Society for American Archaeology

DOCUMENT Citation Only Autumn Painter. Jeffrey Painter.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Method and Theory: Papers in Honor of James M. Skibo, Part I" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During this paper, we will reflect on the impacts that Dr. James Skibo has had on our lives and careers. From childhood to graduate school, Dr. Skibo has been a major influence on how we think about and approach archaeological research. Thanks to his Yooper wisdom, he has also taught us many life lessons, such...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Neil Puckett.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Global Submerged Paleolandscapes Research" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The high desert basin surrounding Walker Lake, Nevada, has been subject to multiple landscape shifts since the lake reached its Late Pleistocene highstand, 15,679 cal BP. Research has identified at least four lake transgression and regression events postdating 5000 BP, and after its nineteenth-century historic highstand, the lake has...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Niels Rinehart.

This is an abstract from the "Public Lands, Public Sites: Research, Engagement, and Collaboration" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Histories are typically drawn up linearly, with events laid out in chronological order and often separated into periods of Early, Middle, and Late to illustrate the processes that make one event lead to another. But when you walk through your hometown, the landscape is a text written with the stories of one’s life, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only J. Emili Aura Tortosa.

The lapse of time between the end of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) and the Holocene 8.2 cold event, can be considered as a Long Transition, in which global diachronic changes and regional processes are combined. Between 17 - 10 ky cal BP important ecological changes (increased temperatures, forestry and presence of some species of herbivores, variations in sea-level and coastline , etc), techno-economic transformations (abandonment of osseous weapons, active and passive grinding stones related...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Selin Nugent. Hannah Lau.

Tracing the mobility patterns of pastoralists and their herds is a critical part of illuminating the lifeways of people who inhabited the southern Caucasus in the past. During the 2014 season, the Naxcivan Archaeological Project excavated several Middle Bronze age kurgans overlooking the Şərur Plain. In these burials humans and animals were interred together, speaking to the significance of the animals in the lifeways of the people inhabiting the area during the Middle Bronze Age. We correlate...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Goldstein.

In the absence of living interlocutors for the Andean Tiwanaku state society (AD 500-1000),we ask how Tiwanaku peoples imagined and reproduced themselves as social beings. A conventional view poses that Tiwanaku civilization at its apogee was unified by common membership in, or allegiance or aspiration to, an elite political culture, as evidenced by a high culture of specialized craft production, elite ritual functions, and religio-political iconography. This paper instead applies practice...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jan Magne Gjerde.

This is an abstract from the "Painting the Past: Interpretive Approaches in Global Rock Art Research" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Temporal changes and surroundings are of vital importance to hunter-fisher-gatherers (HFG) and guide activities of HFG in northern Europe throughout the year. Lifeways differ between and within the regions of northern Europe, e.g., coastal northern Norway, inland central Sweden, or lake districts of Finland. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sonia Machause López.

The power of the underground has attracted ritual practitioners over the centuries. Natural places, such as caves, have some intrinsic sensorial power which helps to create a ritual atmosphere. In the Iberian Iron Age (6th–1st centuries BC), ritual production has been recognized in some caves through the identification of the material patterns, along with other physical and sensorial particularities. Although each cave is different, those cavities in which we find evidence of ritual practice...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kevin Gilmore. John Ives.

This is an abstract from the "Approaches to Archaeological Footwear" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Franktown Cave (5DA272) on the Palmer Divide south of Denver contains an assemblage of perishable artifacts unrivaled on the western Great Plains, and among these perishables is footwear from occupations dated 3300 BC–AD 1280. The footwear has proven to be the most useful for determining regional and cultural associations. Most of the analysis of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Horn. Dianna Doucette.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although restricted to confined, linear study corridors, archaeological surveys of new and existing utility easements provide an opportunity to take a closer look at Pre-Contact settlement patterning across the interior regions of Southern New England. Cultural Resource Management (CRM) identification surveys and site evaluations within these linear project...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Magda Mankel.

This is an abstract from the "Contested Landscapes: The Archaeology of Politics, Borders, and Movement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents an archaeological ethnography of the Migrant Trail and a very recent past associated with the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border. Composed primarily of U.S. citizens, the Migrant Trail is a seven-day walk that protests U.S. immigration and border enforcement policies and commemorates...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Hare.

I present a preliminary analysis of movement through the Postclassic political capital of Mayapán. The architectural features at Mayapán are some of the most densely concentrated of sites in ancient Mesoamerica, but its organizational principles defy explanation. Almost two decades of fieldwork, including using electronic total stations, RTK survey-grade GNSS, UAV-based aerial photography, and an aircraft-borne LiDAR survey of a 40 sq km area centered on Mayapán's defensive wall, allows mapping...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steve Mills.

Walking with Ruth Tringham has always been a social and intellectual adventure. I have been fortunate to have the opportunity to muse on past ways of life while walking with Ruth at a range of different heritage sites in the U.S., Bulgaria and Turkey. Important themes we engaged with during these walks included: exploring different ways to approach contemporary senses of place, thinking about how senses of place may have been significant to prehistoric people, and how to (re)mediate these ideas...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Hanscam. Brian Buchanan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For archaeology to survive in the current political environment and for critical discourse on the past to thrive, archaeologists need to be proactive and advocate for our subject’s contemporary relevance. We illustrate the problems and potentials of this advocacy by examining popular perceptions of Roman border zones like Hadrian’s Wall, and how these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Christie.

This is an abstract from the "Navigating Imperialism: Negotiated Communities and Landscapes of the Inka Provinces" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper analyzes early state formation and integration of local groups at two royal estates, Tipon and Pisaq. Tipon, southeast of Cusco, began as a Killke period settlement before 1400. It functioned as outpost in the buffer zone between the Muyna and Pinagua in the Lucre Basin and the growing Cusco...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lance Pursey.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology of Medieval Eurasian Steppe Urbanism" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the course of its 200+ year tenure the Kitan-Liao dynasty (907–1125) saw large migrations, intensification of settlements, and widespread construction of walled sites of varying sizes north of the Great Wall (N41°+) across the grassland ecotones of North Asia. The remains of some 650 such walled sites are distributed across Inner...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Spring. Jessica Smeeks.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This project uses Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to analyze Late Intermediate Period (LIP) spatial organization and defensibility practices in the Huamanga Province, Peru. The Peruvian LIP (AD 1000-1450) is the period between the collapse of the Tiwanaku and Wari States and the rise of the Inca Empire. This is an ideal time period to study the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Harkey.

In the Yanamarka Valley in central Peru, the Late Intermediate Period saw dramatic changes. Whole villages moved from the valley floors to dense, defensible hilltop settlements, and were still living there when the Incas colonized this region a century later. The remote locations of many of these sites – both those forcibly abandoned under Inca rule, and those which continued on into the early Colonial Period – mean that numerous domestic round houses, storage spaces, patio walls and pathways...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Hernandez.

A critical facet of studying past warfare is the analysis of fortifications. Fortifications are often visible on the surface, making these archaeological features identifiable through surface reconnaissance. Moreover, test pits and trench excavations into gated areas or across various sections of fortifications can be used to establish the martial functions of these archaeological features. Yet, the study of past warfare and fortifications often stumbles in the interpretive stage. How do we know...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Davis.

Soapstone was a valuable raw material for the production of items used in food preparation, including cooking vessels, in eastern North America before the development and spread of ceramic technology. Durable, waterproof, fireproof, nearly impervious to thermal shock and, at the same time, soft and very easy to extract and then sculpt into a desired shape the demand for this raw material was high but supply was geographically constrained. Designated a Connecticut State Archaeological Preserve in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Billman.

This is an abstract from the "Warfare and the Origins of Political Control " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The central Andes has a long history of the rise and fall of centralized political organizations, beginning with construction of the first large-scale ceremonial centers in the New World between 3000 and 1800 BC. Some see these early centers as pilgrimage centers, lacking significant political power, while others argue they were urban...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Clay Mathers.

Although conflict and conquista campaigns characterized many of the earliest encounters between Native and European groups in New Spain and La Florida, the transformation of objects, communities, and strategic policies in these areas was locally variable and changed dramatically by the close of the sixteenth century. Materials characteristic of these changes and variegated responses are found widely in the archaeological record of the American Southwest, but have seldom been explored for the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aurelio López Corral.

This is an abstract from the "Landscapes: Archaeological, Historic, and Ethnographic Perspectives from the New World / Paisajes: Perspectivas arqueológicas, históricas y etnográficas desde el Nuevo Mundo" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Antigua Cienega de Tlaxcala is an area of wetlands located at the core of the Puebla-Tlaxcala valley in central Mexico. Historically, these marshlands have been exploited agriculturally using drained field...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Seibert.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the 280 years since July 7th, 1742, the exact locations of Gully Hole Creek and Bloody Marsh have been speculated and debated without resolution until now. Fort Frederica National Monument partnered with the Frederica Baptist Church regarding private metal detecting finds found on a property near Gully Hole Creek on St. Simons Island, Georgia. National...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Johan Ling.

War related social and ritual traits are common features in European Bronze Age rock art and native North American rock art. There are some general similarities in the material that needs to be stressed between the North American images and those from Bronze Age Europe, fighters depicted with spears and shields etc. This resemblance speaks of how far un-connected human groups may build similar imageries, given only a set of rather superficial social similarities in general terms. Moreover, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tyler Ferree. Gregory Wilson. Amber VanDerwarker.

This is an abstract from the "Warfare and the Origins of Political Control " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper considers the impact of warfare-induced settlement nucleation on the sociopolitical organization of the thirteenth-century Central Illinois River Valley. Concurrent with the beginning of a period of intense warfare, Mississippian groups in the region abandoned their small, dispersed farmsteads and aggregated into the region’s...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Danielle Cathcart.

This is an abstract from the "Navigating Ethical and Legal Quandaries in Modern Archaeological Curation" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The cultural resource management (CRM) industry, emerging from the passage of landmark national and subsequent state-level legislation, is arguably one of the largest generators of archaeological collections in North America. Project-specific deadlines, budgetary constraints, variations in state agency guidelines,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Veronica Williams.

Results obtained from fabric analysis using thin-section microscopy (TSM) and various other analytical strategies (e.g. Raman micro spectroscopy, FTIR, XRD –microX ray diffraction- XRF, SEM-EDAX, and INAA) provide insights into production technology and the provenance of selected pottery sample from Prehispanic archaeological sites in Northwestern (NW) Argentina, North of Chile, and Bolivia (AD 900-1530). Iconographic and morphological analyses sustain the idea of interregional contacts that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Verano. Khrystyne Tschinkel. Helen Chavarria. Gabriel Prieto.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Depictions of combat and the capture and killing of captives are well known in Moche (ca. AD 200-850) art. Since 1995, the iconographic record has been joined by archaeological evidence of the practices themselves. The most dramatic discoveries were made in Plazas 3A and 3C at the Pyramid of the Moon between 1995 and 2001, with scattered deposits...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Suárez Calderón. Yahaira Núñez-Cortés. Francisco Corrales-Ulloa.

This is an abstract from the "Warfare and the Origins of Political Control " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Southern Central America is rich in examples of early complex societies, and yet, the timing and mechanism for the emergence of social complexity and differentiation are still not well understood. Recent works are moving archaeologists in the region to question, on the one hand, the definition of social complexity itself, and on the other...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rod Campbell.

This is an abstract from the "Warfare and the Origins of Political Control " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Intercommunity conflict and sociopolitical complexity are both complicated topics, not only because of their large literatures and diverse approaches, but because of the multifaceted nature of the phenomena involved. For my talk I would like to focus on what I see as two key variables relevant to both warfare and political community. These...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nam Kim.

This is an abstract from the "Warfare and the Origins of Political Control " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists have long been interested in the development of social complexity and associated institutions of governance and political control. Within Southeast Asia, historical societies such as Angkor provide insights around premodern state societies. This paper deals with evidence from the late prehistoric era, addressing the role of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Clark.

The Missouri River Valley is a unique landscape for horticulturist settlements. The semi-arid Great Plains have wildly fluctuating weather patterns and resulted in a difficult growing environment with frequent changes in productivity. The terraces of the river valley offered relatively flat areas for village planning, the terrace-forming flood waters refreshed the flood plains with nutrient rich sediment for village gardens, and the terrace breaks provided protection from both wind and invaders....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mallorie Hatch.

Warfare during the Mississippian Period (ca. AD 1000-1500) of the U.S. Midcontinent and Southeast has been hypothesized as an important political and social practice throughout the region. This paper will explore diachronic and synchronic evidence of warfare, comparing and contrasting evidence between large and small sites. Particular emphasis will be placed on observations of warfare patterns in the Central Illinois Valley of west-central Illinois. Skeletal remains with warfare-trauma have been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only D. Shane Miller.

The complex hunter-gatherers of the Middle and Late Archaic periods in the Tennessee River Valley of the American Southeast are well-known for displaying evidence of intergroup violence, including scalping and trophy taking. On the other hand, these time periods are also known for the emergence of exchange networks centered on items including bone pins and bifaces. I argue that the co-occurrence of exchange networks and intergroup violence was likely the result of iterated "live and let live" or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Catherine Cameron.

This is an abstract from the "Warfare and the Origins of Political Control " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Raiding and captive-taking were common activities in small-scale societies prior to the modern era. A majority of captives were women and children; some were enslaved while others were incorporated into the societies they joined. Ethnohistoric accounts make it clear that regardless of their social position, captives created power for the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Hernandez. Josuhé Lozada Toledo.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper musters archaeological, ethnohistoric, and ethnographic data to highlight that a greater focus on formation processes and sampling bias is necessary in the archaeology of warfare and study of martial architecture. Fortifications are some of the most important archaeological indicators of past warfare. For example, the myth of a peaceful Maya...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Reff.

When examined separately, the archaeological record and early Spanish accounts of Sonora are seemingly insufficient or ambiguous with respect to culture continuity and change. However, critical juxtaposition of the two "data sets" suggests that the late prehistoric period in Sonora was a time when competing chiefdoms or "statelets" embraced slavery and territorial expansion , contributing to processes of ethonogenesis that have confounded previous interpretations of the archaeological and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Jennings. Matthew Biwer. Christina Conlee.

This is an abstract from the "A New Horizon: Reassessing the Andean Middle Horizon (AD 600–1000) and Rethinking the Andean State" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The coast of southern Peru from the Nasca to Moquegua has played a pivotal role in distinct interpretation of the Wari polity. A hard imperial frontier, for example, ran through the region in 1960s models. Nasca and Moquegua were home to important administrative centers in the “mosaic of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrea Vazquez De Arthur.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For ancient civilizations with no form of writing, proper iconographic interpretation is an important tool for accessing the past. This is certainly true of ancient Andean civilizations, especially the Wari who produced some of the most captivating visual imagery of their time. However, Wari depictions of supernatural composite figures are so stylized that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patrick Ryan Williams. Donna Nash. Anita Cook. William Isbell.

Between 500 and 600 AD, the first expansive state of the central highlands of Peru emerged in the Ayacucho Basin. This state, known as Wari after its capital city located in the same region, established far flung colonies covering much of the mountainous region of modern day Peru. Research in the heartland sites of Conchopata and Wari and in the provincial sites of Cerros Baul and Mejia have yielded new insights into the economic production of the early imperial state, including significant new...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Moore.

This is an abstract from the "Almost 100 Years since Julio C. Tello: Research at Huaca del Loro, Nasca, Peru" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Emerging evidence increasingly suggests that D-shaped structures were a tool of Wari imperial and cultural expansion throughout the Middle Horizon landscape. Analysis of their construction, geographic distribution, regional context, and specific orientations reveals that their use and purpose was not...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Silvana Rosenfeld. Matthew Sayre.

This is an abstract from the "Seeing Wari through the Lens of the Everyday: Results from the Patipampa Sector of Huari" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The advances in food studies have revealed significant new information about life during the Middle Horizon (AD 600-1000) in the central Andes of Peru. Botanical and faunal data from Wari affiliated sites shows differential use of at least two items: molle (Schinus molle) and guinea pigs (Cavia...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Grace Alexandrino Ocaña.

Evidence of looted tombs from Conchopata and Huari -the capital of Wari- have allowed archaeologists to identify up to three formal types of funerary structures. Researchers also point out that variants of these types of funerary enclosures identified at both sites might have held local chiefs and provincial governors. Evidence of such elite Wari funerary contexts has also been found in Espítiru Pampa, in the high jungle of Vilcabamba, and Batan Urqo, in Cusco, among others. Although the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patrick Ryan Williams. John Janusek.

In this paper, we focus on the relationships between landscape places viewed as ancestors to Andean communities and things that further political agendas in imperial contexts. We explore how objects and people work together to create or deconstruct political power in Wari and Tiwanaku societies. In particular, we focus on objects, including ceremonial ceramics and lithic monuments, as examples of things that participate in building power relationships with local communities. We argue that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Chirinos Ogata.

The Wari empire built at least two main centers in the Cajamarca region as part of its expansion to different regions of the Central Andes. One of them, Yamobamba, 25 km southeast on the road to Huamachuco, presents an architectural pattern that corresponds to Wari canons, including square patios, narrow corridors, and peripheral galleries. In particular, its distribution, size, and orientation show a strong resemblance to Jincamocco (Ayacucho), almost 900 km away. Recent research at Yamobamba...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Veronique Belisle. Hubert Quispe-Bustamante.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The nature of Wari presence in the Cusco region of southern Peru during the Middle Horizon (600-1000 CE) is debated. In this area, the Wari state built large installations at Pikillaqta and in the neighboring Huaro Valley. Excavations in the Wari colony have demonstrated the strong Wari identity of its occupants along with their political ambitions, while...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Reid. Veronica Rosales Hilario. Miguel Vizcarra Zanabria. Kevin Ricci Jara.

This is an abstract from the "Exploring Culture Contact and Diversity in Southern Peru" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This project investigates the social mechanisms behind culture change and contact in Peru’s southern coastal valleys through the lens of road infrastructure: i.e. the built networks of communication, travel, and commerce. Here we present recent investigations of a pre-Inca road network in the Majes/Chuquibamba region of Arequipa....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rosa Maria Varillas. Francesca Fernandini.

Some pre-Hispanic textiles were complex masterpieces made with labor-intensive techniques and high quality raw materials. Nevertheless, the vast majority of textiles, those used by the population at large, were plain, simple and without any decoration. This study will present a comparative analysis between a sample of plain weaves obtained from domestic contexts and a sample of high quality textiles excavated in an elaborated Wari tomb, all of them registered at the pre-Hispanic settlement of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeffrey Splitstoser. Milosz Giersz.

Archaeological evidence suggests that khipus—devices made of wrapped and knotted cords—were used by people living in the Wari Empire at least as early as Middle Horizon 1B. These Wari-style khipus, like their later, more famous, Inka descendants, likely carried and conveyed information using color and knots. Wari khipus differ from Inka khipus, however, in many respects including their use of colorful wrapping to make bands and patterns to convey information. Wari-style khipus survive in far...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Umberger.

A fascinating aspect of Frances Berdan's new text, Aztec Archaeology and Ethnohistory (2014), is the section in Chapter 8 on warrior regalia as inalienable possessions. This topic is explored by Berdan in a rich discussion that merges Annette Weiner's framework with Berdan's own exhaustive knowledge of written and pictorial manuscript sources on the Aztecs. I would like to take this exploration into the realm of material evidence, by examining particular sculpted examples in the Aztec World. ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Glowacki.

The Wari settlement of Huaro, located southeast of the Cuzco Valley in the Southern Highlands of Peru, contains a mortuary complex known as Cotocotuyoc. This towering plateau site, which overlooked the entire Huaro Wari settlement, was one of several urban components that made up a more than nine hectare Wari center, occupied for over 500 years. Excavations at Cotocotuyoc generated telling evidence for who built and occupied this settlement and how they were treated upon their deaths and in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Leslie. Kevin McBride.

Previous research on Block Island, Rhode Island, indicates that during the Woodland Period, the island was likely occupied year-round and maritime resources accounted for a significant portion of peoples’ diets. Native American sites on the island include semi-permanent villages near the Great Salt Pond and fishing, temporary seasonal, and task specific camps away from villages. Season of occupation for these sites is important to frame our understanding of a developing maritime economy. Several...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Dye. Timothy Rieth.

Archaeologists sometimes claim that the refined chronologies yielded by Bayesian calibration make it possible to distinguish between Levi-Strauss's "hot" and "cold" societies. Historians of Hawai`i leave little doubt that Hawai`i was a "hot" society in the early historic period. A review and comparison of chronologies for the tempo of change in pre-Contact Hawai`i distinguishes the "cold" society reconstituted by ad hoc methods from the "hot" society reconstituted by the Bayesian method. We...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Gajewski. Corry Laughlin.

Throughout two field seasons (2015-2017), the University of Montana and GAI Consultants (UM-GAI) conducted a Section 110 archaeological survey and evaluation project at Warren Grove Gunnery Range (WGGR), Burlington County, New Jersey (9,911 acres). The UM-GAI team completed archaeological survey of all accessible areas of the range making it one of the most expansive survey projects within the New Jersey Outer Coastal Plain. The study identified and evaluated a total of ten sites and recommended...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Douglas Bamforth.

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. Indigenous Plains warfare is one of the anthropological archetypes of tribal war, often seen as just as much of a status-related game as real violence directed toward larger social and political ends. This view misrepresents colonial-era warfare by focusing on only one aspect social...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amelia Hebert.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Scythians were a group of people originating in Central Asia that migrated to what is now Ukraine and Southern Russia from the 8th to the 7th centuries BCE. They are well-known for their nomadic way of life, horseback warfare, and apparent lack of a patriarchal society. There is significant evidence that Scythian women were treated as equals to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pamela Stone.

This is an abstract from the "Women of Violence: Warriors, Aggressors, and Perpetrators of Violence" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Engaging social theory with bioarchaeological analyses offers provocative ways of re-examining (pre) historic populations. With regards to violence and conflict, the research continues to be driven by androcentric notions that this is a man’s arena, and that females, when associated with violence, are only victims....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nelda Issa Marengo.

En Mesoamérica las representaciones gráficas sobre guerra, violencia y conflicto, son una constante que se encuentran en diversos sitios y en diferentes periodos. Para el Epiclásico (650-900 A.D) en el centro de México, y para el Clásico Tardío/ Terminal (600-900 A.D) en el área Maya, esta temática comienza a presentar cambios, tiende a ser más explícita y a compartir algunos elementos entre sitios contemporáneos. Chichén Itzá floreció durante este momento de cambios y muestra de ello es la...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kunihiko Wakabayashi.

Several lines of archaeological evidence indicate that numerous battles took place during the Yayoi Period or Japanese Bronze and Early Iron Age. So far, Japanese archaeologists have argued that these battles occurred as results of competition for agricultural lands or taking initiatives over exchange system. Many of the Japanese archeologists have speculated that wars were a part of the social process for evolving toward an early state society. However, archaeological evidence for wars, such...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Britta Spaulding.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Industrial archaeology has been defined in the anthropological literature of the last several decades to analyze the period, related archaeological record, and resultant and surrounding socioeconomic changes of western industrialization—the establishment of large-scale manufacturing—from 1800 CE to the present. In considering a "movement" such as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexander Safronov.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The last quarter of the seventh century was marked by the intensification of military and political struggle in the Ususmasinta Basin. Loss of control over the Western Lowlands by Kaanu’l power at this time led to wars between the largest political centers of the region—Piedras Negras, Palenque, Yaxchilan, Tonina, and Saktz’i. The Lacandon Selva (Chiapas...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Paige. Charles Perreault.

Acheulean large cutting tools were made across Africa and Eurasia for ~1.5 million years, and show surprisingly little variation for a technology so spatiotemporally vast. One explanation for this puzzling degree of conservatism is that Acheulean tools were not culturally transmitted but rather genetically determined. If this hypothesis is true, then Acheulean tools are more akin to animal technologies such as bird nests than to modern human tools. Here we examine the extent to which the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bruce Benz.

This is an abstract from the "Subsistence Crops and Animals as a Proxy for Human Cultural Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Excavation of Coxcatlan cave recovered remains of Setaria cf. macrostachya. Analysis suggested early increase in abundance of florets (so-called seeds) in deposits associated with El Riego Phase contexts and later decrease in Coxcatlan Phase deposits. Callen observed a size increase of Setaria florets recovered from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Payson Sheets.

This is an abstract from the "Ceremonial Lithics of Mesoamerica: New Understandings of Technology, Distribution, and Symbolism of Eccentrics and Ritual Caches in the Maya World and Beyond" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Many decades ago Stanley Boggs discovered a particularly elaborate chert eccentric from San Andres, El Salvador, yet he never published the find. Here we compare it to the set of more elaborate eccentrics manufactured by "El...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ian Hutchinson. Sarah L. Sterling. Virginia L. Butler. Carrie Garrison-Laney.

The northern segment of the Cascadia subduction zone has ruptured at least four times in the last 2000 years. Each of these giant earthquakes triggered a tsunami that potentially inundated the Tse-whit-zen village site to depths of 3-6 m and exposed it to currents of ~10 m/s. We compare the timing of these tsunamis, as recorded by wash-over deposits at Tse-whit-zen and sand sheets in the marshes at Discovery Bay, some 50 km to the east of Tse-whit-zen, with the palaeodemographic history of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Coon. Julia Furlong.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The field of archaeology, and especially the cultural resource management (CRM) industry, faces ongoing systemic inequalities in access to training and employment. The gaps between demand, recruitment, and retention of archaeologists continue to widen annually. One way that this problem manifests is through a lack of networking opportunities and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bethany Mathews.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Homestead Act of 1862 enabled feme sole—women who were legally single, widowed, divorced, or deserted—to claim up to 160 acres of land. In Washington State 8.5 million acres (20%) of lands were claimed through the Homestead Act; and although feme sole were a minority of these homesteaders, their homesteading experiences illustrate important themes of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Palus.

This is an abstract from the "Unsettling Infrastructure: Theorizing Infrastructure and Bio-Political Ecologies in a More-Than-Human World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cultural resource management projects in and around Washington, DC, have documented the episodic and nearly complete displacement of the city’s first exurban Black communities in areas that would become metropolitan suburbs. This recurring theme illuminates a posture of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Raveena Manhas-Tamoria. Estelle Praet. John Schofield.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. World Heritage sites are subject to a host of threats and impacts, be it from socio-economic pressures, climate change, or natural disasters. In more recent times, the threats from waste and, in particular plastic pollution, has become far more prevalent at various UNESCO sites around the world. There is indeed a growing concern over marine plastic debris...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lindsay Duncan. Elizabeth Graham.

Set in a coastal wetland environment, Marco Gonzalez—to paraphrase the session abstract—is a repository of sediments, fauna, artefacts and plant remains, pertinent to an understanding of human-environment interactions. Marco Gonzalez is also an area of naturally occurring coral sand, grasses and sedges that has been transformed over time into cultivable land. Our preliminary results indicate, however, an inadvertent, rather than planned, transformation. Nonetheless, the site can be characterised...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brady Liss. Thomas Levy.

Recent excavations by the Edom Lowlands Regional Archaeology Project at Khirbat al-Jariya (KAJ), an Iron Age (ca. 1200-586 BCE) copper smelting center in Jordan’s Faynan region, aimed to explore the site’s rich metallurgical history. KAJ is characterized by architectural features and large slag (smelting waste byproduct) mounds visible on the surface, attesting to its significance as a copper production site. These renewed excavations investigated the abundant metallurgical remains by probing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only F. Scott Worman. Anastasia Steffen.

Our study examines the potential for using obsidian hydration analyses to quantify post-depositional site disturbance. The Valles Caldera National Preserve (VCNP) in northern New Mexico encompasses a diverse and dynamic mountainous landscape that people have visited regularly for millennia to access large obsidian quarries and other resources. The result is a rich archaeological record with abundant obsidian artifacts. However that record has been altered, sometimes dramatically, by physical,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carlos Rodriguez-Rellan. Ramón Fábregas Valcarce.

Geographic Information Systems and high-resolution cartography (LIDAR), together with Agent-Based Modeling, are used for assessing the traditional view of open-air rock art as an active element in the shaping of the prehistoric landscape. Petroglyphs have been usually thought to play a major role in the configuration of the different significations of the prehistoric landscapes, their location repeatedly analyzed in terms of spatial proximity with paths and resource-rich areas that would have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Garrison. Fernando Véliz Corado. Stephen Houston.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Surveillance: Seeing and Power in the Material World" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ethnohistoric accounts from highland Guatemala allude to surveillance systems and their personnel forming part of the integrated defense of Maya political territories during the Late Postclassic period, prior to the Spanish arrival in 1524. Recent lidar-driven archaeological research in the Maya Lowlands suggests that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Alcock.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Surveillance: Seeing and Power in the Material World" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient classical sources tell us that in the late eighth/seventh centuries BCE the armies of Sparta marched on their neighbors to the west, the Messenians, and conquered their wide and fertile lands. Many Messenians fled, but others remained to become the famed “helots” of the Greek world—a population subject to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Denemark. Christopher Chase-Dunn.

This is an abstract from the "World-Systems and Globalization in Archaeology: Assessing Models of Intersocietal Connections 50 Years since Wallerstein’s “The Modern World-System”" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The primary focus of world-systems analysis (WSA) is the impact of systemic-level interaction on long-term sociopolitical and economic stasis and change. Differentiation (not equalization) among polities is one of its predicted outcomes....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sonia Alconini.

This is an abstract from the "Water Management in the Andes: Past, Present, and Future" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Puna Apolobamba pastures played a critical role in farming, pastoralism, and agropastoralism in the Kallawaya territory. Located to the east of the Titicaca basin, the area was dotted by sunken fields, bofedales, and water qocha reservoirs supplemented with canals. In this presentation, I discuss the nature and distribution of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Qiushi Zou.

This is an abstract from the "Resources and Society in Ancient China" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the past few decades, research on the Panlongcheng site has achieved important results and progress in many aspects, but few scholars have discussed the site's geomorphological environment, especially the water environment. Researchers have long believed that the environment and landscape of Panlongcheng we see today are no different from the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Hammer.

Archaeology has long seen mobile pastoral societies as largely materially "invisible" both in the realms of portable artifacts and of infrastructure projects such as buildings and landscape modification. Recent studies have sought to alter this impression as part of larger trends that seek to ground our understanding of pre-modern pastoralists in concrete faunal, botanical, isotopic, landscape, and historical data, which clearly show the effect that pastoral practices and infrastructure have had...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Seibel.

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. Government, inclusive of the local, state, and national levels, is the largest aggregate landholder in the United States and has under its direct jurisdiction the largest array of cultural resources in the country, not to mention the cultural resources under jurisdictional oversight. As such,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Morgan Clark. Sheryl Luzzader-Beach. Byron Smith.

This is an abstract from the "La Cuernavilla, Guatemala: A Maya Fortress and Its Environs" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper will present the final results and interpretations of data collected from La Cuernavilla’s aguada. Special emphasis is placed on new data collected through several types of soil and geoarchaeological analyses that crucially supplement the data that have already been presented. Previous presentations on this topic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Burger. Jonathon Curry. J. Andrew Darling. Thomas Jones. Andrea Gregory.

This is an abstract from the "Collaborative Archaeology: How Native American Knowledge Enhances Our Collective Understanding of the Past" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Akimel O’Odham are river people. During testing investigations for a roadway improvement project in Scottsdale, Arizona, sponsored by the Federal Highways Administration (FHWA) and Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community (SRP-MIC), a historical water feature was identified....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chelsea Fisher.

Like many other sites in the northern Maya lowlands, Yaxuná and its environs incorporate a number of cenotes (natural pits in the limestone bedrock that expose underlying groundwater) into the built environment. Interestingly, all but one of these permanent water sources lie beyond the limits of the site’s public and residential core. Residents of the ancient city compensated for this, at least on a seasonal basis, by constructing an aguada (a natural, or in this case human-modified, pond) in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Aparicio. Jose Alberto Delgado Ramos. Margarita Fernández Mier.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Terraces are the clearest evidence of landscape transformation in the highlands of the South-Central Andes of Peru; they represent a magnificent and complex solution to create cultivation areas where geographical and climatic conditions were not ideal. Water management is an important piece of this system in which the water harvested in the puna area...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hailey Tollner.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The capitalist world system in place today has caused resource insecurity and social vulnerability for groups all over the world, pushing people to depend on bureaucratic leaders to solve these issues. The archaeological record, as well as some responses to recent disasters, shows the benefit of mutual aid-style networks of action allowing communities to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leah Marajh.

Water management practices have been instrumental in the rise and collapse of many complex societies. Informed through case studies from South India and Sri Lanka this paper explores the importance of water management in their developmental trajectories during the Chola (848-1279 CE) and Sinhalese Empires (377 BCE-1310 CE). Initial conditions that led to the impetus for water management include environment and climate changes. Continued growth and prosperity relied on the development and use of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Macrae. Gyles Iannone. Pyiet Phyo Kyaw.

This is an abstract from the "The Current State of Archaeological Research across Southeast Asia" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Located along the Ayeyarwady river, in the dry-zone of Upper Myanmar, is an area once described as "the land of the terribly hot", a land where the Classical Burmese capital of Bagan (11th to 14th centuries CE) is found. Home to over 4,000 monuments, a large and diverse population lived within the mixed urban-rural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Portman. Donna Glowacki. Kyle Bocinsky.

Water management is a critical concern in the arid landscape of southwest Colorado, particularly for farmers. As such, significant developments in water supply systems — like the construction of reservoirs — reflect the social, political, and economic climates in a community. Three reservoirs are located on Park Mesa in Mesa Verde National Park. These were originally documented during surveys in the 1970s and revisited after the Chapin 5 fire in 1996, but none have been analyzed beyond basic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alesia Hoyle. Sonia Alconini.

The qochas of the high-altitude Bolivian Apolobamba Puna region had a pivotal importance in the local agropastoral economies. Fed by snow melt and inner water sources, the qochas formed a complex hydrological system along the rich marshes. Although we do not know their origins, some of these qochas were modified during the Late Intermediate period, and a network of canals expanded in order to accommodate increasingly specialized pastoralism. Later the Inka arrival prompted specialized...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Holt. Anke Marsh.

The Nuragic culture of Bronze Age Sardinia (c. 1700-900 BCE) is known for building thousands of monumental stone towers called nuraghi throughout the island. However, toward the end of the Bronze Age, Nuragic leaders stopped building nuraghi and instead constructed underground temples over naturally occurring springs. Previous research assumes that this architectural shift took place rapidly in the Final Bronze Age (c. 1175-1020 BCE), representing a sudden rise in the importance of water ritual....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adriana Sanchez Balderas. Joel Palka.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Archaeological Investigations in Chiapas, Mexico" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Maya established communities at Mensabak, Chiapas, instead of other adjacent lakes because of its impressive water mountain on an island where a major river is born. People traveled and pilgrimaged up the Tulijá River to live near Mirador Mountain (Chakaktun “red-hollow stone / cave-of water” in Lacandon Mayan) where they...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Freidel. Mary Jane Acuna. Carlos Chiriboga.

Vernon Scarborough’s path-breaking work on lowland Maya water management has focused attention on the way that the Maya conceptualized and utilized landscape and its water sources for political, religious and economic purposes. Research in northwestern Peten suggests that canoe traffic linked the site of El Achiotal adjacent to the Central Karstic Uplands to the San Pedro Martir River by way of the San Juan River commanded by El Peru-Waka’. The Mirador hill at Waka’ was conceived as a water...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Abel Traslaviña.

This is an abstract from the "Lost in Transition: Social and Political Changes in the Central Southern Andes from the Late Prehispanic to the Early Colonial Periods" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. After the Spanish arrival in the Andes, the new social, economic, and political organization mainly materialized in two spatial entities: the "reducciones" or specially-designed towns where the Andean population was forcibly resettled, and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexander Herrera Wassilowsky.

This is an abstract from the "Water Management in the Andes: Past, Present, and Future" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dominated by the glaciated mountain couple Huascarán (male, 6768 m) and Tullparaju (female, 6395 m), the cultural landscape of the Callejón de Huaylas has long been shaped by stark contrasts in water availability. This paper showcases how water infiltration and surface runoff catchment technologies developed, as techné and as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Snead. Ann Stansell.

Euro-American experience in the western states has been profoundly shaped by the fight for resources, among which water ranks extremely high. Traditional histories of such struggles focus on policy, macroeconomics, and large-scale social transformation. Historical archaeology, in contrast, offers the opportunity to emphasize the quotidian manifestations of these conflicts, particularly as they shaped the lives (and deaths) of local residents. Current fieldwork conducted by California State...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eugenia Robinson. Marlen Garnica. Sorayya Carr.

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. La Casa de las Golondrinas is a Mesoamerican sacred rock art and pilgrimage site located in the southern end of the Antigua Valley in the central highlands of Guatemala near water sources and routes of travel. Recently, mapping efforts have found that the natural site, 500 m long, was culturally structured...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Hauser.

Water and the making of authority has generally been viewed as a basic metabolic need whose capture and distribution provides a nexus through which power flows. The household becomes place of water consumption where subjectification was achieved in other domains and subsequently inscribed into the container. In this paper I take a slightly different approach. Specifically I ask the question, at what point does water become a convenience and how does its status as a convenience inflect both...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kevin Lane.

This is an abstract from the "Water Management in the Andes: Past, Present, and Future" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the past as in the present water was and is a central material element of the communities of the highland Andes. Underpinning their relationship with water and the taskways this entails has been the constant negotiation and impact of human-human and human-ecology relationships. In this regard, these populations’ relationship...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thibault Saintenoy. Mauricio Uribe.

Located on the edge of the Atacama Desert at the foot of the Carangas Altiplano, the Belén Valley witnessed substantial construction of imperial infrastructures during the late pre-Hispanic period. The Inca occupation was mainly related to agriculture, metallurgy and a sanctuary. The Belén Valley contains, in fact, the most important water resources in the upper basin of Azapa, copper and tin mines and an important mountain summit, which formed both economic and symbolic resources of special...