Society for American Archaeology

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Rosencrance.

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. There is compelling evidence that people throughout the Americas adapted to the cold Younger Dryas winters by manufacturing tight-fitting, sewn clothing. Ethnographic observations of Arctic peoples indicate that they harvested hide animals and manufactured clothing during residential aggregation events in the fall....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tim Kerig.

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. Neolithic and Bronze Age wet preserved settlements are among the most fascinating sites of European prehistory. The circum-alpine sites (“pile-dwellings”) in particular attracted attention early on: because of their excellent preservation, they promised an immediate interpretative access...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Keith Prufer. Megan Walsh. Nadia Neff. Amy Thompson. Douglas Kennett.

This is an abstract from the "2023 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Timothy Beach Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent research in the American neotropics suggests that cultivation of plants for food began early in the Middle Holocene (ca. 7500 BP) and continued for millennia prior to the adoption of surplus agricultural production of domesticated staple foods by 5000 BP in South America and 4000 BP in the Maya lowlands. Data...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Madeleine McLeester. Jesse Casana. David Overstreet. David Grignon.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Wetlands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Today, the dense forests of the northern Great Lakes seem an unlikely place for expansive ancestral Native American agricultural fields, especially ones dedicated to sun-loving crops, like maize. The short growing season in these northern climes, dense forest, alternative staples like wild rice, and past settlement history all would suggest a limited...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Farquhar. Arlene Rosen. Sarantuya Dalantai. Tserendagva Yadmaa.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Wetlands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Paleoclimate studies across northeast Asia document a pronounced drying and cooling trend across desert and desert-steppe environments around 6,000 years ago, intensifying between 4500 and 4000 BP. While conditions led to the deterioration of lake and wetland habitats, past archaeological research based on museum collections and a limited number of excavated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Martin Menz.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Wetlands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Most prominent Woodland period ceremonial centers along the Gulf Coast are located near wetlands, which provided access to a wide variety of resources for the hunter-fisher-gatherer populations who built them. Researchers investigating these sites often suggest that these rich environments created the conditions for increasingly settled lifeways, complex...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leslie Aragon.

It has long been thought that large Hohokam villages, once established, were long-lived and fixed in a single location. La Villa, a pre-Classic Hohokam village on Canal System 2, was one of the largest in the area. It has roots that stretch as far back as the Red Mountain phase and had achieved village status by Vahki times. The village continued to grow through the Pioneer Period, and much of the Colonial Period. Toward the end of the Colonial however, we see a sharp drop-off in both ceramics...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sandy Bardsley. Jamie Paxton.

This is an abstract from the "Experimental Pedagogies: Teaching through Experimental Archaeology Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For five years, we have cotaught an undergraduate Introduction to Experimental Archaeology course under the auspices of the history department at a small university. In this paper, we examine the ways in which history and experimental archaeology share traditions of scholarship, learning objectives, and appeal to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Campbell. William Damitio. Ryan Desrosiers.

In faunal analysis, rare taxa can potentially provide valuable biogeographic or socioeconomic information, but are inherently difficult to interpret and to integrate with quantitative measures. Working with extremely large assemblages highlights these issues. Among the half million specimens of shell identified from the Tse-Whitzen village site are more than 20 taxa represented by less than 30 specimens. There is no single explanation for the presence of taxa in very low numbers, and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Groat.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study uses technological investment thinking and experimental archaeology to examine decision of the socially complex hunter-gatherers of the Kodiak Archipelago to adopt ceramics, ca. 500 cal BP. This decision is puzzling for two reasons: a) ceramic adoption on Kodiak lags centuries behind its adoption on the adjacent mainland, and b) evidence of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erica Hill.

The use of personal amulets appears to have been a common practice among northern hunting peoples of Alaska, Canada, and Greenland. Many of these amulets were intended to facilitate individual human relations with sea mammals. Cooperative whaling, however, required the development of an amulet that mediated group relations with prey. This paper describes a set of Alaska Eskimo whaling "charms" dated to the late 19th century and identified in museum collections from across the United States. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Warner. Katrina Eichner. Renae Campbell.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2019, the University of Idaho offered a field school in an alternative way – by having the field school incorporated into the regular academic year curriculum. With the cooperation of our registrar the class was folded into the regular fall semester class schedule. Four years later we did it again, resulting in 35 students enrolling in an eight week...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Linnea Baldner. Jessica Weinmeister. Daniel Hampson. Ava Godhardt. David Hyde.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the 2023 field season, excavations uncovered evidence for ritual activities at Group M of the Medicinal Trail Hinterland Community, an ancient Maya farming village in northwestern Belize, near the political center of La Milpa. Initial survey and brief excavations from the 2017 field season indicated the group was atypical of architectural groups...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cece Saunders.

How did man, horse and wagon traverse the muck and marshes that so often surrounded America’s earliest coastal towns? Without the benefit of iron, steel, and concrete, the 18th century road builder could span muddy stretches with a corduroy road. This road type was made by placing whole, sand-covered logs perpendicular to the direction of the road in low or swampy areas. The corduroy road was an essential technique for establishing networks between communities and critical resources. The Ash...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Madonna Moss.

This is an abstract from the "Zooarchaeology and Technology: Case Studies and Applications" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Fisheries are of fundamental importance to Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest of North America today and in the past. This presentation summarizes what ancient DNA has revealed/is revealing about Indigenous use of salmon, herring, and rockfish from different archaeological contexts along the Northwest Coast. In the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eugenia Ibarra.

Archaeologist Francisco Corrales and myself recently undertook the study of the exploitation of natural resources and their exchange in the areas close to Juan Vázquez de Coronado´s route in 1564, traced from the Pacific coast to the Caribbean in Southeastern and Southwestern Costa Rica. This presentation aims to underline how resources of the different altitudes on both slopes formed an important part of the various activities carried out by the inhabitants during the 16th. century and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Madeline Mackie.

There has long been a debate about the frequency of megafauna hunting or dismemberment by early Paleoindians in North America. Proposed megafauna kill sites are heavily scrutinized. Sites which contain limited artifacts, but no projectile points are often discounted or classified as ‘possible’ kill sites due to their limited cultural materials. This begs the question, just how likely (or unlikely) are artifacts to be accidentally associated with megafauna remains? Using a computer model, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carly Ameen. Ardern Hulme-Beaman. Allowen Evin. Greger Larson. Keith Dobney.

Tooth crowding is one of several criteria used for the identification of domestic animals in archaeological contexts, and is used frequently in dog domestication studies to support claims of early Palaeolithic domesticates. Studies of crowding have varied in their quantitative approaches, and can be improved by more robust statistical testing and the incorporation of more specimens with secure wild or domestic identifications. Here we present a landmark-based method for analyzing tooth crowding,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Ledger. Veronique Forbes.

Anthropological studies of western Alaska consistently remark upon the substantial knowledge of the regional flora by local Eskimo groups. Despite the attritional impact of Western lifestyles on traditional ecological knowledge, the indigenous peoples of the region maintain a rich appreciation of the plant resources available in their local environment. Yet, archaeobotanical analyses from the region remain scarce and there rests a general opinion that plants did not play an important role in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Randall McGuire.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Immigration and Refugee Resettlement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The authors in this session use archaeological methods to analyze refugees and forced migrations. We seek to better understand the material ramifications of migration in the lives of individuals. We wish to understand the tangible, material consequences of migration at a human scale. The papers in the session spring from historical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yongshan He. Chen Shen.

One major shift in mortuary practices that happened over the Han dynasty (202 BCE-220 CE) China, from burying bronze/pottery vessels to burying miniaturized architectural models, was usually explained as a result of the contemporary ideology of "treating the dead as alive", or as a reflection of the social-economic transformation. While these previous interpretations invariably presumed that artifacts were passive representations and projections of ideological/social conditions of their...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicole Herzog. Anne Thomas.

Starches preserved on prehistoric artifacts including ceramics, ground stone and other lithic tools have assisted archaeologists in better understanding the relationships between technologies and food products, food processing, activity areas and tool function. However, little research has been done to identify differential starch preservation across these artifact types. In order to test whether starch preservation is uniform across tool types, and to examine whether starch records are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leslie Aragon. Kate Vaughn.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ballcourts have come to represent the pre-Classic Hohokam more than any other architectural or artifactual class. These sizeable basin-shaped structures with earthen embankments were built at most of the large villages throughout southern and central Arizona between AD 750 and 1080. People watching or participating in the ballgame probably came together from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bruce Winterhalder. Eugène Morin. Douglas Bird. Rebecca Bliege Bird.

This is an abstract from the "Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the mid-1970s the biologist D. Griffiths proposed that body size determines prey return rates and, citing the diet breadth model, D. S. Wilson stated that the lowest-ranked prey type harvested reveals the general efficiency of the foraging economy. Archaeologists, beginning with Bayham and Anderson, quickly made use of these proposals, initiating a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tineke Van Zandt. Helen O'Brien. Timothy Watkins.

This is an abstract from the "Community Matters: Enhancing Student Learning Opportunities through the Development of Community Partnerships" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Burro Creek/Pine Creek archaeological survey northwest of Prescott, Arizona involved partnerships between Pima Community College and the BLM and private landowners in the area from 2003 to the present. When the survey began, the region was poorly known and only two sites...

DOCUMENT Citation Only A. Gwynn Henderson. Linda S. Levstik.

Twenty-five years from now, as America’s educators put into place yet another "new" set of standards, and classroom teachers endure yet another pedagogical adjustment, will archaeology be at the table, included as an appendix, or invisible? Predicting the future is risky business, but the intrigue of the past never fails to engage learners. It’s our responsibility as educators to nurture that engagement and channel it toward understanding. Drawing from the preliminary results of a piloting...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Diana Moreiras Reynaga.

This poster introduces my doctoral research project which entails a stable isotope analysis of human sacrificial subjects recovered from the Aztec capital city of Tenochtitlan and its sister city Tlatelolco (present-day Mexico City) dating to the Late Postclassic period (A.D. 1400 — 1519). The collections include adult and subadult sacrificed individuals from the Templo Mayor and Templo R. This research focuses on expanding our knowledge about dietary and mobility patterns of sacrificial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Teresita Majewski. Kenneth Aitchison.

SAA has an ambition to investigate the demographics of the archaeological profession in the Americas, looking to bring together knowledge and advice on how the profession of archaeology (in cultural resource management, academic, government, museum, self-employed, and other contexts) is structured throughout North, South, Central America, and the Caribbean. SAA has now carried out the first step toward this goal, which has been to carry out a targeted pilot project, gathering data on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Derek Hamilton. Kerry Sayle. Colin Haselgrove. Gordon Cook.

The Middle Iron Age in southern central Britain (c. 300–150 cal BC) is a period that is often seen as becoming regionally inward-looking. A primary focus of the mixed agriculturalists is on building and maintaining massive hillforts. There is very little long-distance exchange or trade noted in the archaeological record, and the metalwork at the time takes on insular forms (e.g. involuted brooches) that separate it from the Continental connections observable in both the Early and Late Iron...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Golitko.

This is an abstract from the "People and Space: Defining Communities and Neighborhoods with Social Network Analysis" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Network analysis has become increasingly common within archaeological practice during the last decade, yet little consensus exists as to what networks based on material culture actually reveal about ancient social life. Archaeologists have variably interpreted communities or cliques derived from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Natalia Donner. Alejandro Arteaga Saucedo. Kaz van Dijk. Alexander Geurds.

The Proyecto Arqueológico Centro de Nicaragua (PACEN), directed by Alexander Geurds, has recently conducted archaeological research in Chontales, Central Nicaragua. The main focuses of the study include the identification of the different types of settlements, understanding site and mound morphologies, as well as re-defining the regional pottery sequence. Therefore, the authors of this paper carried out a systematic full-coverage high intensity survey of a 52 square kilometer area, a complete...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Véronique Marengère. Kevin P. Smith. James Woollett.

This is an abstract from the "Social Archaeology in the North and North Atlantic (SANNA 3.0): Investigating the Social Lives of Northern Things" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the ninth and tenth centuries CE, a very distinctive and unique site was established inside the cave of Surtshellir. This lava tube was reputed to be the home of the mythological fire giant, Surtur and has been studied over the course of several years by a team led by the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katie Richards. Lindsay Johansson.

The meaning of the term Fremont has been heavily debated for almost as long as it has existed. For over half of a century many archaeologists have argued that the term is only useful in that it encapsulates the highly variable practices of a region. Others have argued that defining Fremont is impossible and even unproductive. We disagree with these assertions. We believe that there are sufficient similarities in material culture and social organization across the Fremont region to suggest that a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Richards-Rissetto.

Until recently, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have held center stage in the archaeologist’s geospatial toolkit. GIS has moved archaeologists beyond the map—but into what? In the early years, criticisms voicing GIS as environmentally-deterministic were abundant. In the ensuing years what methods and tool have archaeologists used to overcome these criticisms? How successful have we been? What shortcomings continue? New geospatial technologies such as airborne lidar and aerial photogrammetry...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hideyuki Nishizawa.

Dramatic culture change occurred in the Central Andes at the onset of the Middle Horizon (MH) (AD 500-1000). During this period, a state society emerged in the Ayacucho Valley and expanded across Peru. Even before the emergence of this state, however, culture contact of the Ayacucho heartland had already started with some remote regions in the late part of the Early Intermediate Period (EIP). This far-reaching contact would have gradually been intensified toward the beginning of the MH. Indeed,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Knut Bretzke.

The southern route for human dispersal out of Africa has moved from being a hypothetical idea to being considered a plausible path of human expansion. Fundamental for this development is the intensified field work in Arabia over the past decade. The stratified Paleolithic assemblages from Jebel Faya in the Emirate of Sharjah, U.A.E. play a critical role in this context. Given that Jebel Faya is separated from the African coast of the Red Sea by about 2000 km the question arise what Jebel Faya...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandria Halmbacher.

Around A.D. 650 the Loma Caldera eruption entombed the Classic Period Maya village of Cerén in 4-6 meters of volcanic ash. This resulted in the exceptional preservation of structures, artifacts and botanical remains, providing archaeologists with a unique opportunity to study the household complexes and their related activities. However, much of the previous research concerning the households at Cerén has primarily focused on its economic activities. As a result, archaeologists have yet to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bianca Gentil.

This study aims to identify patterns of resilience by distinguishing diachronic socio-economic processes through the measurement of change and continuity of multi-level sites in the Puebla-Tlaxcala valley. This will be done via demographic, political, and economic markers during the Classic-Postclassic transition. This project focuses on identifying specific processes that lead towards socio-economic resilience during times of stress. Based upon surveys conducted in the 1960s and 70s, presented...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brandon McIntosh.

This paper documents the environmental conditions of the Tularosa Basin/Hueco Bolson during the Late Formative Period in the Jornada Mogollon Region of the U.S. Southwest by comparing stable carbon isotope values of black-tailed jackrabbits (Lepus californicus) from archaeological site LA 12361 to modern jackrabbits in southern New Mexico and west Texas. Recent research by Stephen Smith and his collaborators provides evidence that carbon isotope values of jackrabbit bone collagen produce an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Conard. Manuel Will.

This is an abstract from the "Establishing the Science of Paleolithic Archaeology: The Legacy of Harold Dibble (1951–2018) Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. After over a decade of excavation and analysis at the Middle Stone Age site of Sibhudu in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, the team from the University of Tübingen has established a uniquely complete and well-documented record of cultural change from the end or the Middle Pleistocene until...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Phillips. Avery Shawler. Chloe Winkler.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The authors analyzed scat collected from gray wolf (Canis lupus) packs in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem from 2019 – 2021. Faunal remains in the scat were identified to element, using comparative collections from the Draper Museum of Natural History, and assessed for surface modification and abrasion. This information was supplemented by species...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cosimo Sgarlata.

My dissertation research at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York which I completed in 2009 involved survey of West Rock Ridge, one of many Triassic "trap-rock" ridges in Connecticut's Central Valley. These are very rugged Triassic landforms made entirely of basalt or diabase that rise like long linear spines above Connecticut's otherwise level and fertile Central Valley. The question of the research was whether data from this new and untested setting could contribute new...

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

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. Between 1566 and 1568, expeditions led by Captain Juan Pardo sought to establish permanent Spanish colonial towns and forts along an overland route connecting Santa Elena, the capital of La Florida, in coastal South Carolina, with New Spain and the rich silver mines near Zacatecas, Mexico. Written accounts chronicle the movements of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marc Levine. Alex Badillo.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite increasing scholarly interest in the role of plazas in prehispanic Mesoamerica, we still have a relatively incomplete understanding of what actually occurred in such places. In this paper, we address this vexing question for the Main Plaza at Monte Albán in Oaxaca, Mexico. Our study draws on data from recent fieldwork on the Main Plaza, including...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alecia Schrenk.

This is an abstract from the "Systems of Care in Times of Violence" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A different model of care is required for trauma resulting from non-lethal violence. In the prehistoric Midwest, raiding and warfare were endemic, making trauma from non-lethal violence a part of everyday life. As such, the peoples living in this region would have needed a model of care specifically designed to treat individuals suffering from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aimée Carbaugh. Krystiana Krupa. Eve Hargrave.

This is an abstract from the "Human Remains in the Marketplace and Beyond: Myths and Realities of Monitoring, Grappling With, and Anthropologizing the Illicit Trade in a Post-Harvard World" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While much of the recent discussion around the trafficking and illicit trade of human remains focuses on the black market and sales utilizing sites such as eBay or various social media platforms, we examine the historical practice...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fernando Armstrong-Fumero.

This is an abstract from the "The Conceptual and Ethical Limits of Heritage in Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The term “artifactual surface” refers to a particular confluence of law and materiality. Protections that are afforded to objects of tangible cultural heritage assume that these objects should indefinitely retain the same physical form that they possessed at the time that that came under official protection. This assumption...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Douglas Ross.

According to this session’s organizers there is no dominant Overseas Chinese narrative, but rather one characterized by diversity. They perceive this diversity as a strength and seek to highlight the range of both Chinese experiences and recent archaeological approaches to their lives. Papers address topics ranging from lifeways of urban merchants to healthcare practices of rural railroad workers, consumer habits of Chinatown residents, and the role of burned sites in creating highly politicized...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tristan Harrenstein.

Part of the Florida Public Archaeology Network’s mission is to work with local governments to both protect archaeological sites and to ensure that these communities receive the benefits related to their preservation. However, many of the smaller communities in Florida are unaware of the opportunities available for state and federal assistance in preserving their heritage. This paper details a new project designed to educate local governments and historical societies about the benefits and legal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sally Crawford.

It has been incredibly difficult to identify children's material culture in the archaeological record using the standard parameters of the last century - is it miniature? does it look like a (modern) toy? was it found actually buried with an actual child? But recent developments in the theory of the archaeology of childhood, particularly in relation to children's toys, play spaces and activities, offer new ways of asking questions of objects to reconsider whether they might be child-related,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Meltzer.

In their 2012 paper, 'The restaurant at the end of the universe,' O’Connell and Allen developed a speculative and far-reaching model for the colonization of Sahul, one that sees initial populations as small, spatially concentrated in scattered ‘sweet’ spots, and which exhibited only occasional growth spurts and geographic expansion along extant coastlines. Although granting the obvious differences between the environmental stage and historical conditions under which the Pleistocene colonization...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Geoffrey Taylor.

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. Preliminary investigation into the use of plants at the site of Huari from the 2017 field season of the Programa Arqueológico Prehistoria Urbana de Huari resulted in new information placing the common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) as a central component of the daily meal for those living in Patipampa in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dana Bardolph.

This is an abstract from the "Presidential Session: What Is at Stake? The Impacts of Inequity and Harassment on the Practice of Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent years have witnessed a sea change in anthropological discourse concerning how gender bias and a lack of diversity has affected the work that archaeologists produce, interest that dovetails with current concerns about equity and safety issues. More broadly, Black,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Brunso. Julia Prince-Buitenhuys. David Witt.

This is an abstract from the "Transformations in Professional Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. How did the current regulatory archaeology system form? What lessons can we learn from how the system was set up? What do these past accounts say about the future of cultural resource management? As part of a historical review stemming from the SAA Government Affairs Committee's survey regarding the Secretary of the Interior's Standards and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessi Halligan.

This is an abstract from the "Liquid Landscapes: Recent Developments in Submerged Landscape Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Aucilla River basin in northwestern Florida contains 92 recorded sites with components predating 9000 cal BP, making it an excellent area in which to examine terminal Pleistocene and early Holocene landscape use. More importantly, some of these sites, all drowned terrestrial localities, contain strata with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christina Giovas.

This is an abstract from the "The Intangible Dimensions of Food in the Caribbean Ancient and Recent Past" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite occupying the Caribbean since ca. 6500-6000 BP, Amerindians did not introduce continental animals to the islands until approximately 2000 years ago. In most cases, non-native taxa, while consumed, did not rival local marine resources in dietary importance; yet there is limited evidence to support an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shannon Novak.

This is an abstract from the "The Future of Bioarchaeology in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. To know and to name bodies and their parts, bioarchaeologists rely on intimate encounters with material traces. At times, they closely examine the "same" objects, yet see quite different things. Understanding such difference is usually treated epistemologically. People have alternative vantage points on the same reality, and divergent...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Pohl. Christopher von Nagy. Joseph Gamble. Gabriel Lima Estudillo. Eliseo Padilla Gutiérrez.

Cave murals, painted in Olmec style with iconographic links to the major Gulf coast center of La Venta, appear to communicate the dynamism of interregional relationships in an era of rising urbanism. The paintings seem to evoke the evolution of hierarchical positioning among political and religious actors. They might reveal the tools for local and long-distance power building. Yet the work that has clarified the nature of Oxtotitlán Cave and its associated site of Quiotepec has extended the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Moore.

This is an abstract from the "*SE The New Normal: Approaches to Studying, Documenting, and Mitigating Climate Change Impacts to Archaeological Sites" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Like many other areas, Virginia is becoming increasingly impacted by the effects of climate change. Over the past several years, the Virginia Department of Historic Resources has taken efforts to model these impacts to identify vulnerable areas for cultural resources...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Zedeno.

This is an abstract from the "Silenced Rituals in Indigenous North American Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Painting and writing from Fort Union Trading Post, North Dakota in the 1830s, George Catlin greatly admired Plains Indian coifs, body paint, and insignia, painstakingly describing each individual’s appearance. Contemporary descendants of Blackfoot warriors whom Catlin painted, joyfully display their portraits as evidence of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brandon McIntosh. Kristin Corl.

This is an abstract from the "People, Climate, and Proxies in Holocene Western North America" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster documents the environmental conditions of the Tularosa Basin/Hueco Bolson during the Doña Ana and El Paso phases (AD 1000–1450) in the Jornada Mogollon Region of the US Southwest by comparing stable carbon isotope values of black-tailed jackrabbits (*Lepus californicus) from archaeological sites to modern...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Willis. Myles Miller.

This is an abstract from the "The Art and Archaeology of the West: Papers in Honor of Lawrence L. Loendorf" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The creation of rock art imagery often involved more than pigments, incisions, and peckings. The natural form of the rock influenced, completed, and enhanced pictographic and petroglyphic shapes and often informed the placement of certain designs. Presenting the complex interactions of natural and human-made...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dayanira Lopez. Lisa Johnson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The PREP: Urban Life at Palenque Project 2023 field season brought about unexpected findings regarding household mortuary practices. Two atypical burials were uncovered: (1) an isolated, articulated right arm boxed-in by large stones at the entrance of residential structure J37; and (2) a complete primary burial discovered on the south side of the same...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Leslie. Andy Fallon. Zachary Singer. John Pfeiffer.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Liebman Site (71-31) is an Early Paleoindian site preserved beneath Lake Williams, a ~270-acre lake initially created by 19th century milling operations of Bartlett Brook in Lebanon, Connecticut. Originally discovered by John Parkos and excavated by John Pfeiffer in the 1990s when water levels were reduced, the site is generally inaccessible to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charles Frederick.

This is an abstract from the "The Legacies of The Basin of Mexico: The Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization, Part 2" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Basin of Mexico survey established a diachronic palette of settlement locations that has served as the baseline for a wide range of studies. But settlements only comprise the nucleus of the most visible form of past human activities. A wide range of activities, agrarian and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Fries. John Morris.

A series of exploratory surveys along the northern edge of the Belize River Valley in the area of the Aguacate lagoon has gradually revealed a surprisingly dense distribution of minor centers of the Classic Period Maya. These centers are situated in a zone of intersections, the nature of which shaped their presence in the landscape. Politically, the region lies at an interstice between the spheres of influence of several powerful, well-known polities. Geographically, the site complex is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Martin Welker.

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches in Zooarchaeology: Addressing Big Questions with Ancient Animals" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A survey of over 200 published sources on archaeological domestic dogs in the Americas reveals that dental anomalies, particularly the absence of the first mandibular premolar, are mentioned in Native American domestic dogs with some frequency. They have even been promoted as a means of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angela Collins. Mary De la Garza.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent excavations on two small pre-contact archaeological sites in southeast Iowa provided an opportunity to conduct drone-mounted low-altitude aerial lidar in addition to the standard total station methodology to develop ground surface elevations and contours. The drone used for the projects was the industrial grade mapping inspection drone, DJI Matrice...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Colin Wren. Curtis Marean. Eric Shook. Kim Hill. Marco Janssen.

This is an abstract from the "Human Behavioral Ecology at the Coastal Margins: Global Perspectives on Coastal & Maritime Adaptations" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Gram for gram, coastal shellfish have significant benefits over many terrestrial resources. They are higher in calories, fats, and proteins than most plants and are available in denser and more predictable patches than mammals. However, there are costs to foraging coastal shellfish....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Flynn.

Archaic Period dwellings have largely gone unnoticed in New England due to poor preservation and thousands of years of bioturbation. However, a concentration of post molds, large and small pits, and fire hearths uncovered at the Halls Swamp Site in southeastern Massachusetts are attributes that characterize, and have been associated with, the few Native American semi-subterranean dwellings identified in New England. Recognizing structural attributes is essential for understanding Native American...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kisha Supernant. Natasha Lyons.

Within the discipline of archaeology, we conventionally employ rational, science-based analyses to examine ancient cultures. Yet the lives of archaeological practitioners, contemporary descent communities, and the ancient peoples we study, are more than just minds and bodies. In this paper, we outline a framework for a heart-centered archaeological practice that draws from foundational literature on feminist, indigenous, and community-based archaeologies. We posit that a heart-centered...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Doat.

The aim of this presentation is to submit for discussion a proposition of an 'orientation map in Ethics' which may be useful for scholars engaged in Bioarchaeology of care. To this end, I present as a first step the main objections that have been raised in the literature to any attempt of inferring care toward disabled persons in prehistory. I suggest that most of these objections comes from two different ethical backgrounds: a number of them are motivated by the defense of a set of values which...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Loukas Barton.

This is an abstract from the "Fifty Years of Fretwell and Lucas: Archaeological Applications of Ideal Distribution Models" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Ideal Free Distribution is a heuristic device used for understanding or explaining behavior as a product of density-dependent habitat selection. More recently, the model has been used to track the emergence of social and political complexity through change in the patterns of prehistoric...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joseph Schuldenrein.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Science Outside the Ivory Tower: Perspectives from CRM" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Heritage Management and CRM are relatively new, evolving industries that have changed the charge of archaeological work in the past half-century. Previously, archaeological sciences were developed and applied in research settings (universities and museums) to extend the range of archaeological exploration and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Renee Collins. Sasha Collins. Rafael Guerra.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Located on the Belize River across from Barton Ramie, preliminary investigations of the recently discovered site of Lower Dover began in 2010. The primary foci of excavations were to situate Lower Dover in the sociopolitical landscape of the Belize River Valley. Initially, investigations focused on the monumental architecture of the site’s epicenter, as well...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Baitzel.

Archaeological investigations into group affiliation and status, gender and other social identities are often based on human burials and their grave goods. Once deposited burials become subject to a series of cultural and natural taphonomic processes that alter the material record. The systematic recovery of over 200 provincial Tiwanaku burials from the Middle Horizon Period (A.D.500-1000) settlement of Omo M10 in the arid Moquegua valley (southern Peru) presents a compelling case study for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Field. Jaime Pagán-Jiménez. Menno Hoogland. Jason Laffoon. Corrine Hofman.

The exploitation of plants in the tropical belt by Europeans had a major influence on the distributions of many species. The Lesser Antillean islands received their fair share of new arrivals. But what plant species inhabited the Lesser Antillean islands just prior to 1492? Establishing which plant species occurred immediately before colonial times would increase our understanding of the impact of alien introductions, provide information about biogeographical range changes, and, in addition,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gwen Bakke. Karen Lupo.

The presence and abundance of cut marks in zooarchaeological assemblages are often used to infer carcass acquisition strategies, butchery patterns and the general availability of prey. In this paper we analyze cut mark data derived from three hunter-gatherer ethnoarchaeological assemblages (East African Hadza, Central African Bofi and Aka and Paraguayan Aché) to investigate how well carcass-size and distribution of meat predict cut mark frequencies as measured by conventional measures such as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam Sutherland. Montana Martin.

Constructing monuments is, in essence, a construction of memory. Conversely, destruction of monuments can be the erosion of memory. Pre-Columbian peoples in the Americas built and maintained monuments as a form of memory-making and place-making. Digital Elevation Models (DEM) provide us an opportunity to re-discover the monuments and re-animate the memories that have been obscured since European arrival. Using LiDAR data, geo-referenced with historic maps, we look at the present state of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fanya Becks.

As archaeologists in Central California shift towards understanding indigenous agencies within the indigenous landscapes of colonial contact (Panich and Schneider 2015) an opportunity has arrived for the field to consider the practical implications of autochthonous Central Californian relationships and ontological perspectives for research praxis. The question posed in this paper, is what are rocks as interlocutors in relationships; how do you think of a rock when it is a part of a place that is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Verenice Heredia Espinoza.

Recent full coverage systematic surveys in the Tequila region have produced new and significant data to understand the nature of the well-known Teuchitlán tradition which has been variously described as a state-like society, a segmentary state, and a chiefdom. The evidence presented for these various models remains shaky and speculative. Here, I evaluate and test the current evidence, including the published literature, while providing empirical data from the region. Then, I interpret these data...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shannon Horton.

The purpose of this research is to examine the ceramic assemblage present at the Steve Perkins site, located in the lower Moapa Valley of southern Nevada. A full analysis of the ceramic assemblage has never been undertaken. Thus the goal of this research is to fully analyze the assemblage. Thereby providing more information on the lifeways of the Virgin Branch Puebloan (VBP) people residing at the Steve Perkins site. In addition, the examination of possible trade wares will also help to better...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Huang. Jane Kolber.

More than a hundred years of archaeological investigation have been focused on Chaco Canyon and, more recently, the Chaco World. Most of that work has been related to Great Houses, Great Kivas and the related material culture found therein. Exhaustive analyses of the archaeological data has brought much to light in our understanding of the Chaco phenomenon, and raised many more questions that are currently being researched. The authors of this paper contend that a wealth of information has yet...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Ortman.

This is an abstract from the "Research, Education, and American Indian Partnerships at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper discusses two important directions in archaeology today. The first is the urge to better-incorporate Native views and interests into archaeological practice; and the second is the urge to make the results of archaeology more useful for the present and future. I suggest that a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Monica Fenton.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Zooarchaeologists have extensively documented the importance of marine resources in the ancient Andes, and the first field season at Cerro San Isidro (Ancash, Peru) proves no different. The multi-component hilltop site lies in the agriculturally rich 'Moro Pocket' of the middle Nepeña Valley, at least an eight-hour walk from the ocean on the north-central...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katie K. Tappan. Ian N. Roa. Gavin Wisner. Chrissina Burke.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Zooarchaeological analysis of both freshwater and marine shells from the Upper Belize River Valley is important to interpreting Ancient Maya daily lives. Shell analysis allows us to examine dietary practices and understand economy and trade between Belize Valley sites. This poster presents the results of an analysis of over 42,000 freshwater and 1,200 marine...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dan Sandweiss.

This is an abstract from the "Fryxell Symposium in Honor of Dolores Piperno" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dolores Piperno has been a trailblazer in interdisciplinary research, building on deep, innovative approaches to plant remains to answer a multitude of questions in archaeology and beyond. In this interdisciplinary spirit, I review research into Holocene paleoclimate along the Peruvian coast derived in the first instance from the study of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Edgar. Cathy Willermet. Corey Ragsdale. Katelyn Rusk.

This is an abstract from the "Approaches to Cultural and Biological Complexity in Mexico at the Time of Spanish Conquest" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Colonial contact in Mexico brought together populations from diverse regions of the world – Europe (especially Spain), Mexico, Africa, and eventually, Asia. While much attention has been focused on the contributions of these groups to the admixed population that resulted, this attention has...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Kaplan.

In 1978 archaeologists partially excavated a frozen Middle Dorset Paleoeskimo midden on Avayalik Island, a far outer island at the tip of Labrador, Canada’s uninhabited northern coast. They recovered hundreds of organic artifacts unlike any found in Labrador’s other Middle Dorset sites, which contain only lithic tools. Faunal remains suggested a North Atlantic quite different from that of the present day. In 2016 Kaplan returned to Avayalik and documented the ongoing destruction of the site....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Bollwerk. Lynsey Bates. Leslie Cooper. Jillian Galle.

The Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS) is a Web-based initiative designed to foster inter-site, comparative archaeological research on slavery throughout the Chesapeake, the Carolinas, and the Caribbean. The goal of DAACS is to facilitate research that advances our historical understanding of the slave-based societies that evolved in the Atlantic World during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this paper we argue that the digital methods encapsulated within...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ariane Pinson.

This is an abstract from the "Ann F. Ramenofsky: Papers in Honor of a Non-Normative Career" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Upon receiving your doctorate, you are expected to become a contributing member of your field, as an academic or as a professional. But what kind of unit is a "field" and what use is a degree in a particular field if you never participate in that field? In this paper I explore the ways in which studying and working with Dr....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Harris.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Khmer Empire (c. 802-1431 CE) is believed to have undergone a dramatic religious transition during the 14th century from syncretic Brahmano-Buddhist worship to what is defined currently as "Theravada Buddhism". While demarcated in previous scholarship by a cessation of monumental temple-building central to previous traditions, the establishment and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Li Zhang.

This article detaches Erlitou from the paradigm of "state formation", and argues for an alternative approach: investigating the continuities and shifts in the multiple networks of politics, ideologies, and economics from the Longshan period to the Erlitou period. The development of political networks featured massive population relocations into the Luoyang basin to stabilize the new social order in the Erlitou polity. Transformed political and ethnographic patterns went hand in hand with changes...

DOCUMENT Citation Only A. Gwynn Henderson. David Pollack. Benjamin Barnes.

This is an abstract from the "Dedication, Collaboration, and Vision, Part I: Papers in Honor of Tom D. Dillehay" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A hallmark of Tom Dillehay’s career is his engagement with local and descendant communities. This is exemplified by his tireless work for the Mapuche, the establishment of anthropology departments throughout South America, and the instrumental role he played in creating the Kentucky Archaeological Survey....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Roddick. Erik Marsh.

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. More than 30 years ago, Garth Bawden wrote a prescient review on the "Andean State as a State of Mind." He critiqued Andean scholars for focusing on the state as an analytical unit. He complained that much good scholarship was being ruined due to the "albatross of the state," and urged...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Lake.

In 1972 David Clarke argued that "models are pieces of machinery that relate observations to theoretical ideas." That "machinery" does not have to be computational, or even quantitative, but with the resurgence of interest in simulation, the adoption of methods from evolutionary biology and the development of more sophisticated spatial statistics, it is increasingly both. Many of the papers in this session are case studies that explore exactly the issue of how effectively we can use models to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Abbott.

This is an abstract from the "WHY PLATFORM MOUNDS? PART 1: MOUND DEVELOPMENT AND CASE STUDIES" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In January 1888, Frank Hamilton Cushing rode his horse atop the Hohokam platform mound at Los Hornos in the lower Salt River valley, and took note of numerous other mounds that dotted the valley’s landscape. The monuments’ spacing led Cushing to conceive of the valley-wide settlement as an integrated network for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Neha Gupta. Susan Blair. Ramona Nicholas.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Vision in the Age of Big Data" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In an era of cyber-infrastructures, large digital archaeological collections have the potential to enable deep insights into human history. Yet the life of digital archaeological data post-field recovery is not well understood, and consequently, issues of spatial data quality in large digital archaeological collections have been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Colleen Bell.

While psychologists have been using many different methods to map brain activity during various tasks, archaeologists have yet to fully utilize the potential of these techniques to examine early human cognition. Paleolithic stone tools provide a promising line of evidence in human behavioral and cognitive evolution. Recently, brain imaging modalities such as Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and Positron Emission Tomography (PET) have been used to more directly link cognition and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ora Marek-Martinez.

The fight for inclusion of Native Americans in archaeology and anthropology hasn’t been an easy road; it has been divisive, contested, and sometimes violent. The need for allies and advocates for Native American inclusion in the field has become apparent through the tireless work of Larry Zimmerman. His scholarship has shaped generations of archaeologists and anthropologists in numerous ways. The ethical dimensions of his work are a testament to the need for change in the field and are a...