Society for American Archaeology

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Steinberg.

The rapid settlement of Iceland has a distinct beginning, but defining the end of the settlement turns out to be difficult. While there are anecdotal stories of earlier settlers, the beginning of large-scale migration to Iceland seems to happen in about AD 870, at the start of Harald Fairhair’s reign, and the time of a distinct volcanic ash layer. The landnám, or land-grab is an important template for our understanding of movements into new landscapes, from the Neolithic Revolution, to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andreas Hennius.

In Sweden, recent excavations have revealed how the production of tar evolved from a small scale, household operation situated within the settlements of the Roman Iron Age, to a large-scale activity in the forests during the Vendel and Viking periods. The resulting quantities of tar far exceeded ordinary household requirements. This change in production coincides with the introduction of the sail, characteristic for the Viking Age, with extensive need for large amounts of tar. The change in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dawn Hadley.

This is an abstract from the "Reinvent, Reclaim, Redefine: Considerations of "Reuse" in Archaeological Contexts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper focuses on reuse of material culture looted by the Viking Great Army when it raided England in the late ninth century CE. This material included gold, silver, and copper alloy, which was sometimes melted down to turn into other artifacts and also cut up for use in exchange in the form of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Neil Price.

In December 2015, the Swedish Research Council made an unprecedented investment in archaeology with a ten-year, multi-million dollar grant to establish a center of excellence in Viking Studies at Uppsala University. Much of the recent research into the Vikings and their time (c. 750-1050 CE) has focused on the complex processes of state formation and Christian conversion that eventually gave rise to the modern Scandinavian nations. Far less attention has been devoted to the very beginnings of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claire Greenlow. Ben Raffield. Neil Price. Amelia Barker. Mark Collard.

This paper presents the preliminary findings of a systematic survey of Viking skeletal remains in northern Europe. The survey covers Viking Age skeletons from the homeland countries of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, as well as putative Viking skeletons from several countries subject to Scandinavian colonization, including England, Scotland, Ireland, and Iceland. Among the attributes we are recording are the degree of skeletal completeness, chronological age of the specimens, and the evidence that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Claire Adams.

This is an abstract from the "New Work in Medieval Archaeology, Part 1: Landscapes, Food, and Health" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper investigates the emerging questions surrounding the interpretation of archaeologically attested communities which blur the lines between religious, familial, and independent productive centers in the early medieval West. Recent scholarship has begun to appreciate the interrelationship between cult sites...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Suzanne Villeneuve.

Understanding when and under what conditions aggregation into larger communities with large corporate house organizations, socioeconomic inequalities and specialized ritual structures occurred has been a central theoretical issue in various regions of archaeological investigations. Perhaps the biggest bone of contention in current theorising is whether these transitions occur when hunter/gatherers accepted claims to privilege on the part of some individuals by consensus to deal with community...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Isabelle Lulewicz. Neill Wallis. Victor Thompson.

Current research at Garden Patch (8DI4), a Middle Woodland mound center with circular village construction in northern peninsular Gulf Coast Florida, provide quantitative insights into the timing and temporality of monument construction and village aggregation. Here, we combine previously modelled radiocarbon assays with new isotopic data on season of collection and habitat of exploitation. The four-phase model of site occupation when combined with the new isotopic data provide new insights into...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Deborah Nichols. Wesley Stoner.

Current research has prompted rethinking about the early development of sedentism, agricultural economies, and complex societies in Central Mexico. We discuss new evidence of significant interconnected changes ca.1000 BC that through multiple trajectories involved intensified maize production, expansion of sedentary villages, expanded interaction networks, and increased social complexity. With the establishment of the first cities, the Late Formative saw corporate political economy strategies...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joseph Waller. Alan Leveillee.

The Salt Pond archaeological site was identified during environmental review planning for a proposed residential subdivision in the 1980s. Archaeological investigations in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s provided glimpses into Native American settlement and subsistence strategies within Rhode Island's coastal zone. Continued multi-disciplinary study of this culturally significant place has provided a wealth of new information on the late pre-contact environment, Native American village...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Genesis Torres Morales. Celeste Gagnon. Gabriel Prieto.

The Moche of the North Coast of Peru, are well known for their ritualized culture of violence. Warriors, prisoners, weapon bundles, and sacrifice are commonly depicted in a variety of Moche media, and archaeological evidence from urban centers suggests such acts were practiced. What is not known is if the Early Intermediate Period ancestors of the Moche also engaged in such acts of violence. Pre-Moche, Gallinazo phase urban sites were often located in defensible settings and some show evidence...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Margot Serra. Amandine Flammang.

This is an abstract from the "Beyond the Ancestors: New Approaches to Andean "Open Sepulchers"" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The recent PARAMa project undertook the excavation of several open sepulcher funerary contexts in the Upper Nepeña Drainage, among which two structures were thoroughly excavated. Their content, predominantly skeletonized and partially mummified human remains, were analyzed, representing the first systematic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only E. Christian Wells. Claire Novotny. Anna C. Novotny.

This is an abstract from the "Journeying to the South, from Mimbres (New Mexico) to Malpaso (Zacatecas) and Beyond: Papers in Honor of Ben A. Nelson" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The northern and southern frontiers of Mesoamerica are about 2000 km apart and are separated by an incredible diversity of peoples and environments. Yet, these frontier spaces appear to be developmentally similar in many ways during the period ca. AD 500-1000, including...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Leppard. Sarah Murray.

This is an abstract from the "Beyond “Barbarians”: Dimensions of Military Organization at the Bleeding Edge of the Premodern State" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Characteristic of many states is a legal monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Conversely, in small-scale normatively egalitarian societies entitlements to wield violent force are often diffuse and informally adjudicated. State formation thus frequently involves the formalization...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Diana Simpson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study takes a holistic biocultural approach to re-conceptualize the forms and patterns of violence taking place at two neighboring Archaic Period shell mound sites on the Tennessee River in North Alabama, Mulberry Creek (1CT27) and Little Bear Creek (1CT8). Bioarchaeological documentation was supplemented by archival records in an attempt to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Martin Gallivan.

Beyond the Mississippian frontier in Southwest Virginia, Algonquian and Siouan societies in the Chesapeake pursued their own culture histories, evidently independent of developments in the American Midcontinent and Southeast. And yet, between AD 1300 and 1500 a set of social changes cascaded from the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Chesapeake Bay which may correspond with developments highlighted in this symposium. How did the late precolonial collapse, social fragmentation, and violence of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lindsey Büster. Ian Armit.

The Sculptor’s Cave in NE Scotland saw a long history of use, from the Late Bronze Age to the Early Medieval (Pictish) period. Late Bronze Age activity is characterised, as in other caves along this stretch of coast, by complex communal funerary practices involving the exposure and processing of human bodies. Veneration continued for many centuries, yet by the Roman Iron Age (c. 3rd century AD) perceptions of the cave had markedly changed. During this period, several adults were decapitated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alison Rautman.

Among Puebloan groups of the American Southwest, oral traditions record mythical-historical stories of the often-catastrophic or violent ends of some of the pueblo ruins that dot the landscape (e.g., Hopi Ruin Legends, by Michael Lomatuway’ma, et al., 1993). In other cases, archaeological evidence points to the continued importance of ruins across centuries of time as repositories of meaning across the landscape (Snead 2008). One small feature from a burned pueblo from Central New Mexico records...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Beth Scaffidi.

Artifacts from yungas and coastal zones of Arequipa, Peru show varying degrees of integration into the ideological and material networks of prominent neighboring cultures of the Early Intermediate Period (Nasca) and Middle Horizon (Wari). Ongoing research suggests these communities and towns were well-integrated into foreign trading networks, whether through direct interaction with foreign traders or down-the-line exchange. While foreign-produced goods and emulation of foreign goods or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bill Sillar.

The paper uses archaeological, historical, ethnographic and geological approaches in an investigation of a small volcano in the department of Cuzco, Peru. Kinsich’ata erupted around 10,000 years ago, but its presence in the landscape is attributed to the animating deity Viracocha in an origin myth that ties Kinsich’ata into a wider narrative cycle locating the social order within the experienced landscape. Kinsich’ata’s eruption disrupted the landscape, altering the path of the river Vilcanota...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Perez. Karen Harry.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The upper reaches of the Virgin Branch Puebloan region—particularly, the western Colorado Plateau—has largely remained understudied, partly resulting from difficulties accessing many areas yielding cultural activity. While the majority of data collection has been amassed through surveys, excavations on the western Colorado Plateau have significantly broadened...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ruth Musser-Lopez.

Though routine interaction may not have been the case, the Fremont were a part of the iconic world of the Virgin (Anasazi) Puebloan people who occupied southeastern Nevada north of Las Vegas in Evergreen Flats, 75 miles northwest the Lower Colorado River’s north end bend. Within that region is Petroglyph Corral visually demonstrating Puebloan people at a Fremont fringe area where the two cultures may have competed, collided or even collapsed into one another and the more recent Numic tribes. ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Miguel Contreras-Sieck. María Margarita del Olmo Calzada. Perla del Carmen Ruíz Albarrán. Maria Nieves-Colón.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Futures through a Virtual Past" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The development of novel digital technologies has consistently expanded the capacities to explore and approach existing anthropological and archaeological research questions. Virtual Anthropology stands as a relatively new interdisciplinary approach that further expands our resolution to study ancient and recent human remains, cultural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Carter.

In the 1960’s, Ivan Sutherland envisioned a time in the near future in which people would be able to physically enter into an alternative, "digital" world. The ability to not only see the environment around them, but also to touch, smell, hear and be affected by the environment itself would provide a unique digital phenomenological experience where viewers become participants and build on their own personal narratives in a non-linear, almost life-like, virtual experience. In reimagining a 15th...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fabio Remondino. Belen Jiménez Fenández-Palacios.

The 3D modelling technology is getting more used for the research, preservation, reconstruction, documentation, communication of cultural assets. Heritage 3D models, accessible on the web, are the most powerful solution to disseminate culture and, at the same time, a great source for tourism, research and education. While the use of 3D technologies in CH have been around for many years there are still some blocking factors that slow down a wider approach. On the technological side we still miss...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lance Greene.

The Confederate POW facility, Camp Lawton, was constructed in the summer of 1864 to relieve the horrendous conditions at Andersonville. Camp Lawton, a 42-acre stockade housing over 10,000 Union prisoners, was only open during October and November 1864. It was abandoned in late November as Sherman’s men marched towards Savannah. Recent archaeological excavations by Georgia Southern University (GSU) students and faculty located the prisoner encampment. The area includes intact prisoners’ hut...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kalyan Chakraborty.

Illustration of various means has always helped in visualising complex information, and archaeologists have used means such as photographs, drawings and even three-dimensional illustration to present complex archaeological data. Archaeologists began using three-dimensional models of various archaeological monuments only in 1990s. However, in recent years, and with high-end computer applications, archaeologists are able to document different stages of excavations using 3D illustration, which has...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Josué R. García García.

This paper develops Maya urbanism and architecture this complex acropolis type of El Mirador site. In order to perform an analysis of this building, proposing a graphical representation allowing their virtual and theatrical reconstruction of the same. This hypothetical proposal is modeled based on historical information and recent archaeological evidence in this sector. The Grand Central Acropolis is located southwest of the nucleus of the settlement and as its name suggest, It is a great...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Payne. Anthony De La Rosa. Kelly Michel.

Nake’muu Pueblo is situated at the tip of a mesa above the confluence of Water Canyon and Cañon de Valle at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in Los Alamos, New Mexico. This area of LANL is not accessible to the public. Nake'muu is an ancestral site to the Pueblo de San Ildefonso. The site is important as a Coalition period (A.D. 1200-1325) site and because it was reoccupied during the Pueblo Revolt (A.D. 1680-1682). Nake’muu is also the only pueblo at LANL that retains standing walls. For...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Blackwood.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Virtual reality (VR) is a tool that offers an opportunity to approach archaeological analyses and communications through a different lens. VR provides a platform where data can be continuously updated and modified as is becomes available as well as adding an element of interactivity. VR allows the user to engage with a simulated environment, walk around,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabriela Uruñuela. Patricia Plunket.

Almost half a century has gone by since the discovery of Los Bebedores (The Drinkers) in 1969, and it still has not received the attention that one of the most extensive large format murals in Mesoamerica deserves. A poor preservation, a hasty register because the Cholula Project was ending, an unfortunate later restoration, and the repetitive selection of the more obvious personages to illustrate the few publications on the theme, are just some of the factors responsible for the scarce...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Lemke. John O'Shea. Robert Reynolds. Thomas Palazzolo.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Alpena-Amberley Ridge (AAR) is a landform that is now 100 feet underwater in the Great Lakes – but 10,000 years ago, it was a unique dry land environment. Research on the AAR has documented some of the world’s oldest hunting features including drive lanes and hunting blinds for targeting caribou. To better understand this submerged landform an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Harrison.

In Turkey, rapid industrialization is one of the most prescient concerns facing the country’s natural and cultural heritage. Increasingly, archaeologists are expanding their traditional toolkit to incorporate methods of virtualization, to create 3D models of sites, structures, and artifacts. This paper offers a case study of digital heritage preservation at Seyitömer Höyük, an Early Bronze Age (ca. 3000-2000 BCE) urban center that is located within an active coal mine, and is under direct threat...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Herbert Maschner.

The promise of the information age is access to data. Advances in online data availability have permeated nearly every scientific and humanities field providing access to unprecedented quantities of research materials. But the key missing element in archaeological (and paleontological research) is access to the material remains that are key to investigating the past. Because of logistical barriers, conservation concerns, conditions of ownership, or other factors limiting access, many of the most...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicola Lercari.

3D technologies, remote sensing, geographic information systems, and virtual reality have changed the documentation and interpretation process of Çatalhöyük (Berggren et al. forthcoming 2015). Work at Çatalhöyük Building 89 has allowed a new methodology of data capture, processing, visualization, and analysis of stratigraphic layers based on digital technologies (Forte et al. 2012). On the other hand, virtual reconstruction of Neolithic buildings rebuilt in the same place has been little...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Fuchs.

This is an abstract from the "Research Hot Off the Trowel in the Upper Gila and Mimbres Areas" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeology is a scientific profession critical to understanding the story humans have written on the world over the course of our history. However, unlike many areas of scientific study, the “subjects” of that scientific inquiry are ultimately people, leading to a complex system of ethics surrounding the treatment of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elena Phipps. Lucy Commoner. Nobuko Shibayama.

This is an abstract from the "From Materials to Materiality: Analysis and Interpretation of Archaeological and Historical Artifacts Using Non-destructive and Micro/Nano-sampling Scientific Methods" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Long distance trade of precious materials such as spondylus shell or turquoise took place in the Precolumbian world. However, at the same time, the associations between particularly local materials and their long-term...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lauren Sides.

This is an abstract from the "Etruscan Centralization to Medieval Marginalization: Shifts in Settlement and Mortuary Traditions at San Giuliano, Italy" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. At the height of its occupation during the Etruscan period, inhabitants at the San Giuliano plateau in northern Lazio, Italy, constructed hundreds of rock-cut tombs in the surrounding escarpment, effectively creating a “city of the dead” adjacent to their city of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Osborne.

Visibility Graph Analysis, or VGA, is a means of evaluating architectural environments based on a number of properties of intervisibility between points distributed within two-dimensional building plans. Created by Alasdair Turner for modern architects as a way to further space syntax analysis (itself based on patterns of accessibility instead of visibility), archaeologists have slowly been incorporating VGA into their work over the past decade. In this paper I outline the stages involved with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan M. Alt.

This is an abstract from the "States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives." session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cahokia has long been subjected to terminological contention, failing to fit categorical configurations such as state or chiefdom but has now become commonly referred to as an urbanism — effectively dodging the chiefdom/state terminological quandary. What if much of the categorical problem lies in looking...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aikaterini Psimogiannou.

Following anthropological theory regarding the dynamic relationship between the living and the dead, this paper will explore the role of mortuary and ceremonial places as important venues for human activities related to broader social phenomena and cultural changes. By the mid. 3d mil. BCE southern Greece had witnessed the emergence of social stratification evident both in the settlement and mortuary archaeological record. Little is known, however, regarding the preceding period and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Doyel.

Throughout their careers, Paul Fish and Suzanne Fish cast a wide net in their studies of the American Southwest, and the Hohokam region of southern Arizona in particular. This powerhouse duo vigorously applied their intellectual breadth and energy throughout their long productive careers to ferret out the complexities of the ancient past. Their team approach and complementary skill sets include regional archaeology; method and theory; settlement structure and social organization; field survey...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Terry Powis.

Most Maya archaeologists never take advantage of excavating into plazas. The perception might be that there isn’t much information other than recovering artifacts to date successive constructive phases associated with the buildings they are investigating along the edges of the plaza. Over the years, some archaeologists have seen the utility of this approach – one that emphasizes locating early Maya buildings, even entire communities - beneath plaza surfaces in site centers. The amount of data...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Van Keuren. Marieka Brouwer Burg. William Graves. Tate Norwood.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. By the eleventh and twelfth centuries AD, the region around modern-day Flagstaff was an emergent ceremonial landscape, evidenced by the proximity of sacred places, important topographic features, and large forms of ritual architecture. The latter included plazas, unroofed great kivas, platformed spaces, and ballcourts, which were engaged by people...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Pateman. Kelley Scudder. Christopher Davis.

The National Museum of The Bahamas/Antiquities, Monuments and Museum Corporation (AMMC) is the agency designated to identify, manage and conserve tangible and intangible cultural resources throughout The Bahamas. The AMMC is in the process of developing a protocol model that will further enhance the identification and conservation of identified and yet to be identified archaeological sites. An essential component of the development of this process is the inclusion of members of each island...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Pauketat. Susan Alt.

Various archaeological approaches exaggerate relations with objects at the expense of the affectivity of substances, phenomena, materials, and spaces. New data from the 11th century foundations of the Cahokian world suggest that the experience of substantial, phenomenal, material and spatial qualities were the primary constituents of a form of religious conversion also known as Mississippianization. Circular buildings at the Emerald site embodied these qualities and point to the creation of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Fish. Suzanne Fish. James Bayman. Douglas Gann.

We explore Early Classic Period Hohokam society through the medium of inhabitants’ lives in the center with a platform mound and over 40 residential compounds in the northern Tucson Basin. We approach the topic as a retrospective based on 30 years of intermittent mapping and excavation at the Marana Mound Site, coupled with insights from advancing Hohokam studies. We ask how the spatial and architectural configuration or "villagescape" of this center reflected and embodied the principles of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carrie Tucker. Nelda Issa Marengo. Ashuni E. Romero Butrón. Dominique Rissolo. Jeffrey Glover.

The Proyecto Costa Escondida (PCE) has undertaken investigations along the north coast of Quintana Roo, Mexico since 2006. In this paper we present results of the 2016 field season, which was focused on the small island port site of Vista Alegre. The 2016 field season at the site had two main objectives. One was to document the extent and scale of human modification at Vista Alegre. The second was to investigate distinct architectural groups at the site to better understand their chronology. To...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashuni Romero. Nelda Issa Marengo Camacho.

El Proyecto Costa Escondida, dirigido por Jeffrey Glover y Dominique Rissolo, ha realizado investigaciones en la costa norte de Quintana Roo, México desde el año 2005. El sitio de Vista Alegre está ubicado en una pequeña isla dentro de la laguna de Yalahau, formó parte de los asentamientos costeros que, a lo largo del litoral de la Península de Yucatán, mantuvieron una circulación de bienes durante la época prehispánica. Estos sitios presentaron y compartieron algunas características...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jamie Bastide. Seth Mallios.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Nathan Harrison, a formerly enslaved man from Kentucky, was adept at performing specific masculinities (and other identities) within different community groups. Through forced migration, Harrison traveled from Kentucky to California during the mid-1800s. After gaining his freedom, Harrison continued moving south until he settled in San Diego County....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paige Bardolph. Dana Bardolph.

This paper examines politics of representation of Native North American communities, past and present, through the use of photographs in academic and museum settings. We consider how photographs of people and objects have been used to naturalize precepts of colonialism, as well as how they have been used to empower indigenous subjects. The implementation of NAGPRA has provided a framework for museums to determine if they should display certain objects deemed culturally sensitive; however, there...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Gush.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Visual Storytelling for a Modern Age: In a visually obsessed world, many archaeologists have squandered the potential for effectively sharing the story of their research. This presentation focuses on the importance of integrating a content creator and utilizing modern image creation techniques to more effectively communicate the story of archaeology, while...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Law Pezzarossi.

The Nipmuc people once lived seasonally mobile lifestyles among the lakes, rivers and hills of what is now Central Massachusetts. Colonial encroachment affected this lifestyle greatly, at first in the form of policed and restricted mobility and pressure from the colonial government to own and farm land in severalty, and then later, in the late 18th and early 19th c., the Nipmuc community was largely dispossessed of their land by surrounding Euro-American farmers. As a result, the 19th century...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bernard Means.

The Virtual Curation Laboratory at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) uses 3D scanning technologies to capture archaeological discoveries from all over the world. Used effectively, these 3D digital artifact models can help cultural heritage institutions share their amazing discoveries to a global audience and not simply to their fixed geographic locations. How to share these 3D digital artifact models to an audience wider than undergraduate students and professional archaeologists has proven...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mallory Matsumoto. Misha Miller-Sisson.

Excavations during the 2014 field season at the Maya site of Uxul in Campeche, Mexico revealed an Early Classic ceramic burial vessel that was embellished with hieroglyphic elements and contained an infant skeleton. The hieroglyphic elements on the vessel body and lid visually represent the underworld and feature components of larger phrases that are used in Classic Maya monumental and ceramic texts to record processes of death and renewal. The occurrence of both iconographic and hieroglyphic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Warren.

This is an abstract from the "Disentanglement: Reimagining Early Colonial Trajectories in the Americas" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Soon after the De Soto Expedition (1539-1542), Fort Ancient peoples from the Middle Ohio Valley abandoned their summer villages. For twenty generations, village life in this region had been both egalitarian and stable. Through a close reading of archaeological sources, including laser ablation testing of late Fort...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samuel Darbyshire. Jaxson Brewer. Timothy Hare.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We present the identification and analysis of the outlying minor centers surrounding the Postclassic city of Mayapán in the 44 km2 area of the 2013 Mayapán LiDAR Survey. The centers were identified in the airborne laser scanning (ALS) data, and all were ground-checked. In this presentation, we display the major architectural and environmental features and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kirsten Hawley. Laura Scheiber. Amanda Burtt.

This is an abstract from the "New and Ongoing Research on the North American Plains and Rocky Mountains" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Interpreting past uses of mountainous regions of the American West is hampered by difficult access, excessive ground vegetation, and wilderness restrictions. Recently however researchers working in the Greater Yellowstone Area have recorded hundreds of sites exposed by forest fires, and our knowledge of campsite...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Virginia Ochoa-Winemiller. Terance Winemiller.

Since 2009, the 3D Scanning of Molded and Modeled Artifacts Project has collected a sample of approximately 100 specimens. The main goals of our project include the assessment of mold and stamp use as methods of standardized mass production of clay artifacts in prehistoric Mesoamerica and beyond, as well as, digitally archiving images housed in various collections. In this presentation, we aim to introduce a virtual catalogue of clay artifacts that contains digital raw 3D data. The Digital 3D...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brent Woodfill. Lauren Norton. Abigail Rowell. Scott Werts. Socorro Jiménez Álvarez.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Archaeological Investigations in Chiapas, Mexico" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Ixtapa saltworks in highland Chiapas have the distinction of being one of the last Precolumbian saltworks in the interior Maya world that is still in use, and members of Proyecto Arqueológico Sak B’alam y Salinas del Interior de Chiapas and Winthrop University’s Environmental Studies Program have been conducting investigations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Carrasco. Joshua Englehardt.

This is an abstract from the "Coffee, Clever T-Shirts, and Papers in Honor of John S. Justeson" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper we examine the complex iconography of the Papaloapan Stela (originally labeled by Stirling as Cerro de las Mesas Stela 2) with a particular focus on the narrative integrity of the tableaux, the depiction of speech, and the relationship between the visualization of language and possible glyphic texts. Our...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Crawford.

Religious processions colored the ancient world, filling a city’s streets with a multi-sensorial display of sounds and images. Although the presence of processional activity is acknowledged as a regular occurrence in the Roman world, our understanding of their movement patterns and their effect on the cityscape remains understudied. The record of processions was held primarily in the memories of those who experienced or took part in the festival, only manifesting within the archaeological record...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexei Vranich. Katheryn Killackey. Andrew Roddick. Erik Marsh.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Mesoamerican and Andean Cities: Old Debates, New Perspectives" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists examining early urban formations in the Andean Lake Titicaca basin have recently framed them as early “proto-urban” centers. In this paper, we reflect on our current understanding of the region’s proto-urbanism by deploying visualization methodologies to synthesize the evidence for Late Formative...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cameron Townsend.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of the Eastern Jemez Mountain Range and the Pajarito Plateau: Interagency Collaboration for Management of Cultural Landscapes" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act requires federal agencies to consider the effects of actions carried out on historic properties under their jurisdiction. In the instance of an undertaking that would diminish or remove important...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Devyn Cabral. Hannah Ferry. Matthew Moriarty.

This is an abstract from the "Capturing and Sharing Vermont’s Past: 3D Imaging as a Tool for Undergraduate Research and Community Engagement" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Ketcham’s Island (KI) site in Brandon, VT provides an important window into the lifeways of Vermont’s native peoples in the Late Archaic period, including residential structures, extensive tool kits, and subsistence strategies. Despite the significance of Ketcham’s Island...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christina Hodge. Camilla Mazzucato.

GIS-based data visualization offers a dynamic, compelling tool not only for promoting on-campus collections, but also for studying and managing these resources within frameworks of engagement, openness, and reflexivity. The Stanford University Archaeology Collections (SUAC) cares for over 30,000 archaeological and ethnographic artifacts from campus lands and around the world. These items manifest a range of complex histories and present-day significances. The collections were recently...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonah Augustine.

In this paper, I examine ceramic vessels, primarily serving wares, from the site of Tiwanaku, the preeminent city in the Central Andes between AD 500 and 1100, in order to examine the political effects of visual media in the ancient Andes. The paper’s empirical focal point is a comparison of ceramics recovered from the monumental core and from a residential sector at Tiwanaku. My analysis is based on both attribute and iconographic data I collected during fieldwork that sought to examine the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emiliano Bruner.

Cognitive archaeology is based on the assumption that behaviors can reveal cognitive capacities, and that archaeology can provide inferences on behaviors. Additional information comes from the fossil record (paleoneurology) and from methods in neuroscience (neuroarchaeology). Visuospatial functions can be investigated from all these perspectives. In archaeology, visuospatial capacity can be investigated in terms of space and geometry according to information on tools, tool use, and space...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Agni Prijatelj.

Caves are regularly portrayed as a blank stage upon which the social – including ritual activity – is enacted. This paper, however, takes the opposite approach: in discussing a number of selected Antique and Medieval ritual cave sites in Slovenia that are associated with Roman, Christian and Slavic religious systems, it demonstrates the vibrant, hybrid, participant and continuously-changing nature of underground places in which multiple symmetric and fluid connections exist between people,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathleen Sterling.

This is an abstract from the "Politics of Heritage Values: How Archaeologists Deal with Place, Social Memories, Identities, and Socioeconomics" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. What do archaeologists mean when we talk about heritage? That depends in large part on our often-shifting positionality within broader heritage discourses. Western archaeologists often investigate what we might describe as our own heritage as well as that of others, both...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marcela Bernal. Lucero Aristizábal. Carl Langebaek. Freddy Rodríguez. Luz Pérez.

This paper studies the relation between feasts and other issues that are traditionally related the power of Muisca chiefs in their communities. The research question deals with the linkage between different dimensions of the social stratification in the La the Muisca site of Tibanica, including: feasting itself, health, kinship and nutrition. It is argued that there is no lineal relation between such variables, and that Muisca social organization is best understood from a multidimensional and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Osiris Quezada. Camila Pascal.

Este trabajo presenta los términos constructivos que se aplicaron en época prehispánica para nombrar elementos arquitectónicos, algunas técnicas constructivas, así como a los individuos que colaboraron en las actividades relacionadas con la edificación, particularmente en edificios del Posclásico en el Altiplano Central. SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samantha Stone. Samuel Burns.

This is an abstract from the "Documenting Demographics in Archaeological Publications and Grants" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Academic research is comparable to a conversation. As in all conversations, certain voices are amplified while others are underrepresented. Much of this academic conversation happens in peer-reviewed journals and academic books, but informal conversations outside of these arenas are often overlooked. We are studying the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ronald Bishop. Socorro Jiménez. Erin Sears.

Knowledge about the movement of pottery with volcanic constituents throughout the northwestern Maya Lowlands, from Preclassic through Postclassic times is closely tied to sub-regionally specific resources of the Usumacinta Drainage—from its origin in the highland to the Gulf delta. Following pioneering work in the region by Blom, Berlin, Ochoa, and Rands, we focus on sites in the greater Palenque subregion and their links to sites along the Usumacinta and in the Chiapas Sierras. Although Karl...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jamie Forde.

In this paper I present data from recent excavations at the highland Mixtec site of Achiutla, Oaxaca, Mexico, to shed light on how indigenous residents there negotiated changes and continuities in exchange relationships from the Postclassic (AD 900-1521) to Early Colonial (AD 1521-1650) periods. Various lines of evidence demonstrate that Achiutla had significant economic ties to both the Basin of Mexico and the Oaxaca coast, and that the site was an important locus along trade routes between the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jose Luis Macias. José Luis Arce. Paul W Layer. Ricardo Saucedo.

The Tacaná Volcanic Complex consists of four volcanic edifices: Chichuj, Tacaná, and San Antonio volcanoes, and Las Ardillas dome. It began its formation ~225 ka yr ago at Chichuj, followed by Tacaná ~50 ka, and San Antonio volcano and las Ardillas Dome during late Pleistocene. Its volcanic history recorded during the past 50 ka yr indicates that the complex has experienced major flank failures at Tacaná (~15 ka) and San Antonio (~2 ka). The latter destroyed the southern flank of San Antonio...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Josephine McDonald. Gregory Haverstock. David Lee.

The Volcanic Tableland north of Bishop, California has been the focus of significant previous research (e.g. Bettinger, Basgall, Giambastiani), which has been mobilized by proactive BLM Archaeologists (E. Levy, K. Halford, and G. Haverstock) to generate a predictive model for managing cultural sensitivity against recreational impacts. Further innovation has been the use of specialized rock art recorders (represented by Western Rock Art Research) to document the petroglyphs and petroglyphs of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julien Riel-Salvatore. Fabio Negrino.

There has been a lot of focus on the disruptive effects of dramatic climatic shifts on Paloelithic population dynamics, but the topic of cultural continuity across such events has been less intensely investigated. This paper presents data from some of our recent research projects in Liguria, especially from the site of Riparo Bombrini, to investigate the nature of the apparent resilience of the proto-Aurignacian in the face of events like the Phlegrean Fields eruption and the reasons why the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Egan.

Payson Sheets’ seminal work on the Tierra Joven Blanca (TBJ) eruption of the Ilopango Caldera, El Salvador was one of the first projects to address the impact of large-scale disasters in Mesoamerica. The on-going research on this eruption has been important for understanding the event as well as developing method and theory for reconstructing the cultural impact(s) of sudden massive stresses. While originally dated to AD 290±110, the TBJ eruption has been re-dated to the mid 5-6th century and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Errin Weller.

Over multiple field seasons, Dr. Payson Sheets has led the Proyecto Prehistorico Arenal in the Northwest corner of Costa Rica. A landscape characterized by repeated volcanic eruptions has resulted in the preservation of prehistoric footpaths. Dr. Sheets established a methodology combining satellite imagery and archaeology that could differentiate between erosional, historic, and prehistoric footpath features. This paper will focus on this methodology and Dr. Sheets’ contribution to remote...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kenneth Sutherland. David Chicoine.

This contribution explores feasting practices discernible from the pottery assemblage at three Early Horizon archaeological complexes in the lower Nepeña Valley, north-central coast of Peru: Caylán (800 - 1 BCE), a large town or city interpreted as the primary center of a multi-tiered polity; Samanco (500 - 1 BCE), a small coastal town involved in production and exchange of maritime resources; and Huambacho (600 - 200 BCE), a ceremonial center associated with agricultural production. In feasting...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kandace Hollenbach.

In January 2015, we instituted a monthly "Volunteer Day" at the Archaeological Research Laboratory at the University of Tennessee. Originally conceived as a way to increase outreach to the general public as well as prepare a large number of artifacts for curation, this activity has developed into a "citizen science" opportunity, where participants help collect data. Here we reflect on the positives and negatives of the program as we have implemented it over the past two years, with feedback from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeffrey Dobereiner. Rebecca González Lauck.

This paper reports on the first stage of a regional settlement study initiated in 2016 by the Proyecto Arqueológico La Venta (PALV). Previous work beyond the primary site core of La Venta, Tabasco, Mexico has primarily focused on a limited subset of regional features. PALV’s inaugural season of field reconnaissance, alongside analysis of 5-meter resolution LiDAR and historic aerial photos, demonstrates that Formative and Post-Classic period occupations beyond the main La Venta "island" were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elise Alonzi. Barra O'Donnabhain.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Diet, mobility, and trauma are key factors in the performance of social identities and the maintenance of social boundaries between groups. In medieval Ireland, burial at monasteries also provided an opportunity for both lay and ecclesiastical communities to represent the religious identities of deceased individuals. In this study, mobility, trauma, and diet...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alistair Paterson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In recent centuries, Southeast Asian commercial trepang (sea cucumber) traders established seasonal outposts on the shores of the coasts and offshore islands of northern Australia. This southernmost extremity of a network of maritime trade and travel connected Australia and Aboriginal Australia to people from Southeast Asia and indirectly to emerging...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jette Arneborg.

The Norse colonies in SW Greenland were established in the late 900’s and depopulated in the middle of the second half of the 1400’s. The traditional Nordic Temperate Zone pastoralism clearly was at its limits in Sub Arctic SW Greenland. Still, adaptation to the new environment has been described as successful, and the depopulation in the late Middle Ages is considered a consequence of the specialization the successful adaptation leaving the Norse Greenlandic society less resilient and more...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Margaret Nelson.

Vulnerability to climate change is a central issue in contemporary policy at local, state, national, and global scales. Facing an uncertain future, public and private organizations, policy makers, and resource managers are concerned about our ability to develop social-ecological systems resilient to climate change. "Long-term sustainability" in the face of present and anticipated climate impacts is a national and international goal. However, planning for long-term sustainable management is a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anne Jensen.

This is an abstract from the "Beyond Triage: Prioritizing Responses to Climate Change Impacts on Archaeological Resources" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological sites are threatened in various ways by accelerating environmental change. The scale and urgency of the threat requires new models for funding, education and recruitment of staff, engagement with the public, and long-term curation of rescued samples. One critical issue is how to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claudia Nuñez. Sofia Chacaltana Cortez.

It has been suggested that Inca colonization strengthened kin bonds between ayllu members while at the same time requested tribute by means of establishing "fictive" kin affiliations. Therefore, subjugated populations response to Inca imperialism caused the consolidation of local and regional identities. However, what occurred in the Colesuyo? Colesuyo region of southern Peru, inhabited by multi-ethnic small-scale groups –the Cochunas from the upper Moquegua Valley and the Coles and Camanchacas...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Howe. Nancy Gonzalez.

This is an abstract from the "The Big Bend Complex: Landscapes of History" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Millington letters from 1910 to 1913 described military actions along the Rio Grande in Presidio, Texas, at the start of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920). These letters are handwritten accounts of the Mexican Revolution and what was occurring across the U.S.–Mexico international border and how this unfolded in the Big Bend region. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Denton.

Traditionally, Waapushukaamikw (‘house of the hare’) was a sacred site for Cree and closely related Northern Algonquian people in subarctic Quebec. Its use as a place of prayer was noted in the early 18th century CE by Jesuit missionaries, and some elements of this tradition have continued to modern times. Waapushukamikw, known by archaeologists as the Colline Blanche, was also an important lithic source in subarctic Quebec, used for some 6,000 years. Artifacts of Mistassini quartzite from this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabriel Hrynick. Susan Blair. Katherine Patton. Jesse Webb.

In the context of rapid social or environmental change, foodways offer a way to track how identities are negotiated amid new realities. The Protohistoric period (550–350 BP) in the Northeast was an early site of sporadic and often indirect Indigenous-European contact in North America and the Wabanaki of Maine and the Maritime Provinces were early participants in the world economic system. Analyses of the Devil’s Head and Birch Cove sites in Passamaquoddy Bay indicate that Wabanaki diets were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Blakey.

This paper concerns the development of an interdisciplinary Project which studied 419 human remains at the 18th century cemetery for Africans enslaved in New York. The first World Archaeological Congress (1986) and Inter-Congress (1989) facilitated conversations among archaeologists and Indigenous peoples that would inspire change in archaeological practice. The African Burial Ground Project carried forward specific ideas of that encounter, joined with the activist scholarship and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Bates.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Located in the southern region of the Virginia Piedmont, the Randy K. Wade site (44CH62) is identified as a Late Woodland, Amerindian community which exhibits expected pit storage technology, boundary features, and material culture (Dan River Series ceramics, diagnostic lithics, dietary remains). However, high-status mortuary treatments and the village’s...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Deborah Olszewski. Maysoon al-Nahar. Daniel Schyle. Brian Byrd.

Wadi Madamagh, a small rockshelter in the Petra region of the Western Highlands of Jordan, contained high-density deposits of the Late Upper Paleolithic and the Early Epipaleolithic periods. It was first excavated in 1956 by D. Kirkbride, who placed two trenches into the site and briefly reported on the lithics, which have since been studied in detail (B.F. Byrd). A small test along one of Kirkbride’s trenches was conducted in 1983 (D. Schyle), and more intensive excavations were pursued in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edward Banning. Kevin Gibbs. Philip Hitchings.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During 2012 and 2013, a survey of Wadi Quseiba's drainage basin in northern Jordan employed Bayesian search methods to find late prehistoric, and especially Neolithic sites that often escape more conventional surveys. This resulted in the discovery of some definite and "candidate" sites, one of which is a Yarmoukian site up to 0.5 ha in size that was the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joshua J. Wells.

Archaeology’s disciplinary engagement with big data is confounded by the variety of information types recorded, variability of data due to differential preservation of materials and theoretical orientations of observers, and complexity of archaeological concepts daring to be caged in explicit digital expressions. The Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA) is a linked open data hub, centered around the theoretically, practically, and interpretively fraught definition of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Gurevitz. Scotti Norman.

Burial practice in the Central Andes was transmitted continuously from the Middle Horizon (AD 700-AD 1000) onward, if not earlier in some areas, reflecting an agreed-upon understanding of Andean social identity throughout time. However, when the Spanish colonized the Andes, they drastically altered this continuity, forcing indigenous populations to bury their dead under the Church in idealized Catholic tradition. This sudden change in burial practice ruptured Andean identity as indigenous...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anne Jensen.

Walakpa is an iconic Arctic site with spectacular preservation, due to frozen conditions. Although many believe it to have been fully excavated, Stanford was only able to reach a third of the way to sterile soil due to permafrost, so earlier occupations of the site remain unstudied. Long considered stable, Walakpa began eroding rapidly in 2013. A single recent storm removed over 30 meters of cultural stratigraphy along a 100+ meter front. Need for rapid response prompted a large volunteer...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nancy Olsen. Ann Brierty. John Fryer.

This is an abstract from the "Technique and Interpretation in the Archaeology of Rock Art" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. SAA is comprised of many educators and a special interest group that conducts research on rock art. The emphasis now is to raise awareness regarding cultural sensitivity of rock art panels, including protection and preservation. That Pueblo people think of rock art panels as part of their cultural heritage, is not a new...