaining the thousands of miners in the area. In 1977, excavations led by Steve Baker investigated the lives of patrons and prostitutes who frequented the Vanoli red light district. As a result, thousands of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ian Taylor.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The founding collection of the British Museum, given by Hans Sloane in 1752, contained several Archaic and Late Prehistoric stone points from North America, some of the first examples from the continent to be included within early museum collections. Over the following 150 years the collection expanded rapidly fulfilling a need for contemporary, analogous...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Uzi Baram.

For talented story-tellers, the past can be conjured up and presented through thrilling narrative arcs and vivid imagery. The result can make the listener feel like they are in an ancient place. But the audience listens, with only awe as the result. With expanding digital technologies, the archaeological past can be animated. Students can immerse themselves in reconstructed buildings and landscapes and move through ancient places, examine material culture from multiple angles, and even engage in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Guengerich.

The highland Andes underwent major transformations in settlement organization between AD1000-1300, in the first half of the Late Intermediate Period. Settlement patterning shifted to higher altitudes, and in some areas, new sites were accompanied by defensive features. Most research has focused on the structural pressures that led to these changes, such as an increase of violence in the wake of Middle Horizon polity collapse, or a shift to pastoralism as a result of climate change. This paper...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Phillip Leckman.

This is an abstract from the "Hill People: New Research on Tijeras Canyon and the East Mountains" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The diverse natural and social environments of the uplands east of Albuquerque have shaped equally diverse and overlapping human landscapes. In this paper, a variety of geospatial analyses are employed to trace the dimensions of East Mountain settlement through time, beginning with the region’s early farming communities...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ken Seligson. George J. Bey III. Betsy M. Kohut. Tomás Gallareta Negrón.

Escalera al Cielo (EaC) is a Terminal Classic Period Maya elite hilltop complex located 1.5 km to the west of the site of Kiuic in the Puuc Region of the Northern Lowlands. Previous research on the hilltop focused largely on investigating the organization and day-to-day activities associated with the northern residential architectural group. The southern group, located atop the highest spur of the hill and consisting of four vaulted masonry structures accessed by a grand staircase, was believed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angela Keller.

Formal plazas constitute the majority of public space in Maya centers and yet, until quite recently, plazas have not received the same investigative attention as the impressive pyramids and palaces that surround them. This neglect is largely due to the difficulty of investigating public plazas, which typically contain few artifactual or structural indications of their ancient use. Although the identification of activity in ancient plazas is technically challenging, a dedicated investigation of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Rosch.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ottoman archaeology remains in its fledgling stage, struggling against modern research and political biases. This greatly effects the understanding of the rural and highland areas of Anatolia, where excavations or surveys are already less commonly conducted. Historical research has done a great deal to illuminate these places and people, and through art,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Valerie Bondura.

This is an abstract from the "Chicanx Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper is an introduction to an organized session on Chicanx Archaeology. It argues for the ethical and intellectual imperative of drawing Chicanx Studies scholarship in to archaeological method and theory. Archaeological frameworks for studying culture contact, ethnogenesis, and identity have tended to bypass theory that falls under the umbrella of Chicanx...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel LaDu. Ian W. Brown.

Around A.D. 1000 Mississippian culture emerged in the Eastern Woodlands of North America. Originating around the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, Mississippian culture rapidly spread south and east, radically transforming Late Woodland societies in its wake. Although Mississippian culture had come to dominate much of the interior of the Southeast by A.D. 1100, its advance into the Lower Mississippi Valley was impeded. Here, Mississippian societies encountered the Late Woodland...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Steere.

In this paper I reflect on Steve Kowalewski’s influence on my research on houses and households in the native Southeast. In the early days of my graduate training, Steve encouraged me to move away from a single-site focus and instead think about household archaeology as a broadly comparative anthropological enterprise undertaken at a macro-regional scale. It was a good idea. To meet Steve’s challenge, I constructed a database that catalogs the architectural features of 1258 structures from 65...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Lane.

Fortifications are found in the archaeological record around the world. Studies of fortifications on the landscape tend to focus on aspects of human territoriality, especially in relation to conflict, economics, and resources. This paper takes a Human Behavioral Ecology approach to territoriality and applies the use of viewsheds, as derived from a GIS database, to the examination of a central resource. Rapa, Austral Islands, French Polynesia, is often cited as a classic example of an island...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alanna Warner-Smith.

Several scholars have explored the role of the empirical sciences in colonial contexts; far from a neutral study of the world, they were actively making and remaking material, social, and geographic boundaries. Cartography was part of these boundary-making practices, as the varying positions and views of actors engaging with the world are dissolved into the singular, authoritative view offered by the map. Studying a cholera epidemic that moved through the Caribbean in the 1850s, I consider how...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Howard Higgins. Brenda Ireland. Sandra Marian.

This is an abstract from the "Collaborative and Community Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Many Indigenous groups that underwent the deleterious effects of colonialism and forced acculturation are now in the process of repatriating their traditional knowledge and culture and reclaiming their unique identities, social structures, and governance. In Canada, this process of self-determination is within the context of the United Nations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only E. Christian Wells. Kara Fulton. David Mixter. Borislava Simova.

The archaeological investigation of Actuncan in western Belize included the geochemical analysis of one of the largest and most diverse sets of activity surfaces in the Maya world. Over 1200 soil, sediment, and plaster samples from four major architectural complexes representing regal, ritual, and residential locations were assayed using ICP-MS. The results allow a uniquely "atomic" perspective on the changing use of urban space over roughly 900 years, ca. AD 100-1000. This research identifies...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tamara Bray.

In this paper I re-visit a particularly interesting find made in the Pimampiro District of northern highland Ecuador a number of years ago. It consisted of a traditional shaft tomb burial that contained an unusual assemblage of items, which included seemingly obvious Late Period Caranqui and Panzaleo wares together with a set of four Nueva Cadiz beads. How and why did these precious European objects penetrate this seemingly remote region at such an early date to be inserted into such a basic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Connor Johnen.

This paper details the results of archaeological survey in the Wind River Range, Wyoming between elevations of 9,000 and 11,000 ft. The purpose of this survey was to test a predictive model of a specific site type (sites referred to as villages) created by Stirn (2014) and tested by Stirn in a different region of the same mountain range. Although the methods of creating the predictive model were not altered, the survey methods were significantly altered. Random survey blocks were created within...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Camille Weinberg. Jo Osborn. Kelita Pérez.

This is an abstract from the "From the Paracas Culture to the Inca Empire: Recent Archaeological Research in the Chincha Valley, Peru" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Just north of the Chincha Valley, the village site Jahuay at the mouth of the Topará valley offers an opportunity to investigate non-elite lifeways, and specifically the Topará cultural tradition, in the Chincha region during the terminal Early Horizon Period (approximately 250-1...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Baitzel.

Although limited in area compared to the neighboring Moquegua, Caplina, and Azapa valleys, the Sama valley (Departamento Tacna, Peru) with its the warm temperature, perennial water sources and arable flood plain creates hospitable conditions for highlanders who settled the valley as early as Late Horizon period. In his 1567 visita, Garci Diez de San Miguel notes the presence of a Luqapa colony and an Inca Tambo at the site of Sama Grande near the modern town of Sama-Inclan. In addition, survey...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tina Jakob. Joe W. Walser III. Donatella Usai. Sandro Salvatori.

Archaeological sites south of Khartoum are much scarcer compared to those further to the north and this presentation aims to report on a multi-phase cemetery that is situated at the periphery of our archaeological knowledge. At present, burials dating to three chronological periods have been recovered at Al Khiday. The site is located on the left bank of the White Nile, approximately 20 km south of Omdurman (Khartoum). Forty-two individuals are dated to the Classic/Late Meroitic period (end of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patrick O'Grady. Scott Thomas. Thomas Stafford, Jr.. Daniel Stueber. Margaret Helzer.

This is an abstract from the "Current Perspectives on the Western Stemmed Tradition-Clovis Debate in the Far West" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The 2018 fieldwork emphasized trench excavation across the relict stream channel directly in front of the rockshelter. Sedimentary deposits comprise a well-stratified, five-part sequence of bedrock basalt overlain by a gravel bed of rounded cobbles and boulders; dark gray blocky to massive cienega...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brendon Murray. Terence D'Altroy.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological investigation on the north coast of Peru to this day draws from the 1946 Virú Valley Project; however, recent investigations have reevaluated chronologies and settlement hierarchies previously based on these data. Continuing these investigations, this paper revisits the valley to reconsider the idea of place and sight in the Virú landscape....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Denise Arnold.

This paper traces the gradual acquisition of increasingly complex mental and haptic operations as a girl learns to weave in the Andes. She starts early with fingertip ‘synaesthetic’ knowledge of fleece thickness and quality as she prepares raw materials and spins them, and the mental-visual knowledge of counting herd animals in her pasturing duties. She passes on to the visual recognition of selection and counting patterns in simple crossed-warp weaves, in belt straps, and then to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Judith Field.

The extinction of megafauna across the globe generates lively and sometimes heated discussion on timing and cause. In the case of Sahul (Pleistocene Australia-New Guinea), the debate is divided into two distinct camps – those that hold a firm belief that humans were responsible, and those that consider the current datasets to thin to provide any definitive answer. These big picture issues are reliant on the acquisition of data from individual sites and data on megafauna comes predominantly from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gregory Heide. Stuart Chilvers.

The Salmo-Priest Wilderness Area is a 41,335-acre wilderness area in the Selkirk Mountains, in northeast Washington. The wilderness area is within the Colville and Kaniksu National Forests. The area is noted for providing habitat for a number of threatened or endangered species including woodland caribou, grizzly bears, and grey wolves. Access to the area is limited to a few trails and visitation to the area is low. The Colville National Forest offers an alternative way to enjoy this wilderness...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Judith Habicht-Mauche. Emma Britton.

As a student of Jimmy Griffin and Irving Rouse, much of Stephen Williams’ early archaeological research involved the typological analysis of pottery collections from the American Southeast to reconstruct regional culture history. Later, as Director of the Peabody Museum, he played an important role in facilitating the development of a new generation of archaeological and materials science approaches to pottery analysis at Harvard with the construction of the Putnam Laboratory. This paper uses...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leah Larsen. Matthew Brown.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cuzco, Peru has long been recognized as an important archaeological area in the Andes. Despite this recognition, earlier periods prior to the emergence of the Inka state remain under researched, especially regarding pre-Inka political organization. In particular, the Late Formative (600 BCE - 200 CE) is a period in which several important political...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Ahlrichs.

The Red Ochre Burial Complex, like it’s later and more intensively studied Adena and Hopewell counterparts faces questions about its usefulness in understanding the cultural prehistory of the Western Great Lakes region. Over 50 years ago the complex was defined using a "trait list" approach. These traits are, for better or worse, still the clearest depiction of what is and is not a Red Ochre mortuary site. This study utilizes GIS to bring together disparate cultural data on a variety of Red...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gina Malfatti. Nick Kardulias.

The present study traces the history of grave manipulation and reentry in Scandinavia from the Stone Age through medieval times, but with a special emphasis on the context and implications of funerary activity during the Viking Age and the early medieval period. During this time span, the people of Scandinavia became a major force that reshaped the economic, political, and social structure of Europe. I examine the phenomenon of grave reentry and alteration within the framework of Neil Price’s...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gwen Bakke.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study examines human-animal relations in the context of a Viking Age (9th to 11th century) port of trade and farming settlement of Ridanäs located in Gotland, Sweden. The objective is to gain an understanding of inter- and intra-site interactions through the faunal data. The primary questions focus on subsistence strategies, trade connections,...