Society for American Archaeology

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gyles Iannone. Pyiet Phyo Kyaw. Nyien Chan Soe. Saw Tun Lynn. Scott Macrae.

The IRAW@Bagan project is aimed at developing an integrated socio-ecological history for residential patterning, agricultural practices, and water management at the Medieval Burmese (Bama) capital of Bagan, Myanmar (11th to 14th century CE). As part of this long-term research program investigations have been initiated on the Tuyin-Thetso mountain range, located 11.25 km southeast of Bagan’s walled and moated epicenter. This upland area figures prominently in the chronicles of early Bagan, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anthony DeLuca.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study explores the relationship between several Teuchitlán Culture archaeology sites and their proximity to permanent and seasonal water sources within the Tequila Valleys of Jalisco, Mexico. Water is an essential resource that humans cannot live without. With a lengthy dry season of nearly seven months, questions arise regarding access to water and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Roland Fletcher.

Angkor, in Cambodia, between the 7th and the 13th century depended on the largest urban water management infrastructure of the agrarian urban world. The key elements of this infrastructure came into being before the global climate transition of the 9th-10th century CE. That infrastructure was vital for coping with the start of the Medieval Warm Phase when other societies around the world experienced severe crises. By the 14th century, some parts of Angkor’s infrastructure were nearly 500 years...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lauren Lippiello.

Shared iconography and similar functionality associated with dated depictions of Predynastic watercraft and terrestrial shrines identify watercraft as the earliest manifestation of manufactured sacred space in Egypt. The resulting Mobile Sacred Space Paradigm describes watercraft as ritual objects (liminal negotiators) empowered to move through and, thereby, connect three ecologically distinctive landscapes as early as the Naqada IIB Period (and possibly Naqada IC). Results indicate that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andres Mejia Ramon. Luis Barba. Deborah Nichols. Sergio Gomez.

As showcased by the "Feeding Teotihuacan" symposium at the 79th Annual Meetings of the Society, there has been a surge of interest in understanding Teotihuacano agriculture or food production. Nevertheless, there is still the glaring question of how the ancient inhabitants dealt with water collection and irrigation in the semi-arid environment of the Northeastern Basin of Mexico. Although canal systems have been previously identified and excavated in various sites throughout the Teotihuacan...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabriela Prestes Carneiro. Roberta Sá Leitão-Barboza. Myrian Sá Leitão-Barboza. Claide de Paula Moraes.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Animal management and domestication have been widely studied in relation to terrestrial mammals; however, there are still debates over what “domestication” means for aquatic animals. Across the Amazon, in recent years, a great number of archaeological structures such as fish weirs, canals, ponds, and turtle and fish corrals have been documented, dating...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Moore. Christopher Rodning. Robin Beck, Jr..

The Exploring Joara Foundation, Inc. is a not-for profit, 501(c)3, organization whose mission is to support public archaeology in the western Piedmont region of North Carolina. Formed in 2008, the foundation has grown around the long-term research project at the Berry site, near Morganton, NC; now known to be the location of the Native town of Joara and the Spanish Fort San Juan built by Juan Pardo in 1567. Archaeological investigations at the Berry site since 2001 have involved the public in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Sheridan. Stewart B. Koyiyumptewa.

As Native peoples assert their sovereignty over intellectual property as well as land and water, relationships between them and anthropologists are entering a new era characterized by collaboration as well as conflict. Ethical anthropologists in North America recognize that they need to secure tribal/First Nations permission for their research. Sometimes permission is granted only for projects of interest to the tribes themselves. And sometimes publication of that research for a wider audience...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erik Johannesson.

Subject to continuous change, landscapes represent palimpsests of successive alterations over time. As such, landscapes have history. Following Carole Crumley’s major contributions to historical ecology, this paper charts diachronic change in mortuary landscapes in Mongolia against the backdrop of three major nomadic polities: the Xiongnu (200 BC-200 AD), The Turk Empire (550-850 AD), and the Mongol Empire (1200-1400 AD). The construction of impressive funerary stone monuments has been a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Levi. Christian Sheumaker. Sarah Boudreaux.

Social life never proceeds in the absence of a spatial dimension that defines, brackets, segregates, alters or otherwise organizes interaction. The power to organize space emerges historically from the sweep of institutional arrangements across society and operates along many different dimensions and scales, at once establishing boundaries all the while insidiously permeating them. This historical process – this "social production of space" – is what we refer to as landscape. Landscape has been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Loomis.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Los Guachimontones was the largest site of the Teuchitlan tradition that flourished during the Late Formative and Classic periods (c. 300 BCE to 500 CE) in Western Mexico. The site exemplified the monumental architecture of the region - circular pyramid complexes and ball courts. Human burials have been excavated amongst these structures and at burial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Kahn. John Sinton.

This is an abstract from the "2019 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of M. Steven Shackley" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Our WDXRF sourcing program of geological and archaeological specimens (n=177) from the Society Islands, outlines the dynamics of inter- and intra-archipelago exchange over an 800 year period. Adzes from 21 sources were identified. Those traded in from the Marquesas Islands, an over 1,400 km voyage, are found with low...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Betsy Bradley.

The archaeological component of the National Historic Preservation Act Section 106 consultation embodies an intersection of power that has privileged archaeologists and their work at the expense of accomplishing all legal mandates and has elevated the practice of archaeology as a science above any need for negotiation for project-specific approaches. This cross-disciplinary conversation is necessary as the current situation increasingly affects the ability of other Cultural Resource Management...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Dubois.

Research in the highlands of Huánuco, Peru, has revealed rock art sites were used to establish, negotiate, and legitimize changing social relations for more than three millennia. Implementation of stylistic seriation bolstered by art from more securely dated archaeological deposits allowed for the development of a chronological sequence of rock art styles in Huánuco. The research revealed rock art played a prominent role in expressing changing social relations in the region. This paper focuses...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tanja Hoffmann.

Indigenous scholars propose that the outside researchers most useful to indigenous communities are those willing to engage in a process of self-discovery and transformation. These researchers are willing to learn from, not just about, the people they work with. This paper contemplates the challenges and opportunities that arise when archaeologists embark on this transformative journey. I use personal examples drawn from two decades of conducting archaeology with and for indigenous communities to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leslie Aragon.

In the prehispanic Salt River Valley (SRV), the extensive canal systems that provided irrigation to the desert farmers, known by archaeologists as the Hohokam, also serve as tangible networks that link villages along an individual canal’s route. Many of the villages in the valley are incredibly long-lived, spanning hundreds of years and multiple generations, providing unique time-depth in which to study how social relationships changed within a region of the Southwest. In order to better...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chelsea Rose. Tiah Edmunson-Morton.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Largely assumed to consist of a male-dominated workforce and clientele, many early Oregon breweries were actually family affairs. The Eagle Brewery and Saloon, one of the first breweries in Oregon, was run by German immigrants Joseph and Fredericka Wetterer. They sold lager beer, distilled whisky and brandy, and had a small vineyard on their property. Upon...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anne Jensen.

This is an abstract from the "Accelerating Environmental Change Threats to Cultural Heritage: Serious Challenges, Promising Responses" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological sites are important sources of data on past human behavior and as valuable resources for paleoenvironmental reconstruction. They can also inform attempts to adapt to environmental change in a sustainable way. Equally importantly, they are part of the tangible cultural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edith Gonzalez.

This is an abstract from the "At the Frontier of Big Climate, Disaster Capitalism, and Endangered Cultural Heritage in Barbuda, Lesser Antilles" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. To quote James Baldwin, “History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Niels Lynnerup. Damgaard Peter. Hansen Henrik. Morten Allentoft. Ashot Magaryan.

Destructive analyses of human remains, i.e. analyses dependent on small biological samples from human, archaeologically found, bone or teeth, have yielded important new data and added to knowledge about our past. Yet, more studies generate even more studies, and the demand is clearly rising for more samples made available. This is especially the case for those collections, which are very unique in terms of geography (Greenland) or time period (Danish mesolithic). At the same time, these unique...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacqueline Cook.

The assumption was made that because the Ancient One was so old, and because the court deemed him not "Native American", the Claimant Tribes had no connection to him, and, therefore, no concern for him. Those assumptions were proven to be incorrect. Evidence demonstrating the Cultural Affiliation of the Ancient One to the Claimant Tribes can be found within the disciplines of indigenous knowledge, geography, biology, archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, folklore, oral tradition, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Laluk. Mae Burnette.

This is an abstract from the "Medicine and Healing in the Americas: Archaeological and Ethnohistorical Perspectives" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ndee perceptions of the past bear directly on the present. Our institutions—lifeways, worldviews and overall continued well-being—are contingent upon our relationship to the land in the form of access, prayer, offerings, power acquisition and overall reciprocity. Intergenerational, ecological and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brenda Guernsey. Chelsey Geralda Armstrong.

The Gitsm’geelm are a galts’ap (community) of the Tsimshian Nation. Today, Kitsumkalum is located at the confluence of the Kalum and Skeena Rivers. There are a number of documented archaeology sites in the core territorial lands, down the Skeena River to the coast where Gitsm’geelm people hold various types of resource use sites. Dałk Gyilakyaw (Robin Town), a large terraced village site replete with evidence of maintained gardens, orchards and distinct archaeological features, is located at the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Pryor.

After 45 years of doing archeology in both an academic and CRM context, I have come to the conclusion that archeology as I have been practicing it simply no longer works for me. For the last 15 years my archeology has been with and for Native Americans, and this collaboration has lead me to many wonderful insights and has enriched the archeology I have come to practice. This new approach is not a rejection of Western science but the blending of the best that we both have to offer. This new...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Capuder.

This is an abstract from the "Cultivating Food, Land, and Communities" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. On September 7, 2020, the Cold Springs Fire ignited on the Colville Indian Reservation during a significant wind event, with flames racing southward 50 miles overnight, crossing the Columbia River and igniting the Pearl Hill Fire. These fires eventually charred a combined 413,673 acres, including some of the last vestiges of Washington’s fragile...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lylliam Posadas Vidales.

This research will address how contemporary archaeology can be used to explore notions of identity, gender expression and self-determination, community belonging, and the value of queer cultural heritage, with an emphasis on the experiences and engagement of queer and trans youth. Queer and trans youth are organizing in their schools and communities to create change that affects their lives and the lives of their friends and families. They are creating new language for queer and trans identities...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicola Terrenato.

This is an abstract from the "Ephemeral Aggregated Settlements: Fluidity, Failure or Resilience?" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The urbanization of western central Italy has had a peculiar role in our intellectual history, starting with its most famous fruit, the "eternal" city of Rome. With evident teleology, the narrative about the emergence of the earliest agglomerations in the early first millennium BCE has taken the form of an ascending...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alyssa Henss.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A major feature of colonization of the Americas was the weaponization of the Christian faith. In colonial Latin America it was distorted and weaponized to push a political agenda of forced conversion upon Indigenous peoples. In the instance of the Maya Caste War, however, this idea was flipped on its head by Indigenous peoples who used their spirituality...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Enrique Rodríguez-Alegría.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology and Material Culture of the Spanish Invasion of Mesoamerica and Forging of New Spain" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Scholars have debated the relationship between ownership of indigenous goods among Spanish colonizers and different economic, cultural, and social variables. Some argue that wealth had a strong impact on consumption patterns, and wealthy colonizers used more European imports and less...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Wattenmaker.

Stratified occupational remains at mounded sites of third millennium Mesopotamia afford a temporal perspective on houses and institutions, as well as fluctuations in their resources. This paper draws on such data to evaluate the ways that houses and institutions accrued wealth and enhanced inequalities. Evidence for the production, circulation and storage of food and craft goods in early Mesopotamia informs about the kinds of resources used for wealth building, the processes through which goods...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark McCoy.

This is an abstract from the "To Have and Have Not: A Progress Report on the Global Dynamics of Wealth Inequality (GINI) Project" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Polynesia has been largely overlooked in previous archaeological assessments of levels of wealth difference despite the pivotal role that research in the region has played in advancing our understanding of inequality in human societies. The Global Dynamics of Wealth Inequality (GINI)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ronald Faulseit. Gary Feinman. Linda Nicholas.

The Late Classic period in the Valley of Oaxaca is marked by shared practices in residential organization, design, the layout of houses, and domestic artifact assemblages both within and between sites throughout the region. This degree of homogeneity allows for cross-site comparison of excavated residences to examine household wealth inequality on a systemic and regional scale. In this paper, we employ different indices to explore multiple lines of evidence (e.g., patio size and other...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sadie Weber. Percy García.

This is an abstract from the "Them and Us: Transmission and Cultural Dynamism in the North of Peru between AD 250 and 950: A Vision since the Recent Northern Investigations" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Located in the Cajamarca Valley, the site of Iscoconga (50 BCE–750 CE) represents one of the few extensively explored domestic contexts of the Cajamarca Archaeological Culture. Excavations at Iscoconga revealed, among many things, that the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Jones. Annabelle Lewis. Gabby Cruz.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We examine a sample of surface-survey-collected ceramics from the Cook Farmstead, which was in operation in Fenner, NY, during the second half of the nineteenth century. After the farm stopped operation around the turn of the century, the house remained in that location until the late 1930s, when it was moved a mile down the road. Since that time, the area...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Mazow.

The existence of weaving swords in the Bronze and Iron Age Levant is hinted at in both the textual and archaeological records. Furthermore, weaving swords as grave goods would fit the generally accepted pattern of weaving tools in association with female burials. Yet when swords have been found in graves with positively identified females, the deceased have been described as ‘warrior women’ or the burial reinterpreted so as to disassociate biological sex and gender. In recognizing the use of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Guarino.

This study explores the potential for sharing of weaponry elements during communal hunts, and the implications of sharing pertaining to the overall technological organization of Agate Basin hunting groups. K-means cluster analysis was utilized to determine whether hafted-area morphologies on Agate Basin points were standardized and displayed properties consistent with expectations we might have if sharing of weaponry elements incorporated into the preparation for a communal hunt. I argue two...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Van Wandelen.

The Camino Real de Tierra Adentro served as the main conduit of transportation in New Mexico from 1598 until the 1880s, with continued regional use afterwards. Situated in strategic locations along this road were stopping points, called parajes, which travelers used to rest. Parajes are usually described as campsites in literature and less attention is given to the other activities that occurred at these sites. In recent reanalysis of collections from Paraje San Diego, a historical paraje near...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angélica María Medrano.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeologies of Contact, Colony, and Resistance" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The weapons used during the Conquest of Mexico have been described in ethnohistorical sources, both in documents written by the soldiers and in codices. The primary weapons described are steel swords, crossbows, cannons and the arquebus. From the Mixton War of 1540-1542, military material culture has been recovered from one of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew D. Turner.

In a myth that provided a charter for Mexica domination of Central Mexico, the deity Huitzilopochtli defeated his foes with a spear-thrower in the form of a fire serpent, or Xiuhcoatl. While Huitzilopochtli was a being unique to the Mexica, the Xiuhcoatl is generally considered to derive from an earlier entity referred to as the Teotihuacan War Serpent. Although the influence of Teotihuacan symbolism on later cultures of Central Mexico is undeniable, the portrayal of solar deities with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marvin Kay. Justin Dubois. Devin Pettigrew.

Experimental replicas of chipped stone sickle blades and both arrowheads and atlatl darts are used to evaluate (1) stages of sickle gloss formation as affected by moisture content of harvested wild grasses and domesticated rye cereal grains and (2) armature impact and penetration wear traces. Herbaceous plant moisture content was calculated along with the total time of harvesting by wooden sickles mounted with stone prismatic blades. High speed digital photography recorded projectile flight...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Genevieve LeMoine.

Miniature carvings recovered from Paleo-Inuit Dorset culture sites (2800-700 BP) across the Canadian Arctic and northwestern Greenland offer tantalizing glimpses of human-animal relations of this prehistoric group. Recently scholars such as Matt Betts and Mari Hardenberg have begun a productive line of inquiry drawing on representational ecology to contextualize and enrich understanding of the social nature of these relationships and the symbolic role of the carvings of polar bears in particular...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paula Ugalde. Calogero Santoro. Eugenia M. Gayo.

Surficial archaeological sites are widespread in arid environments. However, due to the difficulties in numerically dating them, they are usually considered as coarse indicators of past behaviors. Here, we explore the use of lithic weathering to develop local relative chronologies, and to better incorporate these assemblages into archaeological research. We test whether the most weathered artifacts should be considered the oldest; an assumption that has informally served to compare assemblages....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pete Demarte. Samantha Walker. Dan Savage. Melissa Coria.

The settlement sub-project of the Socio-Ecological Entanglement in Tropical Societies (SETS) investigations was executed by engaging a variety of data collection methods in order to assess the development and overall organization of settlements of support populations in a sample of pre-industrial tropical societies from South and Southeast Asia, and Mesoamerica. This presentation explores the diverse types, character, and quality of the data employed in the study, and underscores how, when...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lee Clauss.

This is an abstract from the "Braiding Knowledge: Opportunities and Challenges for Collaborative Approaches to Archaeological Heritage and Conservation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Reflecting on work within a Serrano community and their ancestral territory, in this presentation, I will discuss how community-based conceptions of self and landscape, cultural mores related to the treatment of ancestors and artifacts, and the application of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ileana Micarelli.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The migration of the Longobards to Italy represents one of the most significant events of the Early Middle Ages regarding the socio-political unity of the peninsula. As reported in Historia Langobardorum by Paul the Deacon, in 568 CE, Longobards crossed the Italian boundary to occupy its territories. From this moment, the interaction with the inhabitants...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Phil Geib. Laurie Webster.

This is an abstract from the "Cordage, Yarn, and Associated Paraphernalia" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pre-pottery farmers on the Colorado Plateau of the North American Southwest known as Basketmakers fabricated various artifacts using human hair cordage. The textiles made of this material ranged from intimate personal adornments to utilitarian rabbit nets and load-bearing tumplines. Aside from important functional properties of elasticity and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Gearty. Laurie Webster. Chuck LaRue. Louie Garcia.

This is an abstract from the "Textile Tools and Technologies as Evidence for the Fiber Arts in Precolumbian Societies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Perishable materials that provide information about precontact weaving traditions rarely preserve in the archaeological record. One region where they have survived is the Four Corners region of the North American Southwest, where the arid environment and intensive use of dry caves allow for the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christina Lee.

My paper will look at textiles as marker of identity in the Viking Disapora in Britain and Ireland. While oval brooches and metal work have been given prominent roles in the discussion of identity, the textiles they adorned are often only mentioned in passing. However, techniques and fabrics may tell us something about connections with the homelands, as well as identities which are maintained in the areas of the Viking diaspora. SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Molly Carney.

This is an abstract from the "Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the last 20 years practitioners, activists, and scholars across disciplines have repeatedly pointed out the importance of incorporating other-than-human kin, relationality and reciprocity, and Traditional Ecological Knowledge into scientific practice when working with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Alt.

Fabric is rarely recovered from Mississippian sites, although there have been a few spectacular finds. There are however other lines of evidence that speak to the use and meaning of fabric in the Mississippian world. We have recovered the charred remains, or at times structured ash of what were once bags, mats, baskets or other fabric items during excavations at a few Cahokia related sites in the American Bottom region of Illinois. The Emerald Shrine Center in particular has produced these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Mathiowetz.

West Mexican archaeologists long have noted that around AD 900 the material culture record in this broad region exhibits a pronounced increase in the presence of modeled ceramic spindle whorls, particularly along the Pacific coastal plain of Nayarit and south-central Sinaloa. Although limited evidence of cotton in this region is present in the Classic period, the heightened cotton cultivation and consumption that seemed to accompany the dramatic social transformations in the Aztatlán culture...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paulette Steeves.

This is an abstract from the "Activating Heritage: Encouraging Substantive Practices for a Just Future" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Substantive practices for a just future in archaeology require an acknowledgment of the history of discrimination and marginalization within American archaeology. Equity is not achieved through policies supporting marginalized communities within the discipline. Substantive practices and equity are addressed through...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marisa Lazzari. Marina Sprovieri.

The south-central Andes have a very rich record of long-distance circulation of things, animals, and people, the origins of which can be traced to the earliest hunting-gathering societies that occupied the territory ca 9600BP. We summarize the available information on obsidian circulation resulting from nearly three decades of research in the area, with a particular focus on the Calchaquí valleys area of north western Argentina (NWA) from early sedentary settlements until the Inca...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carrie Todd. Gabrielle Vail.

Ethnohistoric sources point to the importance of textile production in the northern Maya lowlands in the years immediately preceding and following the Spanish conquest. Archaeological evidence of textiles and their creation comes from a variety of sources, including fragments of cloth recovered from the Sacred Cenote at Chichén Itzá; spindle whorls found in domestic and ceremonial contexts at Chichén Itzá, the nearby cave site of Balankanche’, and other archaeological sites in the vicinity; and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sharisse McCafferty. Geoffrey McCafferty.

This is an abstract from the "Cordage, Yarn, and Associated Paraphernalia" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Bribri myth, the Creator God Sibó commanded Sál, the head of the spider clan, to weave cane and thatch to cover the cosmic house, which was built to encapsulate the world order. The house was supported by a central pole with eight surrounding posts representing each of the major clans. In 20+ years of archaeological research in Pacific...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Camilla Mazzucato.

The end of the Çatalhöyük Research Project’s (ÇRP) 25-year mandate and the consequent generation of large and unique datasets produced by the collaboration of excavators and the specialists labs provide an extraordinary opportunity to investigate patterns of early agricultural settled life, social structure and differentiation at an intra-site level through a synthetic approach capable of weaving together different data threads. In this study, a relational framework rooted in models of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Linda Hylkema.

Mission Santa Clara de Asίs, founded in 1777, is one in a chain of twenty-one Spanish Colonial missions established along the coastal region of Alta California. Recent excavations within Santa Clara's Native American Rancherίa have revealed a plethora of objects directly and indirectly associated with textile production and use within the colonial setting. Indigenous practices from ethnic regions of California and Mexico are reflected within the assemblage of sewing/weaving tools, adornments,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kazuyo Nishihara.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Evidence that basket weavers in the Neolithic Japanese archipelago had weaving techniques and knowledge of their adjacent climate and environment has been found in archaeological artifacts dating from approximately 8,000 to 2,300 years ago (Early to Late Jomon Period) across the Japanese archipelago. Fewer than 1,000 basketry pieces, including fragments,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emmalee Eslinger. Sarah A. Kennedy. Karen Durand Cáceres. Alexei Vranich. Arturo Rivera Infante.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Textile production was a major economic sector in the prehispanic Tiwanaku state, for which weavers transformed camelid (llamas, alpacas) fibers and bones into utilitarian and decorative objects. As Tiwanaku pastoral communities dispersed in the wake of state collapse, they relocated to arid coastal regions where their textile industry demonstrates...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Kilpatrick.

Scholars have debated the relevance of variation and standardization in artefact assemblages since the nineteenth century. Variation in artefact assemblages is used for developing typologies and examining temporal changes in artefact form. Standardisation in artefact shape is an important indicator of the cognition of early humans, socio-economic organization, and the emergence of craft specialization. Research into the causal factors of variation include testing humans sensory perceptions,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Raphael Greenberg.

If archaeology is by definition strongly attached to certain academic ideals (or "scholastic fallacies"), to a particular secular, rationalist way of looking at the world, and to ever-proliferating specializations that require scarce technological resources and expertise; and if, moreover, academic symbolic and cultural capital is constantly and increasingly measured by membership in the correct status groups and by access to these scarce resources, can academic initiation of, or even...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Martin Menz.

The transition to Weeden Island mortuary and ceramic expressions along the Florida Gulf Coast also coincided with a shift in settlement. During this interval, around A.D. 600-750, earlier Swift Creek shell rings were abandoned and Weeden Island rings established nearby. In many cases, these Weeden Island shell rings were substantially larger than their predecessors, however, some anomalously small, isolated Weeden Island rings have also been recorded, such as the Old Creek Shell Ring (8Wa90) in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Scharf.

With construction beginning about 3,700 years ago, Poverty Point (16WC5) in northeast Louisiana is one of the earliest and largest sites of its kind in the United States. What were conditions like when people began constructing the mounds? What kind of environment did they live in? How did this change (or not change) over time? This poster presents lithological and palynological evidence covering the period before, during, and after prehistoric occupation at this site. Comparing and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Venicia Slotten. David Lentz.

Our understanding of the diet, subsistence, and agricultural practices of ancient Maya commoners has been remarkably enhanced thanks to many years of archaeological investigations at Cerén led by Payson Sheets. The recovery of paleoethnobotanical remains at the site has revealed not only the storage of various well-preserved foodstuffs, but also extensive house gardens and agricultural fields filled with lasting impressions and carbonized remains of a diverse set of plant species including...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gonen Sharon. Maya Oron. Rebecca Biton. Rivka Rabinovich. Steffen Mischke.

Eight excavation seasons (2007-2014) at the Mousterian site of Nahal ‎Mahanyeem Outlet (NMO) on the banks of the Upper Jordan River offer a ‎glimpse into the life ways of MP people during a hunting expedition in the ‎Upper Galilee. This open-air site, OSL dated to ca. 60ky BP, is interpreted as ‎recording a series of short-term hunting events. The NMO horizons, with ‎their small number of lithic artifacts, unique typological composition and ‎evidence for task specific hunting and butchering...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mavis Greer. John Greer.

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. Setting and geographic context have always been integral to rock art analysis and are important in combination with symbolic content for determining site function. The Weeksville Pictographs in western Montana exemplify intentional selection of a location for pre- and postcontact rock art by both Natives and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrea Picin. Katarzyna Kerneder-Gubala. Damian Stefanski. Sahra Talamo.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Weichselian (MIS 5d–MIS 3), the climatic deteriorations and the rapid decrease of the temperatures caused significant difficulties for Neanderthal groups that had to cope with an increased seasonality of resources and faunal turnover. Central European Neanderthals reacted to these new ecological conditions by designing a toolkit composed of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandra Parsons. Rochelle Marrinan. Margo Schwadron.

In 1968, a dredging project alongside the Anhinga Trail in Taylor Slough, Florida unearthed an unusually large collection of worked bone objects. Peat deposits in the slough afforded excellent preservation conditions – some of the bone tools still contain wooden shafts and pitch. Sometime after its discovery, the collection was split between different institutions and lost. This important collection has recently been relocated and rejoined and is described in this paper. The assemblage consists...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa Cipolla. Daryl Basarte. Michael Zimmerman. Anna Coon. Bryanda Owen.

This is an abstract from the "Digitizing Archaeological Practice: Education and Outreach in the Archaeogaming Subdiscipline" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The emergent field of archaeogaming explores how people interact with gaming worlds. In this poster, we take a look at a subset of gaming, role-playing games (RPGs), and their potential for teaching archaeological concepts and critical thinking. We present three case studies of RPGs with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa Matisoo-Smith.

Recent reports of ancient DNA recovery from samples that are 10s if not 100s of thousands of years old attest to the amazing developments in aDNA technology in recent years. Unfortunately, most aDNA from the Pacific Islands is poorly preserved and highly degraded. Despite the relatively short history of settlement on many Pacific Islands, ancient DNA is often difficult, if not impossible, to obtain from archaeological samples recovered from Pacific sites. Still, we are able to recover aDNA...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Gilmore. Jonathan Dombrosky. Lisa Nagaoka. Steve Wolverton.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Zooarchaeological Methods" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Taxonomic identification is a key goal of faunal analysis, but few controls are in place to ensure data quality. Comparative collections and identification guides offer valuable information; however, the validity of faunal identification can be questioned without assessing each feature’s utility for differentiating taxa. Analysis of biometric...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mischa Johns. Carl Halbirt.

Since the City of St. Augustine's Archaeological Preservation Ordinance was enacted in 1986 more than 200 wells have been excavated. This presentation takes a look at some of the styles and circumstances of their construction and examines the the distribution of these various styles across the city's archaeological zones during the city's centuries of development. Through the varieties of well construction used over the centuries we hope to glean insight into the path that the city has taken...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gemma-Jayne Hudgell. Ellen Cowie. Robert Bartone.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Vermont Route 78 follows the Missisquoi River into its floodplain and out to Lake Champlain, and in doing so crosses a rich archaeological landscape. Since 1999, archaeological excavations have been undertaken in advance of safety upgrades to this major east-west route, and although necessarily a narrow slice along the road corridor, the results document...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joanna Hambly.

Former sea caves at East Wemyss in Scotland are unique because of the carvings within them. These include around 40 surviving Pictish (5th-9th century AD) symbols and animal representations; a possible Viking boat; early Christian crosses; and 19th century monograms and graffiti related to local New Year rituals. Located in a former coal mining area, today you are far more likely to read bad news stories about the impact of vandalism, structural instability and coastal erosion upon this unique...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Aldenderfer. Leslie Aiello.

Over the past 15 years the Wenner-Gren Foundation has received approximately 3,000 applications for research funding from archaeologists (students and established scholars) and have funded just under 500 of these requests (success rate = 15-16%; grand total of funds awarded = $8,050,000). The Foundation does not fundraise and thus the amount we can award each year is dependent on the financial markets. A particular challenge is to maintain and grow the spending power of the endowment, while...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Roger Colten. Susan deFrance. Michelle LeFebvre. Brian Worthington.

The Caribbean islands had limited endemic terrestrial fauna and they lacked any of the New World domesticated animals until fairly late in prehistory. Given the depauperate terrestrial fauna of these islands the early Native American inhabitants relied on marine resources and endemic rodents for a significant proportion of the animals in their diet. It has been argued that rodents from the family Capromyidae, various species of hutia, were managed and perhaps domesticated in the Caribbean. In...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shelby Medina. Jessica Rodriguez. Paul Gerard. René Vellanoweth.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Danielson Ranch (CA-VEN-395) is a multi-component site containing both significant prehistoric shell midden deposits and a historical ranch complex. CA-VEN-395 consists of five discrete loci dated to between 2690 and 860 cal BP, with the most recent occupation as late as 290-60 cal BP. Excavation revealed vertebrate faunal remains representing specimens from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Effrosyni Roditi. Britt Starkovich.

This is an abstract from the "Peninsular Southern Europe Refugia during the Middle Paleolithic" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Compared to other parts of Eurasia, the southern Balkan Peninsula had a relatively stable climate during the Late Pleistocene. Zooarchaeological materials from the Asprochaliko Rockshelter in northwestern Greece provide evidence for hominin subsistence strategies in the Middle and Upper Paleolithic. In this study, we...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Yerkes.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Central and SE Europe from 5500-4000 cal. B.C.E., during the Neolithic (N) and Early Copper Age (ECA), and in Eastern North America during the Late Prehistoric (LP) period (900-1650 A.C.E.), there were similar socioeconomic changes in agricultural societies. Larger settlements with food storage were established, but interaction and exchange between groups...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Hays. Richard Weinstein. Steve Tomka. Robert Tykot.

This is an abstract from the "*SE Not Your Father’s Poverty Point: Rewriting Old Narratives through New Research" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation discusses the preliminary results of our study concerning fiber-tempered sherds from six loci in the Southeast in order to determine if any of the fiber-tempered pottery found at Claiborne, a Poverty Point culture site in coastal Mississippi, were made locally or imported. We analyzed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Perry Gnivecki. Mary Jane Berman.

"Were the Lucayans a creole society?" Can creolization be inferred from Lucayan material culture during the Early and Late Lucayan Periods? Through the examination of ceramics and other remains, such as duhos and shell and stone artifacts, we will attempt to determine whether this was the case. Can Lucayan cultural expressions, unique to the Bahama archipelago, be viewed as byproducts of the processes of creolization, and if so, why?

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sheila Jon Hauser.

Were the Wichita consuming Ilex vomitoria in a ritual context while living in the Arkansas River Basin in Kansas? Prior to moving into the Arkansas river basin the Caddoan speaking tribes of Wichita were located further south in Oklahoma and Texas where Ilex vomitoria grows naturally and was consumed, however it is not a plant that naturally thrives in Kansas. To determine if there is evidence of Ilex vomitoria use FTIR Testing was performed on pottery shreds around one small vessel found at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Faith Flores. Brian M. Kemp. Marc Levine.

This is an abstract from the "Current Research on Turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) Domestication, Husbandry and Management in North America and Beyond" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo) were domesticated by Basketmaker peoples in the American Southwest and independently by prehispanic Mesoamerican groups, yet relatively little is known about the nature and origin of ancient Oklahoma turkeys. In this project, we analyze...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gerardo Gutiérrez. Mary E. Pye.

In this paper, we address the role of leaders and their communities during the performance of ceremonies associated with rain petition in a network of caves located in the Mixtec-Tlapanec-Nahua region of Eastern Guerrero. We present newly discovered archaeological evidence in the caves of Pozo de Muerto, Casa de la Lluvia, Cauadzidziqui, Juxtlahuaca and Gobernadores de Techan, as well as ethnographic analogy to shed new light on the use of caves as arenas of ritual and political performance from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ben Hammer. James M. Potter. Terry Knight. Lynn Hartman.

The Ute Mountain Reservation in the Four-corners region of the American Southwest contains some of the most spectacular and numerous prehistoric archaeological sites containing standing architecture in the country. Combining research and preservation efforts at these sites is a priority of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribal Historic Preservation Office. The West Mancos Project focused on three sites along the Mancos River containing the remnants of circular towers. Preservation and research efforts...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carol Gonzalez-Velez.

Cultures in the Intermediate Area served as the catalyst for the potential connections that exist between north and south. Maritime trading routes were the most probable form of contact and dissemination of information and styles. Iconographic evidence points to contact between various people from Chupícuaro to San Agustin Their styles are but a few of the missing links for the interaction between cultures from north and south. SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Diane Lister. Huw Jones. Hugo Oliveira. James Cockram. Martin Jones.

By the end of the 2nd millennium BC, the South-west Asian crops wheat (Triticum spp.) and barley (Hordeum vulgare) are being cultivated in much of Central, South and East Asia. How did these crops spread from west to east? Can we find evidence of the routes of spread through the archaeogenetic analysis of these South-west Asian cereals? We describe our analyses of Eurasian barley and wheat using microsatellite and Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs); this data is enabling us to elucidate...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Travis Jones. Todd Kristensen. Jeff Speakman.

In January of 2015, researchers from the Royal Alberta Museum, Canada, and the University of Georgia Center for Applied Isotope Studies collaborated on one of the largest geochemical analyses of archaeological obsidian via portable X-Ray Fluorescence (pXRF) to date in western Canada, a region previously lacking large scale obsidian XRF analysis. This study is part of a larger project to synthesize obsidian use in the Eastern Rocky Mountains. The Canadian sample consists of approximately 750...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bradley Ensor.

The Mesoamerican Gulf Coast figures prominently in grand schemes of interregional population interactions from Olmec to contact eras. However, most models of exchange, migrations, or identities rely on samples from Southern Veracruz, the Usumacinta, and the southern Isthmus without considering the vast Chontalpa in-between. This paper synthesizes new and old data on sites, intrasite spatial organization, and material culture from the Mezcalapa Delta for a synopsis on prehispanic settlement...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Judith Habicht-Mauche. Suzanne Eckert.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology, Cultural Heritage, and Public Education at Tijeras Pueblo, New Mexico" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Non-local glaze-painted pottery types, such as Heshotautla and Kwakina polychromes, comprise more than 20% of the decorated ceramic assemblage at Tijeras Pueblo (LA581). Despite Tijeras Pueblo’s location at the eastern edge of the Albuquerque basin in the central Rio Grande region, these pottery types...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kimberly Smith.

This is an abstract from the "Changes in the Land: Archaeological Data from the Northeast" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Hoosac Tunnel is a 7.6 km long railroad tunnel within Hoosac Mountain located in northwestern Massachusetts, extending between the towns of Florida and North Adams. The project was deemed of utmost value to encourage efficient trade between opposite sides of the Hudson River, which is why, regardless of its obstacles, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leigh Marymor. Amy Marymor.

A particularly enigmatic form of rock art referred to as "Western Message Petroglyphs" has been identified at thirty locations in the American West scattered between no fewer than eight western states. Relying on standard rock art research approaches, this body of work is assigned to the historic mining boom years of the mid to late nineteenth century based on geographic distribution, symbol typology, and style analysis. A significant number of the sites are associated with the Mormon Trail and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Beekman.

The Epiclassic has been described as a major watershed in Mesoamerican prehistory, but in different or even contradictory ways. The period has been claimed to usher in a shift from prestige to mercantile economies, religious to military political systems, territorial states to city-states, parochial to international art styles, and in the case of western Mexico, from non-Mesoamerican to Mesoamerican society. These metanarratives have privileged formal characteristics, which are in any case found...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Manuel San Roman. Omar Reyes. Javier Cárcamo. Jimena Torres.

The Chonos archipelago (43°50’-46°50’S) at the western Patagonian channels of Chile was peopled by marine hunter gatherers known as Chonos. Archaeological occupation spans from 6260 cal years BP unto the 18th century. Recently the archaeological record has been described and characterized through surveys, test pits and systematic excavations in different parts of the region. This work presents a first synthesis of faunal resource exploitation for a range of islands, considering archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dennis Jenkins.

Recent research into the chronology and character of Western Stemmed Tradition occupations at the Paisley and Connley Caves provides new insight into the settlement-subsistence patterns and social organization of the period >13,000 to 9000 cal. BP. Human populations may have been larger, more social, and territorially constrained than previously envisioned. Long distance movement of obsidian artifacts across the landscape probably reflect brief population agglomerations (festivals) scheduled to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jon Erlandson.

This is an abstract from the "Current Perspectives on the Western Stemmed Tradition-Clovis Debate in the Far West" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Paleocoastal sites on California's Northern Channel Islands have produced hundreds of stemmed points, crescents, foliate points or knives, and other bifaces dated between ~12,250 and 8200 years ago. Although uniquely maritime in nature, these island Paleocoastal assemblages are clearly related to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kenneth Reid. Franklin Foit, Jr..

Recent reviews of the radiocarbon record for Western Stemmed components on the Columbia Plateau suggest a post-Clovis age for this tradition. Controversies over the timing question are intensified by highly selective frames of references for mapping regional patterns of site distribution. Some sites are highlighted, other relevant sites ignored, and still others find their way into the debate through uncritical confirmation bias. This paper focuses on the latter confusion, examining the use of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katelyn McDonough.

This is an abstract from the "Current Perspectives on the Western Stemmed Tradition-Clovis Debate in the Far West" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent excavations at the Paisley and Connley Caves have uncovered coeval Younger Dryas occupations with different but complementary Western Stemmed Tradition artifact assemblages. Whereas the perishable artifact assemblage at Paisley Caves provides important health and subsistence data, the large lithic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Derek Reaux.

This is an abstract from the "Far West Paleoindian Archaeology: Papers from the Next Generation" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Source provenance analyses have long featured prominently in Great Basin Paleoindian archaeology. Such research has primarily focused on reconstructing Paleoindian settlement/subsistence strategies, territoriality, and socioeconomic interactions by sourcing obsidian artifacts from sites and mapping their geographic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Geoffrey Smith. Derek Reaux.

Western Stemmed Tradition (WST) projectile points mark Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene occupations in the Great Basin. Considerable morphological variability exists among WST points and over the years researchers have come to recognize various types (e.g., Cougar Mountain, Haskett, Parman, and Windust). Because most substantial WST sites are near-surface scatters that likely represent palimpsests of multiple occupations, it remains unclear whether this variability reflects tools used during...