Society for American Archaeology

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patrick Reed. Shelby Anderson. Caelie Butler.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We are conducting a multi-year (2009-2018), multi-disciplinary research project at Inuigniq (Cape Espenberg) to explore changing patterns of human occupation, culture change, and environmental conditions in Northwest Alaska. Our current focus is on the emergence of Birnirk archaeological culture ca. AD 1000, and the question of how Birnirk culture factored...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Owen Mason. Claire Alix. Nancy Bigelow.

Around AD 1000, from near Barrow, the Birnirk culture expanded southward across northwest Alaska, with settlements arising at Point Hope, Cape Krusenstern and Cape Espenberg. The motivation and successful adaptations of Birnirk were furthered by the stormy weather associated with upwelling and glacial expansion, correlative with tree ring, beach ridge and varve sequences across northern Alaska. New interdisciplinary data sets, archaeological and paleoecological, from Cape Espenberg elucidate...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claire Alix. Tony Krus. Lauren E. Y. Norman. Owen K. Mason. Juliette Taïeb.

This is an abstract from the "Arctic Pasts: Dimensions of Change" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The transformation of the Birnirk culture into the Thule culture remains central to the development of modern Inuit peoples across the Arctic. Nevertheless, its chronological definition remains imprecise and contentious despite a century of research since the discovery of the Birnirk site near Utqiagvik and the definition of the Thule culture in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Owen Mason.

This is an abstract from the "Arctic Pasts: Dimensions of Change" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A climate-driven eastward push of Thule migrants remains axiomatic to many arctic archaeologists, associated with presumed warming weather of the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA), by tradition dated ca. AD 1000. Thule researchers implicated a rapid migration by rapacious “over-killing” seal-hunters and whalers entering unoccupied landscapes—increasingly...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Liam Frink. Celeste Giordano.

Modern humans have been living in the Arctic for over 30,000 years and their ability to adapt to the ecological limitations and challenges is relevant to questions of human adaptation and evolution. However, we know very little about the actual technologies and nutritional implications that were necessary to develop in the northern latitudes. Here we focus on two aspects of Arctic dietary practices that are little understood in the literature and yet would have been essential to successful...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karl Taube.

One of the most striking deities of the Aztec pantheon is Ehecatl-Quetzalcoatl, a duck-billed being embodying such ethereal concepts as rain-bringing wind and the breath of life. He is in jarring contrast to Quetzalcoatl, who although embodying the same concepts of wind, is a quetzal-plumed rattlesnake in Aztec thought. This study argues that in contrast to the plumed serpent, Ehecatl-Quetzalcoatl constitutes a relatively recent introduction of an avian wind deity from eastern Mesoamerica into...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacob Welch.

This is an abstract from the "The Role of Women in Mesoamerican Ritual" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Underneath a Classic Maya palace at Ucanha, builders buried a Terminal Preclassic platform outfitted with monumental portraits of rain gods. Analogous architecture appears throughout the Maya lowlands from the Middle Preclassic to Early Classic periods, and several scholars suggest their role in expediting the apotheosis of royal figures into...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Metcalfe. Vandy Bowyer.

Promontory people were proficient bison hunters with a sophisticated understanding of bison ecology. In contrast, modern researchers know relatively little about pre-contact bison ecology in the Great Basin. We combine botanical analysis of dung and isotopic analysis of various substrates (dung, hair, hide, bone) to reconstruct ancient landscapes and bison behaviour during the Promontory occupation. Carbon isotope compositions indicate that a C3-dominated environment existed at the Promontory...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Zedeño.

Euroamericans who encountered northern Plains bison hunters in the late 19th century believed that the Blackfoot held the Rocky Mountains in awe and fear, preferring to remain on the plains even as bison and elk herds dwindled. This incorrect assumption has hampered our ability to understand deep-time relationships between mountain and plains cultural expressions. Although the historic Blackfoot did not dwell in high elevations, the character of their relationship with the Rocky Mountain Front...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jenna Carlson Dietmeier. Michael Fosha. Chris Nelson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The state of South Dakota currently has over thirty recorded bison kill sites. With development, agricultural practices, and natural erosion a threat to many of these sites, the need to identify, evaluate, and protect these and other unrecorded bison kill sites within the state is imminent. To aid in this process, staff from programs of the South Dakota State...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chrissina Burke.

Zooarchaeologists have commonly employed analyses concerning only site formation processes when studying carnivore modification and utilization to North American faunal assemblages. Yet, such processes are rarely discussed beyond descriptions of the presence of tooth marks or overall percentages of elements with modifications. Additionally, limited discussion has occurred with regards to the implications of these data on how humans and carnivores interacted in the past. In this paper, I address...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Byers. Suzann Henrikson.

Over the past several years, efforts to expand our knowledge of the Holocene climate of southern Idaho have been initiated through analyses of the relationships between bison remains recovered from seven cold lava tubes on the eastern Snake River Plain and several paleoenvironmental indicators. Although the mere existence of these unique storage features would suggest that they would always be utilized, we suggest the key variables associated with such use would revolve around fluctuations in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kirsten Tharalson. Matthew E. Hill, Jr..

The Dismal River complex is a protohistoric archaeological complex likely representing an early Apache occupation on the Central Great Plains of North America. A key Dismal River complex site is the Lovitt site (25CH1), located in southwestern Nebraska. Excavations at Lovitt in 1939 revealed the site as a small residential locality with three ephemeral house structures and more than 150 pit features. Recent radiocarbon dating at the site suggests it was likely occupied either in the first half...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Barbier.

Beads made from the Olivella biplicata shell were used as both decoration and a form of currency by the Chumash living in the Santa Barbara Channel region, and large quantities have been recovered from many prehistoric sites throughout Western North America. Many of the bead types were made from different portions of the shell and conform to standardized shapes and sizes. A number of these types have distinctive spatial and temporal distributions in the archaeological record, and based on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Laughton.

This is an abstract from the "Northeast Asian Prehistoric Hunter-Gather Lifeways: Multidisciplinary, Individual Life History Approach" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this dental anthropology project, the use of interproximal wear facets of teeth will be measured and studied to assess changes in facet size between Mesolithic, Neolithic, and Early Bronze Age hunter-fisher-gatherer populations. These populations hail from the Latvian Stone Age...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Hyde.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster details the findings of a contextual analysis of portable material culture, commonly referred to as “small finds” artifacts, collected from 2004 to 2019 at the hinterland Maya community of Medicinal Trail, located in northwestern Belize. The collection from Medicinal Trail comes from a variety of contexts, such as middens, burials, caches, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dawn Hadley. Elizabeth Craig-Atkins.

This is an abstract from the "The Health and Welfare of Children in the Past" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper will discuss the burials of infants and young children in the earliest Christian cemeteries in Anglo-Saxon England (10th and 11th centuries CE). While in earlier pagan periods the burials of the very youngest members of communities are conspicuous by their paucity, the earliest Christian cemeteries have a much more representative...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yuko Kita. Annick Daneels. Alfonso Romo de Vivar.

This is an abstract from the "Plant Exudates and Other Binders, Adhesives, and Coatings in the Americas" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Investigations on monumental earthen architecture in the Classic period La Joya site in Central Veracruz led to the hypothesis that a bitumen additive was used as a stabilizer in construction. The use of bitumen resulted in increased resistance to weathering in a humid tropical environment, as well as control of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bruce Huckell.

Along the western edge of the Rio Grande Valley in Central New Mexico is a huge expanse of late Cenozoic volcanics, including a high-quality hydrothermally altered rhyolite. Colloquially known as Socorro jasper, at least one source of this material was exploited frequently by Clovis groups. This paper describes this source—the Black Canyon quarry—and the physical and geochemical properties of the "jasper" from it. Recent and continuing studies of its use by Clovis groups are reviewed, and its...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stacy Ryan. Riley Duke.

During Archaeology Southwest and University of Arizona’s 2013 and 2014 field school seasons, close to a hundred bifaces were recovered from the Dinwiddie site, a Cliff phase (A.D. 1300-1450) Salado site in southwestern New Mexico. These artifacts include Archaic and late Pueblo period projectile point styles and several bifaces interpreted as having been discarded during the manufacturing process. This poster presents the biface and projectile point analyses results, expanding on a study...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claire St-Germain. Christian Gates St-Pierre. Krista McGrath. Keri Rowsell. Matthew Collins.

Bear bones have been identified in the faunal assemblages of Iroquoian sites of the St. Anicet cluster near Montreal, Quebec. Three village sites will be the focus of this presentation: McDonald, Droulers, and Mailhot-Curran, with comparisons with other Iroquoian sites, especially Hurons and Iroquois. Bear bones are few in the St. Anicet faunal assemblages, but a ZooMS analysis indicates a high frequency of bear bones used in the production of bone projectile points. This unexpected result will...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Lapham. Thomas Whyte.

Historic accounts of Fort San Juan, a Spanish garrison built near the native village of Joara in the late 1560s in western North Carolina, inform us that chiefs from neighboring towns brought "meat and maize" to the soldiers on various occasions. Based on the high proportion of bear in the fort faunal assemblage, it seems likely that the foods gifted to the Spaniards included bear meat. A recent zooarchaeological study suggests that native peoples provisioned the soldiers with some prime bear...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aja Lans. Daniel Sunshine.

This is an abstract from the "Storeroom Taphonomies: Site Formation in the Archaeological Archive" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. University and museum collections containing human remains belonging to members of the African diaspora have recently come under scrutiny and for valid reasons. The curation of the bodies of Black individuals continues to inflict violence and reinforces the notion that Black people are objects, not humans. During the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Oas. R. J. Sinensky.

This is an abstract from the "Enduring Relationships: People, Plants, and the Contributions of Karen R. Adams" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper provides a brief overview of Karen Adams’s career and contributions, with a special emphasis on her extensive research and her legacy as a mentor to decades of junior scholars and budding archaeobotanists. Dr. Adams’s investigations into the long history of people-plant relationships in the US...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Slaughter. Jon Czaplicki.

The Black Mesa Archaeological Project (1967-1987) was undertaken to clear archaeological sites to mine coal for the Navajo Generating Station to provide power for the Bureau of Reclamation’s Central Arizona Project. The original permit for this work expires in 2019. The Bureau of Reclamation is in the process of re-permitting (from 2019-2044) all of the connected features of the project that include the Kayenta Mine on Black Mesa, a railroad, and two large powerlines. This paper will present...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Stokes. Cash Ficke. JoAnna Schultz.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Black Mountain phase (AD 1180-1300) in the Mimbres Mogollon area is an important transition between the cessation of Classic Mimbres pottery production and masonry pueblos to a new suite of pottery types and poured adobe wall pueblos. Debate among Mimbres archaeologists primarily focuses on whether the occupants of Black Mountain phase sites were the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joanna Ostapkowicz. Fiona Brock.

Since 6000 BC, if not earlier, Trinidad has been the gateway into the Caribbean for waves of South American migrants - the first stepping stone in the long chain of islands that make up the archipelago. Its critical position to the settlement of the Caribbean is reflected in its deep archaeological record, documenting the complex interactions between its diverse peoples over millennia. Unique among its archaeological sites is Pitch Lake, one of the largest natural deposits of asphalt in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Mallouf. Erika Blecha.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. An unusual and highly significant Late Prehistoric mortuary feature in eastern Trans-Pecos Texas was discovered in 1992 by a group of relic collectors who carried out an uncontrolled excavation. The feature, which contained 7-9 human interments and over 500 associated objects, consisted of a circular, 6.0 m diameter stacked rock cairn on the summit of a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julie Francis. Mark Willis.

This is an abstract from the "From the Plains to the Plateau: Papers in Honor of James D. Keyser" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Black Rock is an extremely rare, fully pecked rock art site in southwestern Wyoming. It is dominated by unusual anthropomorphic forms and associated abstract/geometric designs, with three identifiable zoomorphic figures (two mountain sheep and one elk). As part of a 1990s dating study, 14C and rock varnish...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sean Dolan.

Archaeologists in the North American Southwest have documented the source provenance of obsidian artifacts throughout the Ancestral Pueblo, Hohokam, and Mimbres Mogollon regions. These results have impacted how we portray obsidian lithic technology, procurement, and social interaction at both macro and micro regional and temporal scales. Despite the methodological and theoretical advances in southwestern archaeological obsidian studies over the years, obsidian from the Casas Grandes region in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexander Bauer. Owen Doonan.

Recent years have witnessed increasing scholarly attention to the Black Sea, a region often considered peripheral to better known "cores" of cultural activity, such as the Mediterranean, Europe, the Near East, and even the Caucasus. Challenging conventional views of the Black Sea as largely disarticulated prior to the arrival of Greek colonists in the 7th Century BCE, this paper argues that ongoing, informal networks of interaction existed across the region during the previous millennia,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Greer.

This is an abstract from the "Thinking with, through, and against Archaeology’s Politics of Knowledge" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists often draw on theories from other disciplines to frame their research, which invariably draws our work into the orbit of larger political debates within and outside the academy. Even a subtle gravitational pull from these political bodies of theory can have substantial effects on how archaeologists...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Greer.

One thing for which Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley is known is its active antebellum ceramic industry. While predominantly German and Scots-Irish peoples colonized the region from the 1730’s onward, it was the Germans who brought their potting traditions to the Valley. By 1745, German potters began to fill local needs for ceramics, a trade which grew in importance over the next century and a half. These vessels took on more than just utilitarian roles, as choosing to purchase locally made ceramics...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Hurst. Caitlin O'Grady.

Black and red are foundational colors in Mesoamerican painting and scribal arts, often derived from easily accessible raw materials. Although their presence is ubiquitous, variations in chemistry and microscopic properties are data that tell a more nuanced story. This paper summarizes analysis of black and red colorants used in Maya wall paintings that contribute to observations regarding local traditions in manufacture, as well as individual variation in artistic practice. Reported results...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tawnya Waggle. Laura Hronec. Jasmine Kidwell. Donald Purdon. Jenna Domeischel.

Blackwater Draw is known world-wide as the type-site for Clovis culture— the first demonstrable evidence of humans hunting mammoths in the New World. However, as a resource of Eastern New Mexico University, Blackwater Draw is also a valuable tool for creating connections between student research and community engagement. Students participate in internships, directed studies, and use the varied components of the site to write their undergraduate capstone papers and graduate theses. Through these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lucas Vetrisano.

Evidence for blade production has been found in the Santa Cruz River basin, with chronologies between ca. 1900 and 1100 years BP, although not all the cases gexhibit the same characteristics. Differential frequencies in blade numbers have been used to argue that the Santa Cruz River was a frontier between human populations, but there is also variability in knapping methods. I will focus on El Sosiego locality, which includes an archaeological site dating to ca. 1900 yr BP and surface materials...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wendy Sutton.

The CCC and other New Deal agencies were active across the Gila National Forest during the 1930s. The North Star Road (which experienced earlier use as a Military Road) runs alongside the Gila Wilderness, the nation’s first wilderness area, established in 1924. The road is now sandwiched between the Gila Wilderness and the Aldo Leopold Wilderness (part of the first Wilderness established in 1964, under the Wilderness Act). Significant work was conducted along the North Star Road by the CCC. How...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Hampson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Historically, research on prehistoric roads in the southwest has been heavily focused on Chaco and the San Juan Basin, however, these enigmatic anomalies extend into the Central and Western Mesa Verde Regions as well. LiDAR data for the Four Corners area has made it possible to peer through the trees and shrubs of the Great Sage Plain and observe the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mya McWilliam.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The cycles of menstruating bodies have long been characterized in terms of impurity, pathology, and socio-spiritual threat both outside and within the field of archaeology. My research makes use of the archaeological record and existing literature to shed light on the experiences of women and menstruants in prehistory outside of these typically assumed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Reed.

The archaeological zone south of Grants, New Mexico and north of Quemado, New Mexico has long represented an enigma for southwestern archaeologists. Straddling the so-called Mogollon-Pueblo boundary and lying south of the boundary between the Pueblos of Acoma and Zuni, its archaeology combines traits of multiple cultural traditions. Detailed recording at sites in the area reveals a mix of architectural approaches including use of adobe, sandstone, and igneous rock—often at the same site. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Attila Gyucha. William Parkinson. Richard Yerkes.

The past two decades have seen a remarkable increase in the number of joint prehistoric archaeological research programs of US and local scholars in Eastern Europe. These collaborative projects are featured by the innovative blend of profoundly different theoretical and methodological traditions. In our introductory paper to the session, with a focus on the Carpathian Basin, we illustrate similarities and differences in North American and Eastern European perspectives and approaches to explore...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tim Riley.

This is an abstract from the "How to Conduct Museum Research and Recent Research Findings in Museum Collections: Posters in Honor of Terry Childs" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Ephraim P. and Dorothy Hickman Pectol Collection, probably the largest single collection of Fremont-associated perishable artifacts, was donated to the Utah State University Eastern Prehistoric Museum in the Spring of 2017. Most of this collection was amassed from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Naomi Cleghorn. Thalassa Matthews. Christopher Shelton.

The exposure of the wide continental shelf of the Agulhas Bank during the gradual regression of the shoreline from 45,000 years ago, culminating in the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), opened up a vast new area for foragers. Humans with well-established coastal resource exploitation strategies would have naturally shifted their foraging range to the south, following the regressing shoreline. During this period, the South African technological record underwent a critical transition from the prepared...

DOCUMENT Citation Only W. James Stemp. Adrian A. Evans.

The increasing adoption of approaches to lithic microwear analysis based on metrology and tribology by archaeologists has provided opportunities to revisit unresolved issues associated with microwear method, such as wear formation processes, the exclusivity of polishes derived from different worked materials, and, as presented in this paper, post-depositional damage and the accuracy and reliability of microwear analysis. In this paper, we discuss the results of blind-tests performed on chipped...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cecelia Klein.

Scholars have invariably interpreted the blindfolds worn by certain figures in Aztec painted manuscripts as a sign of—in their words—"transgression," "sin," and "punishment." This talk challenges the simplicity and inherent Eurocentrism of that reading. It is true that the Aztecs perceived a person’s mistakes to plunge him into darkness and chaos, and that blindfolds, at one level, symbolized that disorder. The cause of a moral error, however, was embodied by certain objects and substances that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Billie Follensbee. Allison Robbins. Sammie Hernandez. Alexandra Thrower. Nicholas Deckard.

Among the most enigmatic artifacts to emerge from Formative period Gulf Coast deposits are thousands of small, roughly rectangular cubes of iron ore that are perforated in a consistent, t-shaped pattern. Numerous hypotheses have been suggested for the function and meaning of these artifacts, including that they may have served as beads that were strung together as helmet decorations; as objects that were strung together to serve as a sort of armor or mail; as tiny hammers for chipping obsidian;...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan McNutt. Camilla Damlund.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the American Civil War, Glasgow-built blockade runners emerged as crucial supply conduits to the Confederacy, prolonging the conflict and sustaining chattel slavery by clandestinely running cargo into Confederate ports. This paper delves into the historical archaeology of blockade runner cargos, an area relatively unexplored beyond shipwrecks. It...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Gillespie.

La Venta, the Middle Formative Olmec capital, is famous for its unique structured deposits composed of thousands of serpentine blocks. The discovery of these "massive offerings" along with caches of fine jade artifacts was taken as evidence of a powerful ruling class who controlled this wealth and commanded the labor of countless commoners to bring the serpentine to La Venta, shape it into standardized forms, and bury it in a ritual precinct. This paper challenges that conventional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angel González López. Jeremy Coltman. Karl A. Taube. Travis Stanton.

This is an abstract from the "New Perspectives on Ritual Violence and Related Human Body Treatments in Ancient Mesoamerica" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Heart sacrifice constituted one of the most basic yet fundamental tenets of Mesoamerican ritual practice. At Early Postclassic Chichen Itza, as with the later Aztec of Tenochtitlan, hearts and blood were offered to the bellicose solar deity whose daily journey through the sky not only depended...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Conner Wiktorowicz. Bettina Arnold. John Wiktorowicz. Alexander Kurosky.

This paper presents the results of a proteomic analysis (protein-based mass spectrometry) of the contents of six ceramic vessels excavated from a burial mound near the Heuneburg, an early Iron Age (640-400 BC) hillfort in southwest Germany. One hundred and sixty eight proteins from human, animal, and microbial sources were identified with high confidence and low false discovery rate, demonstrating the suitability of proteomics for discovery-based residue analysis in untreated prehistoric...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bethany Potter. Caroline Kisielinski. Justin Tackney. Dennis O'Rourke. Frederic Sellet.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Species detection using DNA recovered from lithic artifacts could indicate the manner in which tools were utilized and ultimately enhance our understanding of the mobility strategies and subsistence patterns employed by past peoples. Geneticists and archaeologists in the 1980s and 1990s managed to successfully extract DNA from lithics, using both modern...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephanie Halmhofer.

In May 2015, a disturbed burial was uncovered in Garden Bay, British Columbia, within close proximity to the large shíshálh village site of Sexwamin (DjSa-3). Found in association with the burial were 244 intact smooth, unadorned mold-blown (SUMB) glass beads and 40 SUMB glass bead fragments. Due to their extremely fragile nature, blown glass beads are rare in archaeological contexts and the beads from Garden Bay are from one of only five sites in North America where SUMB glass beads have been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sean Dolan.

Multiple lines of anthropological evidence demonstrate people moved from the northern San Juan region into the Pajarito Plateau in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries A.D. This Coalition to Classic period transition was a time of immense demographic and social reorganization that shaped the historical and cultural trajectories for future of Ancestral Pueblo people. As a consequence of the influx of diasporic households, how did this transformation affect traditions of obsidian...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bruce Huckell. Nadine Navarro. Christopher Merriman. Joseph Birkmann. Steven Shackley.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Opportunities to learn more about Clovis technological behavior at lithic material procurement and workshop sites are rare, particularly in the Southwest. The Blue Canyon site is a rare example of such a site—an artifact scatter covering some 16,000 m2 and consisting of Clovis projectile points and preforms, end scrapers, bifaces, and lithic debitage...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Luisa Aebersold. Tim Beach. Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach. Tom Guderjan. Fred Valdez.

Early to mid-Holocene humans domesticated a wide variety of plants and animals, which widely changed societies and environments around the world. The Archaic period in the Maya Lowlands was suited for this transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture with its abundant resources such as edible wild plants and animals, fertile soils, and abundant freshwater. To better understand long-term societal and environmental changes by early inhabitants, we studied sedimentation and paleosols in a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa DeLeonardis. Dawn Kriss. Ellen Howe. Judith Levinson. Adriana Rizzo.

This is an abstract from the "Plant Exudates and Other Binders, Adhesives, and Coatings in the Americas" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Indigo (*Indigofera) is a recognized plant exudate employed in cloth dyes to produce the color blue. In Andean South America, indigoid dyes have been identified in textiles as early as about 4200 BCE. While in other parts of the Americas the plant is utilized as a ceramic pigment (e.g., “Maya Blue”), in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emiliano Melgar. Emiliano Gallaga.

Since the beginning of Mesoamerican societies, the elites employed prestige goods to display their power and status. At Chiapa de Corzo (Chiapas, México), a Formative period site that lasted until the late Classic, the archaeologist recovered a group of ornaments crafted on bluish stones that contrasts with the common greenstone objects found at the tombs. In this paper, we present the mineralogical identification and technological analysis of them in order to discuss their local or foreign...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine Beaule.

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. This paper addresses the impact of conquest and colonialism on indigenous Andean peoples’ clothing styles and textile motifs in the central Andes, using examples from elsewhere in Latin America and beyond to contextualize documented patterns. Comparing Prehispanic and colonial period examples, I use several classes of material culture...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lindsay Shepard. Christopher Schwartz. Will Russell. Robert Weiner. Ben Nelson.

Intricately-crafted mosaics are prevalent among blue-green stone artifacts created in prehispanic Mesoamerica, but are rarer in the prehistoric United States Southwest and Northwestern Mexico (SW/NW). Because they occur earlier in Mesoamerica and are the most Mesoamerican-like of the SW/NW blue-green stone creations, we propose that the production and use of these artifacts in the SW/NW was derived from Mesoamerica. We describe the degree to which mosaics manufactured in the SW/NW resemble and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lauriane Bourgeon. Rolfe Mandel.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Following its discovery and excavation in the 1970-1980’s, the Bluefish Caves site (northern Yukon Territory, Canada) yielded a small number of stone artifacts and thousands of vertebrate remains buried in late Pleistocene loess. Preliminary taphonomic observations suggested that modern humans visited the caves about 30,000 years ago, raising considerable...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lauren Norman. Rolfe Mandel. Lauriane Bourgeon. Caronline Kisielinski. Justin Holcomb.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology of Alaska, the Gateway to the Americas" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Originally excavated by Jacques Cinq-Mars in the 1970s and 1980s, Bluefish Caves, Yukon Territory, yielded artifacts and faunal remains. Cinq-Mars’s chronology for human occupation at the site dates to as early as ca. 24 ka and has been corroborated by AMS 14C-dated cut-marked bones. These findings support the genetic “Beringian...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Till. Winston Hurst.

The valley of Bluff, Utah, is one of many localities in southeast Utah where the archaeological record may show evidence of a succession of Puebloan community centers from the AD 500s through the 1200s (Basketmaker III – Pueblo III periods). These remains can be (1) the formation and dissolution of successive, independent, econocentric communities that came and went in a location with economically advantageous qualities (water and arable land); or (2) a single, persistent, sociocentric community...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joseph Curran.

Conflict archaeology has recently begun to focus on the effect of warfare on hunter-gatherers. A key issue in Southern California revolves around the effectiveness of indigenous weaponry. Numerous accounts describe club-like weapons as well as bows and arrows. Little archaeological evidence, however, is available on the role and impact of these weapons on conflict. This paper reports on experiments designed to document trauma inflicted by weapons replicated from archaeological and museum...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ella Goulding. Anena Majumdar. Hwajung Kim. Erin Riggs.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There has been a serious reckoning with problematic histories in our discipline, which have involved extractive research—outsiders’ removal of objects and knowledge from local communities. Increasingly, researchers are attempting to address the harms perpetuated by these histories by better serving communities. Often, however, insider/outsider...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kia Taylor Riccio.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster presentation complicates the cultural and temporal divisions of pottery types in the Caribbean. Specifically, this work seeks to elucidate the overlapping nature of Kalinago, Taíno, European, and Maroon pottery styles in the Lesser Antilles. Using archaeological material and data from La Soye, Dominica, and reference works from across the Lesser...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Hampton.

This is an abstract from the "Digitizing Archaeological Practice: Education and Outreach in the Archaeogaming Subdiscipline" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. How do we tell stories about the past? Historical-themed board games provide one such avenue for transmitting history. With the rise of independent publishers and crowdsourced publishing, recent opportunities to broaden the narrative and creative scope of these types of games have expanded...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bettina Schulz Paulsson.

This is an abstract from the "Negotiating Watery Worlds: Impacts and Implications of the Use of Watercraft in Small-Scale Societies" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent research into megalithic temporality, mobility, and symbolic identity suggests that the rise of long-distance maritime journeys began in Europe as early as the megalithic era. Megaliths emerged in northwest France (~4700–4200 cal BC) and then spread over the seaways along...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bruce Huckell. Chris Merriman. Matthew O'Brien.

Shallow open-air Folsom sites in central New Mexico have been known for six decades, but have received little investigation; most are known only from surface collection. Their post-occupational geomorphic histories of erosional exposure and reburial, coupled with limited archaeological investigation, pose significant challenges to efforts to examine and interpret Folsom intra-site activity organization. We report on our efforts to detect and make sense of patterning in the distribution of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Johnson.

This is an abstract from the "The State of the Art in Medieval European Archaeology: New Discoveries, Future Directions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper discussed the results of buildings and landscape survey at Bodiam Castle, SE England, 2010-2015. Bodiam is a much discussed site, a classic case study in the 'defense versus status' debate in castle studies. Our project moved beyond this false and misleading binary framing of a tired...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Cerezo-Román.

Inhumation and cremation usually are studied in isolation regardless of the fact that they may be practiced in the same culture and time period. Among the Tucson Basin Hohokam in the Prehispanic American Southwest cremation was the main funeral custom and normative and non-normative inhumations were practiced with very low frequencies throughout the Preclassic (A.D. 700-1150) and Classic (A.D. 1150-1450/1500) periods. This paper explores changes through time in non-normative burial customs of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Hall.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Historic-era skeletal samples from the United States routinely reflect marginalized and vulnerable populations, many of which were also subject to dissection, a partible practice widely considered a form of desecration in the nineteenth century. Using historic and osteological data from a skeletal assemblage (MNI=25) at Point San Jose in San Francisco, CA (AD...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gordon Rakita. Adrianne Offenbecker. Kyle Waller.

This is an abstract from the "From Individual Bodies to Bodies of Social Theory: Exploring Ontologies of the Americas" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ethnographic descriptions of historic and contemporary peoples with clear connections to prehistoric cultural groups offer ready sources to explore non-Western views of reality. Researchers working in the American Southwest and much of Mesoamerica benefit from robust ethnographic accounts that can be...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sara L. Juengst.

This is an abstract from the "Cooperative Bodies: Bioarchaeology and Non-ranked Societies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Power differences and status are most commonly associated with hierarchy; however, heterarchy, or horizontal power differentiation, is another common way of organizing complex communities. Rather than the vertical ranking commonly associated with hierarchy, heterarchy may include differential or shared access to power at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carrie Brezine.

The textiles of Magdalena de Cao Viejo provide an opportunity to study technological changes in one coastal Andean settlement between the late 16th and the early 18th century. As a colonial reducción, Magdalena was home to people of both Andean and Spanish descent. Among the more than 3,000 textile artifacts are examples of cloth woven with pre-Columbian methods and indigenous fibers, fabrics created on European-style floor looms, and examples which combine Andean and European techniques and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Evin Grody.

This is an abstract from the "Frontiers in Animal Management: Unconventional Species, New Methods, and Understudied Regions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While our relationship encompasses far more than just the dinner menu, food is one of the key ways in which human and animals lives and bodies directly shape one another. Indeed, beyond just the act of eating, how human and animal bodies meet in the context of procurement and processing can...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charles Morse. Meredith Chesson.

Though death may seem an instantaneous experience, the treatment of death by a mortuary community provides implications for activity and identity that stretch far beyond a stilled heart. Archaeologically, we can use evidence associated with mortuary practices to inform us about lifeways and beliefs of the interred and the community at large. Mortuary contexts from the Early Bronze I (3500 – 3100 BCE) at Bab adh-Dhra’ provide just such an opportunity. The site, situated in the Southern Ghor...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elsa Tomasto-Cagigao. Peters Ann.

Until recently, our understanding of Paracas Necropolis was based on objects divorced form their contextual data. Research in archives and museum collections has allowed us to re-link object with context, and a complete restudy has been carried out for some gravelots. In these cases, systematic bioanthropological observations have provided more reliable and more detailed information on the persons at the center of the mortuary bundle. Age and biological sex have been re-evaluated based on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claire K. Maass.

From its arrival in Lima in 1709 until the abolition of slavery in 1854, La Orden de la Buena Muerte was among the largest slaveholders in the sugar industry of Cañete, Peru. Moreover, as an order explicitly founded to oversee the physical and spiritual well-being of marginalized communities, the Buena Muerte also played a critical role in public health programs throughout the region. These activities were grounded in fundamentally different, and often opposing, perspectives towards the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wesley Vanosdall. Ryann Seifers. Rick Weathermon.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In late spring 2018, a team of anthropology students and faculty from the University of Wyoming, with support from the Wyoming Military at Camp Guernsey Training Base, recovered a historical burial from an eroding cutbank near Emigrant’s Washtub Spring. Members of the Oregon-California Trails Association marked the location based on interpretations of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Diana Loren.

This is an abstract from the "Culturing the Body: Prehistoric Perspectives on Identity and Sociality" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The body is so many things simultaneously. It is an historical object, a site of experience and violence, a set of behaviors, and is both material and metaphysical. We cannot conceive of history without bodies. Bodily adornments add further nuances that are personal, symbolic, political, situational, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ariane Thomas. Matthew E. Hill Jr.. Chris Widga. Martin Welker. Andrew Kitchen.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dogs of North America share a long history of interaction with humans, yet little is known about how humans managed their dogs prior to modern breeding practices that became popular during the sixteenth century. European colonists recognized a few indigenous dog “breeds” and described these dogs as primarily “wolf-like” in appearance and phenotypically...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Vibeke Viestad.

This is an abstract from the "Body Modification: Examples and Explanations" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Body modifications are a well-known aspect of various cultural practices among the historically and ethnographically known San hunter-gatherers of Southern Africa, but not until recently have such practices been analyzed within an interpretative framework that gives reason to suggest that they were mostly performed to ensure harmonious...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Franz Manni. Laurence Glémarec. Liliana Huet. Martin Friess.

This is an abstract from the "Body Modification: Examples and Explanations" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Musée de l’Homme hosts several collections corresponding to body modification practices. The collections correspond to body piercing (prehistoric artifacts, casts of living individuals from the nineteenth century, and early photographic images) and to other types of body modification: intentional cranial modifications of various types and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Keely Yanito.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the Jornada Mogollon cultural area, anthropomorphic representation in rock art and ceramics provides evidence for prehistoric body modification, specifically tattooing. This presentation will focus on the history of the Jumanos, Tompiro and the Mansos. When the Spanish arrived in El Paso in the 14th century, they encountered the Manso, Jumanos, Tompiro...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Osterholtz.

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. Deb Martin’s legacy is one of exposing her students and colleagues to new theoretical models, asking everyone to contextualize bioarchaeological data within robust theoretical frameworks. Through Dr. Martin’s mentorship, I began to think of the body differently. The human body can be viewed as an artifact of cultural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ann Peters.

This is an abstract from the "Cordage, Yarn, and Associated Paraphernalia" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In study of Andean archaeological textiles, a focus on decorative “high status” objects too often produces a distorted vision of ancient textile traditions, obscuring the textile forms most commonly found in an excavated assemblage. Ethnoarchaeological study by Cases (2020) has begun to address this problem by looking at production contexts in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Harper Wall.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The anaerobic and highly acidic nature of peat bogs produces a perfect environment for preservation. Biological material which would usually decay, such as human tissue, is kept stagnant unable to decompose thus allowing for preserved individuals and items to be discovered. Peat bogs located in both modern-day Ireland and Scotland have produced an unusual...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott MacEachern.

To this point, most analyses of Boko Haram have stressed its origins in Salafi/Wahhabi radicalism in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State in northeastern Nigeria. Equally important to the development of this organisation, however, has been its utilisation of frontier zones in the Lake Chad Basin, as refuges and areas for the development of political and military power. In this paper, I will argue that aspects of Boko Haram activities can be profitably understood through the deep-time...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victoria Roberts.

This is an abstract from the "The Art of Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bold Line Geometric is one of five currently identified rock art styles in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas. It has previously been described as thick, glossy pigment applied in bold lines, geometric shapes, and globular anthropomorphic and zoomorphic forms. In 1965, David Gebhard laid the ground work for the initial description and definition of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kirsten Mink. Anna Novotny. Gabe Wroble.

This is an abstract from the "“The Center and the Edge”: How the Archaeology of Belize Is Foundational for Understanding the Ancient Maya, Part II" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bioarchaeological studies have taken a central role in developing our current understanding of the sociopolitical and economic organization of the ancient Maya. This is in large part due to advances in methods and theory that allow a deeper contextualization of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Miller.

This is an abstract from the "Decipherment, Digs, and Discourse: Honoring Stephen Houston's Contributions to Maya Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One might think that the 2013 publication of Miller and Brittenham on Bonampak would have closed discussion of these paintings for a few years. But the complexity and richness of the subject continues to yield both details and to add to the big picture of the three-room program of late 8th...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amelie Guindon.

The Midi Toulousain area shows a distinctive organisation of its rural ceramic crafts during the early modern period. Three production centers made pottery, imitating each other’s decorative styles and techniques. Distribution patterns are keys to understanding the social and economic factors that underlie regional competition in production and marketing. We believe that Midi Toulousain pottery production fits into the much larger socioeconomic sphere of the French Atlantic. This pottery was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steve Fox. Jaime Awe.

Previous archaeological investigations of terminus groups in the Maya Lowlands concluded that these architectural complexes served either cosmological, ritual, or economic purposes. In an effort to test these models, we investigated causeway terminus groups at Cahal Pech and Baking Pot. Subsequent comparisons of the Cahal Pech and Baking Pot data with that from other sites in the Belize Valley, Caracol and Tikal, strongly suggest that while there was some regional diversity in the significance...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Hallett. Jacopo Niccolo Cerasoni.

This is an abstract from the "Animal Resources in Experimental Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bone has been used as a raw material for a range of activities for at least two million years. The criteria for determining whether a bone was used—or shaped and then used—have been established by archaeologists following decades of experimental research. In contrast, the antiquity of using bone for pressure flaking stone is less well...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kaitlin Stanley.

Situated in Alaska’s eastern Aleutian Islands on Unalaska Island, the Summer Bay site dates to 2,000 years BP. Over 700 osseous objects representing various manufacture and use stages have been recovered. Among these are harpoons, fish hooks, labrets, points, wedges, awls, and needles. These are primarily made from sea mammals and avifauna. Although Summer Bay represents one of the most secure dates of the Amaknak Phase (3,000 to 1,000 years BP), minimal research has been done to better...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heleinna Cruz. Jaime Ullinger. László Paja.

Bronze Age Hungary saw the advancement of trade which may have been a cause of the movement from egalitarian societies to more complex societies with increasing social inequality. Social inequality between regions in Hungary may be reflected in variation among funeral customs. Excavations from Békés 103, a Bronze Age cemetery in south-eastern Hungary, have uncovered 68 burials, most of which are cremations. This study focuses on color analysis (identified by Munsell Soil Color Charts) of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Byers. Joan Coltrain.

In this poster, we build on an earlier study by using stable isotope data extracted from bone carbonate to evaluate the hypothesis that two behaviorally distinct groups of people, Paleo- and Neo-Aleut, occupied the eastern Aleutians after 1000 BP. This study focuses on directly dated burial assemblages from Chaluka midden, Ship Rock Island and Kagamil Island. We use the SISUS linear mixing model informed by isotopic data from Aleut faunal assemblages to address temporal and spatial variation in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Evelyn Breda.

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. The desire to own human skeletal remains has been prevalent for many years; in our modern technological age avenues for this market have exploded across the internet. This research focuses on Facebook groups dedicated to oddity...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julia Giblin. Jaime Ullinger. Naomi Gorero. Jillian Clark. Melissa Trudeau.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Bronze Age Körös Off-Tell Archaeology Project (BAKOTA) has excavated 84 burials from a Bronze Age cemetery (Békés 103) located in the Lower Körös Basin in Eastern Hungary. Radiocarbon dates indicate that the cemetery was used for several hundred years, with the most active phase between 1600 and 1280 cal BC, a time that has been associated with the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only YI-LING LIN.

This paper will discuss recent analysis of worked animal bone discovered at the late Shang Xinanzhuang site, and the manufacture strategies and raw materials manipulations within different locations in Anyang, Henan. Xinanzhuang is considered to be associated with the industrial-scale boneworkshop at Tiesanlu site because of the close proximity between the two sites. Previous studies on bone artifacts from Tiesanlu provide some understanding of craft production systems during the late Shang...