Society for American Archaeology

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erik Johannesson.

This paper examines the intersection of mortuary ritual and beliefs, at the edge between funerary ideology and religion. The formation of the Xiongnu polity in the 3rd century BCE in what today is Mongolia included the introduction of new funerary regimes that conspicuously upended previous mortuary traditions. Xiongnu mortuary practice breaks a millennium-long convention of east-west orientation of funerary monuments and accompanying inhumations, the creation of visibly prominent and highly...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brittany Fullen.

Excavations at the Middle Horizon (AD 500-100) capital city of Huari in the summer of 2017 focused on understanding processes of urbanization and the resulting realities of everyday life in the domestic sector of Patipampa. Several of the architectural spaces exposed during excavation were more intensively investigated. This paper focuses on the architectural space containing niched walls in order to understand how the Wari utilized this type of space in comparison to the uses of the other...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zachary Newell. Loren Davis.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Preliminary geoarchaeological investigations at the Devils Kitchen site (35CS9) produced a stratified archaeological record comprised of stone tools, debitage, and fire-cracked rock associated with alluvial deposition occurring between ~11,600 and 1900 14C BP (i.e., ~13,470 and 1800 cal BP). The robust Holocene-age portion of this record demonstrates that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Frederick. Meghan Howey.

Physical food storage is one mechanism hunter-gatherers use to even out the variability of subsistence resources throughout seasonal cycles. Food storage facilities are typically plain, undecorated constructions basic to mundane needs and as such, food storage features do not necessarily appear at first look as social technology, that is, as objects that extend personhood. However, we suggest food storage facilities, in ensuring the fundamental continuation of the human body, can never be...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelly Eldridge. Kendall D. Campbell.

This is an abstract from the "U.S. Army Corps of Engineers: A National Perspective on CRM, Research, and Consultation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Consultation with Indian tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations is an integral part of the Section 106 process of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966. The Alaska District is unique among other districts within the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in that, per the regulations, village and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Lane. Katherine Cynkar. Kimberly Kasper. Anthony Graesch.

Uncharred botanicals are commonly found on archaeological sites but seldom assigned interpretive significance owing to their assumed ambiguous origins. Thousands of uncharred, fragmented Sambucas racemosa (red elderberry) seeds have been recovered at Welqámex, a Stó:lō-Coast Salish settlement in the Upper Fraser Valley of southwestern British Columbia. In Stó:lō-Coast Salish territory and beyond, Sambucas was used as both a food and a medicine. Owing to the presence of cyanide-like...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kimberly Zhu. Guillermo ae Anda.

This is an abstract from the "Studies in Mesoamerican Subterranean Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. It is so widely accepted that the Maya burned copal incense in their rituals that the assumption has gone unquestioned. During the 2018 season, the Gran Acuífero Maya Project began a multi-year investigation of the cave of Balamku near Chichen Itza. The cave contains a large number of incense burners filled with burned material that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samantha Fulgham. Colin Grier. Audrey Rainey.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The study of feasting activity in precontact societies can illuminate hierarchical social structures that existed within a community, because of the labor and wealth investments required to produce a successful feast. It can also highlight the integrative aspects of feasts, since they often involved widespread participation. We present results of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Arsenault. Serge Lemaitre.

The last few years of archaeological fieldwork in Eastern Canadian Shield have allowed the identification of some new figures in the graphic content of sites already documented by other researchers in Ontario. But this context has led also to the discovery of new rock art sites in this province as well as in Québec. These rock painting sites but also the new engraving sites found help more than ever to better understand the variability and complexity of the iconographic themes privileged by the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dru McGill. Katherine Chiou.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this poster, the authors introduce a 3-year NSF-funded project to advance knowledge on the pervasiveness and effectiveness of ethics training interventions in archaeology and other STEM fields. Specifically, the project will examine the organization, implementation, and long-term results of competitive ethics case study-based debates, such as the SAA...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julia Coverdale.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Corrugated exterior white wares in the Ancestral Puebloan world are often thought of as a rarity. While these ceramics are not as common as gray ware corrugated or regular black-on-white ceramics, they are an important blending of pottery manufacture. Corrugated whiteware ceramics can also help us begin to understand symbolism and meaning of corrugation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Francois Richard.

This paper explores rural communities’ historical relationships to state authority in the Siin province (Senegal). I engage with classic literature to examine how the concept of ‘peasant’ might be relevant to archaeological realities in Senegal’s countryside during the Atlantic era, and how it might helpful to think about political identity among social actors chronically understudied (and under-documented) in the African past. I am interested in the term as one way to conceptualize the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Manasij Pal Chowdhury. Prof. Stuart Campbell. Dr. Michael Buckley.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Analysis of biomolecules absorbed in unglazed ceramics can provide valuable information about pottery use in antiquity, including detailed information on ancient diet. Such investigation has mostly focused on the analysis of lipids, but recently the more labile proteins have seen increased attention as they are capable of providing more specific information....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brandy Norton.

In order to gain a better understanding of the faunal diet composition of Native Americans in south-central Florida, an examination was conducted to determine which types of animals appeared most frequently within tree island assemblages. Of the 19,149 bones examined from a 2016 excavation, all were identified to at least an animal’s taxonomic order, although identification to the species level was usually not possible due to the fragmentary nature of the sample. This information was compared...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Briana Doering. Grace Stanford. Kassandra Dutro. Joshua Reuther.

This is an abstract from the "Hearths, Earth Ovens, and the Carbohydrate Revolution: Indigenous Subsistence Strategies and Cooking during the Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The subsistence traditions of the early Americans residing in Beringia have played a key role in debates surrounding the spread of people across the continent. Hunting and related technologies have garnered the most...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Summer Moore.

Anthropological discussions of gender and sexuality in colonial-era Polynesia have often focused on the introduction of Western clothing styles and the relationship between changing modes of dress and the negotiation of new social identities. Because clothing is highly perishable, however, there have been few opportunities to address this topic through the archaeological record. My paper presents an analysis of an exceptionally well-preserved collection of archaeological cloth from Nu‘alolo Kai,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Burant.

The Milwaukee County Institution Grounds (MCIG) Cemetery is located in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. This historic cemetery was in use from 1878 to 1974 and interred Milwaukee County’s indigent. The individuals represented consist mostly of poor European immigrants, subsequent generations, institutionalized residents, and the unclaimed deceased. The material culture associated with the 2013 MCIG cemetery excavations recovered from 685 individual graves, was stabilized, inventoried and accessioned....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lynn Fisher. Susan Harris. Corina Knipper. Rainer Schreg.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Stone shaping tools and hammerstones are among the most ancient and ubiquitous of stone implements in the archaeological record, but they are not commonly studied in detail in archaeological context. This poster presents results of a comparative study of chert objects that show percussion scars at a Neolithic chert quarry in southern Germany. Variation in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ann Stahl.

The Banda area of west central Ghana is a quintessential example of what Igor Kopytoff (1987) long-ago dubbed the Internal African Frontier—an ‘interstitial’ region between ‘established societies’ that is home to a dynamic composition of people, languages and practice forged by newcomers and autochthones alike. In presumed contrast with their ‘established’ neighbors, frontier societies are ones in which processes of improvisation and the negotiation of social boundaries seem more apparent. While...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Linda Scott Cummings.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Colonization of Central and North America involved Spanish mission construction and growing wheat necessary for Eucharist bread. Using evidence of threshing technology, represented by cut phytoliths, as an indicator of trait adoption, we examine missions in California and the southwestern Puebloan region. Introduction of a new religion, new icons, new...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ava Godhardt. David Hyde.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Excavations between 2004 and 2019 at the Medicinal Trail Hinterland Community in northwestern Belize have uncovered numerous special deposits from a variety of contexts including caches, termination offerings, exposed offerings, and problematic deposits (PDs). Caches and the offerings have been reported on extensively and are generally understood to have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Helen Haines. Kerry Sagebiel.

Jade has been long recognized by archaeologists as an important trade item among ancient Mesoamerican cultures. This is particularly true for ancient Olmec and Maya cultures where it also is seen as an indicator of social status. Unfortunately, the precocious development of Olmec society, lead many early archaeologists to an over-emphasis of Olmec influence on the Maya during the Formative Period (ca. 1000-400 BC). This is particularly noteworthy in the attribution of jade "spoons" to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily McKenzie. Taylor Puckett. Lawford Hatcher. Katherine Chiou.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The chili pepper (Capsicum spp.) has cemented its place in ancient and modern Mesoamerica as a fixture in medicine, ritual, and cuisine. The timing and context of its domestication which began around 10,000 years BP, however, remains unclear. To address this, we conducted morphometric analyses of a diverse array of modern seeds from multiple species of wild...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melanie Saldana. Samantha Lorenz. Jocelyn Acosta. Marilyn Bueno.

The importance of subterranean space has been well established through studies of Maya sacred landscape. The Maya word "che’en" is used for any natural feature that penetrates the earth such as caves, cenotes, rock shelters, chultuns, sinkholes, springs and crevices, all spaces where the sacred nature of animate Earth are expressed. In the Three Rivers area of the southern Maya lowlands, non-cave Maya archaeologists appear to be at a loss on how to engage landscapes where sacred landmarks take...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kalyan Sekhar Chakraborty. Greg Slater. Shyamalava Mazumdar. Prabodh Shirvalkar. Heather M.-L. Miller.

This is an abstract from the "Farm to Table Archaeology: The Operational Chain of Food Production" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The study of ancient food residues does not only provide information on the ancient diet but also sheds light on the nature of food selection, processing, storage and finally the discard of food wastes. The presence of large quantities of animal bones, primarily from cattle/buffalo and sheep/goat in all Harappan...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gary Brown.

The distinction between generalized hunter-gatherers and economic specialists has long interested archaeologists reliant on faunal and floral remains. Resource-processing features provide another line of evidence to address the topic, though specialized facilities do not necessarily imply patterns of specialized subsistence. Chumash inhabitants of the Santa Monica Mountains provide a case in point. Earth ovens interpreted as specialized resource-processing facilities are commonly excavated, yet...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ann Laffey.

Ethnoarchaeological chicha brewing was conducted on modern ceramic sherd samples for organic residue analysis. The goal was to identify botanical biomarkers that can evidence the use of Schinus molle L., Erythroxylaceae coca, and Echinopsis pachanoi (San Pedro cactus) for ancient brewing in the Middle Horizon (MH) era (c. 600-1100 CE). There is strong evidence that during this period socio-political influence was inexorably linked to the ability to provide chicha in exchange for labor, goods,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Pailes.

Analysis of Contact Era ethno-historical accounts has played an outsized role in the interpretation of protohistoric Sonora, Mexico. Controversy surrounds interpretations, owing to incongruities between archaeological and textual data as well as disagreements over how to weight the disparate observations made in these documents. Modern researchers variably evaluate the biases, motives, and the overall truthfulness of the authors of these documents. Another issue is the general subjectivity...

DOCUMENT Citation Only J. Anne Melton. Emily Briggs. Kele Missal.

Often in the study of stone tools, without the application of microarchaeological studies and the presence of microwear, little is left to distinguish how the tool was used originally and what the tool may have been processing. Was it used for scraping? Sawing? Slicing? Was it slicing bone? Scraping animal hide? Is it even possible for archaeologists to discern such behaviors from the tool without having access to definitive microwear traces and/or residues? In this study, we test whether the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stéphen Rostain.

Modern archaeology must diversify its scientific approaches. First, it is essential to get various viewpoints and different scales to understand better the artifact. Moreover, the interdisciplinary methodology improves considerably the interpretation. The Amazonian raised fields study is a good example of such multiple scientific approaches. While raised field agriculture is no longer widely practiced today, it was quite widespread in the past. These structures are frequently found on the coast...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julia Coverdale.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Corrugated exterior whitewares in the Ancestral Puebloan world are often thought of as a rarity. While these ceramics are not as common as gray ware corrugated or regular black-on-white ceramics, they are an important blending of pottery manufacture. Corrugated whiteware ceramics can also help us begin to understand symbolism and meaning of corrugation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Grace Conrad. Robert Cook.

This is an abstract from the "Improving and Decolonizing Precontact Legacy Collections with Fieldwork: Making Sense of Harvard’s Turpin Site Expedition (Ohio)" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A long-standing point of contention has been the degree of continuity and change between the Middle Woodland (ending AD 500) and Fort Ancient periods (beginning about AD 1000). The intermediate Late Woodland period has become a placeholder but is clearly of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Baustian.

This is an abstract from the "Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Debra L. Martin" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bioarchaeology today is interdisciplinary, scientific, and theoretical. For over 30 years, Debra Martin has contributed substantially to archaeology by promoting these shifts in the discipline. Her scholarly accomplishments are extensive but I suggest that perhaps her most important contribution to the field of bioarchaeology...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Marston. Emily Ubik.

Free-threshing wheat (Triticum aestivum and T. durum) and barley (Hordeum vulgare) were staple cereal crops in the ancient Near East. Although modern varietals of these species have significant variation in growing times, water requirements, and grain yields, few studies have distinguished varietals in the past. Traditional approaches have used grain seed size and shape to identify different crop varieties. These coarse metrics, including length:breadth and thickness:breadth ratios, give only a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Dye. Keith Jacobi. William DeVore.

Violence in the daily lives of individuals in late prehistoric eastern North America took many forms. Exposure to violence was pervasive and persistent. From the time you were born until the time you died you were a witness, a participant, and possibly a victim. In some instances death was a not release. In the Tennessee Valley of northern Alabama two Mississippian sites, Kogers Island (1LU92) and Perry (1LU25), demonstrate a range of evidence for interpolity violence. Familiar examples of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Cook.

There were two distinct cultural systems in a key part of the Fort Ancient region – Anderson and Madisonville – with the general understanding that one changed into the other in situ ca. AD 1400 and then left the region en masse ca. AD 1650, becoming one of several contemporary Central Algonquian tribes. However, new data raise the possibility that this interpretation needs revision. First, through a biodistance analysis we learn that at least some Anderson and Madisonville groups were not...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Estelle Praet. Peter Eeckhout. Milton Lujan Dávila. Sylvie Byl.

Traditional accounts of the conquest of Peru are well known and universally accepted: in 1535, Francisco Pizarro – who had arrived two years earlier – decided to create a new capital in the neighbouring Rimac river valley, which would one day become the current city of Lima. In order to achieve this, Pizarro forcibly displaced all the contemporary inhabitants of Pachacamac, leaving this major Inka pilgrimage site completely abandoned. However, new finds recovered during the 2016 excavations at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicole Waguespack.

Archaeologists have a unique relationship with the faunal record of proboscideans. The interpretative histories associated with mammoths and mastodons, particularly in North America, are wholly unlike those of other zooarchaeological species both extinct and extant. Distinctively divisive, consequential, and enduring, the interpretive attention and rhetoric focused on proboscideans has proceeded largely independent of the known inventory of sites and assemblages in Pleistocene North America....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steve Baumann.

This is an abstract from the "The Vanishing Treasures Program: Celebrating 20 Years of National Park Service Historic Preservation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. El Morro National Monument’s Mission 66 maintenance\utility complex is a distinctive Cecil Doty design uncharacteristic of Mission 66 program utilitarian buildings. Extending from the maintenance building is a service yard enclosed by a fence with battered stone masonry piers and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rintaro Ono. Jason Lebehn. Osamu Kataoka. Takuya Nagaoka. Scott Fitzpatrick.

This is an abstract from the "When the Wild Winds Blow: Micronesia Colonization in Pacific Context" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Previous archaeological research on islands in eastern Micronesia hint at possible early human migration from Melanesia by the descendants of Lapita groups. However, hard archaeological evidence has remained largely ephemeral. In this paper, we discuss recent findings from new archaeological excavations on Lenger, a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Fedick.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For Maya agriculture, both ancient and modern, it is known that a wide range of time is needed between planting and harvesting of various plant species. While annual crops require less than a year to reach full productivity, perennial crops, particularly tree-crops, might require many years to begin production, and even longer to reach full productivity....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sharlot Hart.

Not much is found in the scholarly literature regarding site boundary definitions: boundaries defined for management purposes may be different from pre-Columbian geographical boundaries. This is the case at University Indian Ruin (UIR), a 13-acre parcel listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and owned by the University of Arizona. Homeowners in the neighboring community, also listed on the National Register as Indian Ridge, routinely retrieve sherds while performing yard...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rujana Jeger. Darcy Morey.

Throughout prehistory, dogs and humans have sometimes been interred together in the same grave, in different locations in the world. This practice raises the question of why this practice was so prevalent. Circumstances leading to this practice were variable, but its consistency suggests an underlying factor in common. Using one of the earliest known cases as a point of departure, Bonn-Oberkassel from Germany, we suggest that this underlying factor in common is that dogs and people were regarded...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Curteman. Cheryl Pouley. Daniel Snyder. Chris Bailey. Briece Edwards.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. When a private landowner consistently finds artifacts on their property and wants to be open to outside research opportunities, it can be difficult to find the funds necessary for a thorough cultural resource inventory when there is no development project associated. Encouraging education as a tool to promote advocates for the cultural resources, developing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicole Kulaga.

Both Paleoindian and Archaic sites hold valuable information concerning some of the first people in North America, yet these sites remain to be some of the most difficult to identify. Without diagnostics like architecture and ceramics to turn to, projectile points are what are most commonly depended on when trying to date these locales. However, debitage makes up the bulk of the artifacts found on these sites and sites of later dates, and it is highly plausible that debitage characteristics will...

DOCUMENT Citation Only D. Gibson.

Several debates have endured for decades within the field of anthropological archaeology as to the character of lowland Classic period Maya political organization. Scholars have been struck by the contrast between Maya regal-ritual centers possessed of impressive monumental architecture with the minimal references from the documentary record to any kind of bureaucratic organization. There is disagreement as to the scale of the larger Maya polities and whether or not some polities had begun to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Hansen.

The Division of Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History launched its first online database in 1995. The image-oriented interface proved attractive to an audience with a moderate level anthropological background. Later, in response to numerous requests, unimaged archaeological collections with more technical data were offered through a password protected interface. As of September 2017, 250,000+ files with images were publicly available, the combined online database representing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sean Dolan.

Archaeologists often assume that Ancestral Pueblo groups in the North American Southwest built small one- to three-room structures to serve as temporary fieldhouse shelters for extracting agricultural resources during the farming season, and to minimize transportation to and from their larger villages. If fieldhouses were associated with agriculture, then they should be found near agriculturally productive fields. To determine if there is an association between agriculture and fieldhouses during...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Parker. Lisa Johnson. Kate Magargal. Marianna Di Paolo. Brian Codding.

The (re)introduction of the horse to North America brought dramatic changes to American Indians. However, not all populations were affected equally; the horse became central to some societies, but had seemingly little effect on others. This variation is seen across Great Basin ethnographic groups, where some populations adopted the horse for transportation and hunting, while others ignored or even ate the horse. Some argue that this variation is the result of environmental constraints: where the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Ostahowski. Jayur Mehta. Ted Marks.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Many archaeologists studying coastal archaeological sites are weighing the costs vs. benefits of implementing erosion control structures to protect sites threatened by sea level rise and/or land loss. However, little literature is available about the types and applicability of erosion control structures, such as living shorelines, as protection measures...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tim Riley.

Perched along the northern edge of the Colorado Plateau, the Tavaputs Plateau is best known among archaeologists for its interior canyons, including the incredible rock art in Nine Mile Canyon and the well-preserved Fremont communities located in Range Creek Canyon. Despite the greater water resources and arable land along the Book Cliffs escarpment of the plateau, it has received little professional attention. This research program focuses on a small segment along the Grassy Trail Creek, a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patrick Rivera.

Given the impressive variety of objects produced and used by most ethnic groups, why do some forms of material culture--but not others--come to be identified as signs of ethnic identity? Who makes these identifications, and what sort of work do they do? This paper examines how particular historic artifacts (or representations of them) have come to signify an Irish or Mexican ethnic identity in the contemporary imagination, what role archaeologists have played in this process, and what this might...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Horowitz. Marcello Canuto.

At a basic level, the lowland Classic Maya economy was a complex web of prestige exchange, centralized distribution, and local market economies. In fact, while it is important not to consider the lowland Classic Maya economic system as monolithic, it is also as critical to understand how it articulated with the different levels of social hierarchy. Beyond this, we should also make a point of understanding the roles these specific economic systems played in the distribution of utilitarian goods...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alice Samson. Jago Cooper.

Multiple episodes of identity transformation can be seen in the archaeology of Mona island. From the emergence of "Taino-ness" (cf. R. Rodríguez) in the 12th century, to the catastrophic (after S. Mintz) eruption of colonial identities in the 16th century. We contrast the dynamics and character of creolizations from a diachronic and material perspective by looking at the archaeology of 500 years of subterranean ritual landscapes of Mona. We ask whether an expanded use of the term creolization is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Agostini. Robert Weiner.

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. For the Ancestral Puebloans, Chaco Canyon (ca. AD 800-1180), in what is now northern New Mexico, brought disparate communities together under a common cultural system by adjoining religious ceremonies, pilgrimages, and exotic goods with astronomical events, striking topographical features, and other...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Travis Cureton. J. Andrew Darling.

This is an abstract from the "Collaborative Archaeology: How Native American Knowledge Enhances Our Collective Understanding of the Past" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Scholars of the Hohokam archaeological culture area have worked for decades to build a more comprehensive explanatory framework regarding the interpretation of vapaki, or ancestral O’Odham ceremonial houses. In 2023, an edited volume of the same name was published and represents a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peri Johnson. Ömür Harmansah.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological landscapes are not heritage landscapes similar to the picturesque; they are the living heritage of the contemporary inhabitants and stakeholders who live with the past, ecological destruction, and climate change. Our paper is informed by the Yalburt Yaylası Archaeological Landscape Research Project (2010–2021) in western central Turkey. At...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Geoff Smith. Elisabeth Noack. Nina Maria Schlösser. Sabine Gaudzinski-Windheuser. Radu Iovita.

Recent zooarchaeological and isotope analyses have largely settled the debate surrounding Neanderthal hunting capacity. The vast numbers of Middle Palaeolithic sites containing the butchered remains of large ungulates demonstrates the ability to obtain and, often, highly process these carcasses. Nevertheless, evidence for the effectiveness and ubiquity of Neanderthal hunting technology, specifically composite hafted tools, has not been illustrated across either their entire spatial or temporal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kyle Palazzolo.

This is an abstract from the "Formal Models and Experimental Archaeology of Ground Stone Milling Technology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Among the various categories of ground stone technology in precolonial California, the mortar has a celebrated role in the shift to a subsistence economy dominated by acorn processing and consumption. The size and shape of mortars, both bedrock and portable, facilitated pulverizing and grinding of these and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca L. Simon.

More often than not, cultural resources on private land experience development and/or intentional disturbance. Data from sites are often lost or compromised during these activities. Occasionally, landowners keep notes on material culture that may be passed on to archaeologists. Incorporation of these data is important to understanding the condition of the site and maximizing interpretations of the past. As Crow Canyon Archaeological Center embarks on a new multi-year research project, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carlos Quiroz. Katherine Miller Wolf. Hannah Plumer. Yasser Musa.

Funding in small developing countries like Belize for archaeological research and post excavation curation remains one of our greatest challenges to preserving our tangible cultural heritage. The state of curation of human remains and artefact collections at St. John’s College in Belize City is a perfect example of what can go wrong when there is not established a properly funded and managed curation program both at the national level or the institutional level. This paper highlights the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brenton Willhite.

Several methodologies have been developed to analyze flaked stone debitage. Among the more popular methodologies are flake typologies similar to Sullivan and Rozen’s (1985) "interpretation free typology", which focused on measuring breakage patterns by classifying debitage into complete flakes, broken flakes, flake fragments and debris. While many discussions have focused on the usefulness of these measures, especially in regards to gaining an understanding of reduction methods via the relative...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Austin Ringelstein.

A colonial archaeological assemblage from Santa Catalina Island, California contains both "traditional" native materials and substantial Euro-American trade goods. Archival sources and artifacts suggest that the native islanders, known as the Pimu Tongva people, opportunistically acquired trade goods from Euro-American seafarers for close to 300 years. Although the bulk of the trade items appear to be European in origin, recent insight suggests that some of the materials have associations with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Felipe Criado-Boado. Jadranka Verdonkschot.

This is an abstract from the "Developments and Challenges in Landscape Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper is an appeal for a structural archaeology, analogous to what used to be called structural anthropology. Or at least an appeal for a structural archaeology of landscape. Landscapes are active, performative, changing, temporal, moving, contingent, situated . . . but they are also the result of a design, whether intentional or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Dylla. Zachary Overfield.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological monitoring is generally considered a secondary investigative methodology, to be used when necessary after proactive archeological work has already occurred. However, monitoring is increasingly relied upon as a primary form of investigation within archaeological compliance, particularly in highly urban settings where proactive work is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Letícia Correa. Astolfo Araujo.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Historically, the shift from the study of form to the study of techniques was guided by the transition from the Cultural History approach to the New Archeology. This theoretical readjustment was incorporated into Brazilian archeology decades later, strongly impacting the way that the collections was studied. Today the reality is that, although lithic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zachary Hruby.

The architecturally diminutive, but economically robust, Classic Maya polity of Copan must have had an integral role in the production and exchange of Ixtepeque goods; perhaps even control of portions of the source itself. Indeed, after the collapse of the Copan state, Ixtepeque becomes one of the most heavily traded obsidians in the Maya world. This proverbial opening of the floodgates suggests that Copan used Ixtepeque materials primarily for local and regional exchanges, increasing its value...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Selene Yuridia Galindo Cumplido.

This paper presents an ethnographic account of the people of Quitovac, Sonoras yearly journey to the sea. The village is set amidst the Altar desert. Every year the people of this town take a trip to the Sea of Cortés and make the shore a very special place. I present this account from the perspective of communities of practice emphasizing how the activities they undertake are the result of a continual interaction between people and places and between the distinct actors present. I also take...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alex Ruuska.

This is an abstract from the "Painting the Past: Interpretive Approaches in Global Rock Art Research" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper explores the critical subject of indigenous oral traditions in California and the Great Basin. Using an interdisciplinary approach that considers Numic oral teachings relative to place-based data in ethnography, ethnohistory, archaeology and geology, the author interrogates traditional narratives encoding...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kevin Lane.

Spanish conquest of the Andes commenced in 1532 and, for all intents and purposes, was over by 1572. Yet, this somewhat simplifies the story. Throughout the Andean region, but especially away from the early strongholds of Spanish power, such as the towns and cities, conquest was a mixture of appropriation and negotiation. Drawing on research from the Ica Highlands (South-central Peru) and the Cordillera Negra (North-central Peru) this paper examines how Spanish religious orders initially...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nikki Manning.

During the fall of 2012 a local, urban archaeological survey project was conducted to see what evidence remained of the Missoula, Montana historic “underground” landscape. Now heading into the fourth year of research and expanding geographically into other cities of the American West, the project which actually began from public inquiries into the existence of a small town underground continues to hold the interest of the local community and beyond. As the project has continued to grow in scope...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Egan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. How do repeated disasters shape and strengthen communities? The Tilarán-Arenal region of Costa Rica is one of the most volcanically active regions in the world, but despite the risk, from the advent of sedentary villages during the Tronodora phase (2000-500 BC) until the arrival of Spanish in the 16th century, people demonstrated remarkable resilience. Using...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Parker. Christopher Parker. Brian Codding.

Research exploring the complex human decisions that lead to territoriality have largely focused on defensibility. Here we explore territoriality using an ecological and evolutionary model from behavioral ecology: the marginal value theorem (MVT). Based on the principal of diminishing returns, the MVT predicts that the utility of a plot of land will decrease with each additional plot, therefore people should defend an area only at a threshold when it becomes energetically beneficial within the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adrian Whitaker. Christina Giovas.

A notable feature of hunter-gatherer adaptations in mainland coastal settings throughout the world, is the ubiquity of marine mammal hunting. This pattern is less commonly seen in insular settings, which is surprising since marine mammals are often the only large mammal available. We develop a model based in evolutionary ecology that predicts ecological, social, and technological conditions that shape the choice to hunt marine mammals. We then evaluate this model in light of data from the island...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fernando Ozorio De Almeida.

One of the most insightful contributions recently put forward by Anthropology and Ethnoarchaeology is related to the concept of the "communities of practice". It is naturally connected to issues such as the relation between language and material culture, transmission, identity, persistence, structure as well as the limits of socially permitted restructuring of practices, and even the possible contingencies which might cause deep change and break the structure and, therefore, Tradition. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chelsea Cohen.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster focuses on the context of urban enslavement in the South Carolina Lowcountry, examining botanical and ceramic assemblages as mechanisms to create visibility for populations often who lived in close proximity with and are thus materially rendered less visible by their enslavers. The rodent-cached botanical and ceramic assemblage of the Nathaniel...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brooke Morgan.

The smallest pieces of chipped stone flaking debris are often overlooked in the analysis of hunter-gatherer camps. Several factors account for this, including recovery methods, research focus, and time and cost allotted for a project. At shallowly-buried sites where features have been obliterated, concentrations of microrefuse have the potential to reveal in situ activity areas or secondary deposits formed by batch dumping. This paper presents a case study of the Mountaineer Folsom site near...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Chan.

This is an abstract from the "The Subterranean in Mesoamerican Indigenous Culture and Beyond" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Surveyed in 2008–2010, Midnight Terror Cave contains the comingled remains of at least 118 Maya sacrificial victims from the Classic period (250–925 CE). Although previous studies have shown Maya populations to have high dental caries rates and enamel hypoplasia corresponding with weening, the Midnight Terror collection does...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Brandeberry.

This is an abstract from the "A Celebration and Critical Assessment of "The Maya Scribe and His World" on its Fiftieth Anniversary" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In “The Maya Scribe and His World,” Michael Coe published some of the first detailed photographs of a series of vases depicting ghoulish, supernatural characters identified by the Maya as “wahy.” With names like “Deer Death,” “Head Louse Spider Monkey,” and “Red Bile Death,” Coe and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Deni Seymour.

Data sources, including documentary and archaeological, represent rich caches, full of mundane descriptions and an occasional succulent morsel that adds to the richness of our understanding of the past or potentially changes those understandings in fundamental ways. Yet facts are situated in frameworks of conventional wisdom, existing reconstructions, methodological practice, and extant data. Many substantial advances effectively and critically combine the particular with the generalizable,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Louise Purdue. Cyril Castanet. Lydie Dussol. Eva Lemonnier. Aline Garnier.

Maya communities occupied and cultivated the tropical lowlands of Naachtun (Peten, Guatemala) for nearly a millennia (AD 150-950). Major goals of the Peten-Norte Naachtun project include understanding why the city was founded, the reasons for its development and why it was abandoned. Due to constraining environmental conditions (non-permanent water supply, shallow soils), the availability and management of water and soil resources in the city and around the bajo are closely tied to settlement...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Alperstein. Jesse Casana. Madeleine McLeester. Nathaniel Kitchel. Carolin Ferwerda.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There is a general absence of evidence of Woodland village sites (~900–1600 CE) in New England’s archaeological record. Due to a long history of colonization and environmental factors, even Woodland house sites, let alone villages, are incredibly scarce in the region. Despite that, many large village settlements appear within the early colonial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Garrard.

The Overmountain Victory National Historic Trail is a Revolutionary War route used by an estimated 1,040 patriot militia during the Kings Mountain campaign of 1780. It totals approximately 272 miles from the mustering point near Abingdon, Virginia, to Sycamore Shoals (near Elizabethton, Tennessee); from Sycamore Shoals to Quaker Meadows (near Morganton, North Carolina); from the mustering point in Surry County, North Carolina, to Quaker Meadows; and from Quaker Meadows to Kings Mountain, South...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alice Wolff.

The importance of alcohol in the landscape of feasting has been well documented across cultures, and early medieval Europe is no exception. The mead-hall in Anglo-Saxon Britain functioned as a location where social bonds were strengthened both vertically and horizontally; Vikings in Iceland relied on barley beer to demonstrate the power and generosity of chieftains. Production of alcohol in the large quantities required for feasting necessitates some degree of specialization, but to what degree...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eugenia Gayo. Daniela Valenzuela. Isabel Cartagena. Calogero M. Santoro. Claudio Latorre.

There is a growing volume of literature arguing that camelids were a local resource for Prehispanic societies that inhabited the coastal and intermediate Andean valleys from Peru. Indeed, existing evidences show uninterrupted herding practices along the Peruvian lowlands (>2,000 masl) at 8°S-16.5°S during the interval 800 BC-1100 AD. Although camelids archeofaunal remains, textiles and iconographic representations are recurrent in low-elevation sites from the northernmost Chile (17°-19°S), the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniela Valenzuela. Bárbara Cases. Persis B. Clarkson. José M. Capriles. Victoria Castro.

Llamas were one of the most valued animals in the Andes. Their importance has transcended the subsistence sphere as they were not only used as a source of food but also served for medicinal and ritual purposes; their fiber was fundamental for manufacturing textiles, and they were a source of symbolism and "food" for thought and ideologies. Nevertheless, their use as pack animals in exchange caravans has been prominent, stimulating intense mobility and long distance traffic between diverse...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Manuel Perales.

This is an abstract from the "Beyond the Round House: Spatial Logic and Settlement Organization across the Late Andean Highlands" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Late Intermediate period constitutes a time of important changes in the life of pre-colonial Andean societies, including new mechanisms for the construction of power and authority. In the case of the Yanamarca valley in Jauja, central highlands of Peru, previous investigations have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Ballantyne.

This paper is inspired by consideration of how charred plant macrofossil assemblages relate to past human lives, as one component of the small artefactual debris on settlements. Cultural decisions regarding activity location, rhythm and ‘waste’ deposition mean there can be wide variation in the archaeological remains of an otherwise identical plant processing activity; this issue is common in archaeology as many classes of material, including plant assemblages, are understood with models from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine Lee.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Women in pastoral nomadic steppe cultures had a higher social status and fluid gender roles than their counterparts in sedentary agricultural regions. Central Asian women (Mongol and Qidan) are historically documented to have made diplomatic, economic, and military decisions in proxy for male relatives. Mortuary evidence for women warriors is inferred from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Whittemore.

This is an abstract from the "Beyond the Ancestors: New Approaches to Andean "Open Sepulchers"" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Modern interaction with ancient human remains is near-ubiquitous in aboveground open-air tombs, used in the Andes during the late prehispanic period (ca. 1000–1532 CE). These spaces are host to a range of activities, from looting and sale of artifacts by professional huaqueros to exploration by local history enthusiasts....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eleanor King. Stephen Epstein.

Over its 25 years, Project Archaeology has helped revolutionize not only how we teach archaeology in pre-collegiate and other settings, but also how professional archaeologists look at public engagement. The program’s original objective was to prevent looting by inculcating a sense of stewardship in children. Its initial success made it the profession’s premier outreach instrument. As various states adapted Project Archaeology to different regional audiences, it became clear that the deep...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Hernández.

In the 19th century there was a large influx of people traveling to Puerto Rico, many stayed in lodgings throughout the capital city of San Juan. This study focuses on the hotels, guest houses and hostels within the walled city, currently known as Old San Juan, during the late 19th century and early 20th century. Using primary sources that include photographs, maps, blueprints and newspaper advertisements, the goal of my research is to establish the location of this type of businesses. Also, to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Marla Toyne.

Traditional archaeological practice involves horizontal mapping and excavations of ancient settlements and cemeteries, but bioarchaeological research of mortuary practices in the Chachapoyas region of northeastern Peru is stymied by the challenging vertical slopes, almost constant rain, and the placement of burial structures on seemingly impossible to reach ledges on exposed rock escarpments. Exploring and registering archaeological vestiges of these cliff cemeteries requires the combination of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Virginia L. Butler. Jessica Miller. Alexander Stevenson. Dongya Yang. Camilla Speller.

This is an abstract from the "Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Given the scale of habitat loss from development associated with the Industrial Age, archaeological faunas pre-dating the modern era often represent animal populations extirpated from their former ranges. For example, anadromous salmonid populations in the Pacific Northwest of North America have become extirpated from much of their range in the past...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Diana Moreiras Reynaga. Jean-Francois Millaire. Fred J. Longstaffe.

We present preliminary interpretations of the residential patterns of Aztec sacrificial subjects from the Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan and the Templo R of Tlatelolco (present-day Mexico City) who died during the Late Postclassic period (A.D. 1400–1519). The study uses oxygen isotope analysis of bioapatite phosphate to assess whether these individuals lived in the Valley of Mexico during the last years of their lives or were brought in from distant Aztec provinces. Tissues analyzed also include...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ann Stodder.

This is an abstract from the "The Future of Bioarchaeology in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper considers the role of CRM-based bioarchaeologists in bioarchaeology as practice and as a realm of research. Doing bioarchaeology in this context invokes professional challenges and responsibilities that transcend the individual project. Bioarchaeologists on the front lines of engagement with descendant communities, corporate...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julien Riel-Salvatore. Fabio Negrino. Claudine Gravel-Miguel.

This is an abstract from the "Hunter-Gatherer Archaeology of Liguria: Recent Research and Insights" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Due to a suite of topographical and geomorphological factors, Liguria, and the Liguro-Provencal arc more generally, is an interesting natural laboratory in which to revisit some of the debates about forager mobility and its analysis that have unfolded over the past several decades. This paper presents an overview of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jose Lopez.

Manuals of American prehistory, divided South America into bio geographical zones, associated with archaeological traditions, and classify the basin of the Río de la Plata, as one marginal area of others with a more defined cultural profile. Systematic research and multidisciplinary projects, have discussed the boundaries of those units of archaeological and cultural analysis, as well as theoretical principles which held it. The basin of the Río de la Plata was associated with the "Pampa"...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jasmine Heckman.

This is an abstract from the "Ideas, Ethical Ideals, and Museum Practice in North American Archaeological Collections" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The federal government is responsible for a huge amount of archaeological collections in the United States, and yet not all of these collections are housed in federally compliant repositories, while many collections are not even known to exist by the agency. But whose problem is this—the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brenna Hassett. Suzanne Pilaar Birch. Rebecca Wragg Sykes. Victoria Herridge.

The TrowelBlazers project is a community-sourced digital archive of short biographies and images of women whose significant contributions to the fields of archaeology, geology, and paleontology have often been overlooked. Originating in a conversation on Twitter between four early-career researchers, the project began life as a tumblr blog designed to share inspirational images and stories of women researchers in the past. Different social media accounts allow us to interact with a number of...