Society for American Archaeology

DOCUMENT Citation Only Terrance Martin.

Analyses of the large faunal assemblage from the eighteenth-century Fort St. Joseph site (20BE23) in Berrien County, Michigan, are becoming more concerned with the question of "food or furs?" With over 70% of the identified animal remains coming from white-tailed deer, we are trying to discern whether broken longbones are the result of removal of marrow for subsistence, or if they may have also been used to prepare hides. In contrast to late prehistoric and early historic Native American sites...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Synstelien. Heli Maijanen.

Bone modifications by chewing insects and their larvae have been described for several families. We report extensive bone damage due to feeding of the American cockroach (Periplaneta americana), a close relative of termites. Roaches were seen feeding on thawing vertebrate remains in a processing room, in which skeletons were being prepared for entry into a comparative collection. A study of roach gnawing was initiated after a number of defleshed mammal bones were discovered extensively modified....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Gutierrez. Nahuel Scheifler. Cristian Kaufmann. Daniel Rafuse. Agustina Massigoge.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study is part of an actualistic taphonomic project designed to characterize the bone modification patterns generated by native South American carnivores. We present the results of the bone modifications (skeletal representation, breakage, and tooth marks) produced by a captive lesser grison (Mustelidae: *Galictis cuja) that was fed 10 wild guinea pigs...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Merritt. Monica Avilez. Jonathan Reeves.

Fossil bone surface assemblages include differential specimen preservation (weathering stage, cortical surface exfoliation, polish, roundedness, fracture type) and identifiability (taxonomic or anatomical precision). Three 1x1 meter inventory squares placed on steep, moderate, and minimally sloping areas of a fossiliferous outcrop test whether outcrop shape is a megabias that influences assemblage attributes. A digital elevation model created from drone-captured aerial imagery describes outcrop...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sabrina Agarwal.

The morphology of the whole skeleton is crafted over the life course by bone remodeling across its skeletal surfaces: the endosteal surface of its trabeculae, and on the periosteal, endocortical, and intracortical surfaces of its cortex. The behavior of each of these surfaces differs between individuals and populations resulting in some understood differences in bone morphology across human groups. But the skeletal surfaces are also differentially influenced during growth, aging, reproduction,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Nowell. Ashley Hampton.

Excavations of Housepit 54 in the Bridge River village recovered an immense amount of cultural material that has contributed to a better understanding of the lifeways of its past inhabitants. The faunal assemblage contains a number of items tentatively identified as bone tools. This poster outlines the results of research aimed at understanding the effects of taphonomic and cultural processes associated with the formation of bone tool assemblages. Implications are drawn regarding activity...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Wake.

This is an abstract from the "AD 1150 to the Present: Ancient Political Economy to Contemporary Materiality—Archaeological Anthropology in Honor of Jeanne E. Arnold" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Fragmented bits of worked bone are relatively common in coastal California habitation refuse—or shell middens. I examine collections of worked bone from various mainland and Channel Island archaeological sites with a focus on understanding the role of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bruce Manzano. Carolyn Rock.

This poster discusses patterns of bone tool production and use in light of results from recent testing at six sites in the interior of southern Florida. More than 100 worked bone tools and production wastage were identified from the six sites dating from the Archaic to the Historic periods. The artifacts reveal patterns of bone tool production from various elements of Chondrichthyes (cartilaginous fishes), Reptilia, Aves, and Mammalia. Functional interpretations of the bone tools and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Coutros. Brooke Luokkala.

This is an abstract from the "African Archaeology throughout the Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Worked bone has a long history across the African continent, occurring as early as the Middle Stone Age in eastern and southern Africa. However, since the beginning of the Holocene, barbed and un-barbed points – associated with the so-called ‘African Aqualithic’ peaking at 9,000 BP – have likewise been recovered from sites within Sahelian and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joshua Howard. Caroline Funk. Debra G. Corbett. Brian W. Hoffman.

Aleut bone tools offer a unique opportunity to study Aleut identity, relational ecology, interaction with seascape, tool technology, materiality, and subsistence strategies. A study of the Rat Islands was conducted in 2003 and 2009 by the Rat Islands Research Project to examine the Aleut sites found in the area in order to better understand the subsistence strategies, use of the environment, and the importance of landscape and seascape to the Aleut culture. During this study, due to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Engelbrecht. Bruce Jamieson.

In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries St. Lawrence Iroquoian populations gradually decline and disappear from their homeland at the same period that the Wendat and Iroquois Confederacies are evolving. One of the most striking differences between St. Lawrence Iroquoian assemblages and those of surrounding groups is the general absence of stone arrow points on the former. This paper considers the advantages and disadvantages of bone or antler versus stone tipped arrows. We argue that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Autumn Myerscough.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Through conducting a microwear analysis, I argue that the use wear of the bone tools examined will determine their functional use. The collections of bone tools for this study are from various Mimbres (AD 200–1130) and Chacoan (AD 850–1250) sites (located in the North American Southwest). Many bone artifacts with narrow, pointed distal ends are defined as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Isabella Medina. Inés Zazueta. Vera Tiesler.

This is an abstract from the "A Session in Memory of William J. Folan: Cities, Settlement, and Climate" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Mayanist community recalls a close colleague and tireless promoter of Maya archaeology, Dr. Folan. The Bioarchaeology Laboratory of the Autonomous University of Yucatan remembers him with great affection and a deep appreciation of a remarkable person, scholar, and student mentor. He ably led the archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Garrison.

There are bones of a bridge in Lansing exposed on the muddy banks of the Grand. In this cityscape, a "Sortatropolis", a once urban space now emaciated and exhausted. There would have been nothing special about this bridge to make its 1987 demolition, its absence, a remarkable tragedy, except that its disappearance can be directly connected to the long exhale of this once thriving capital. The Sortatropolis is haunted by the ghosts of auto industry moguls, lumber barons, and boot-strapping...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jean Hudson. Roberta Boczkiewicz. Brian Billman. Jesus Briceño.

Cerro la Virgen (CLV) is a town-sized LIP site located in the Moche Valley a few kilometers from Chan Chan, the administrative and political center of the Andean polity of Chimu. Previous studies have focused on ceramics and regional politics (Keatinge 1974, 1975), the kinds of plant and animal remains found in residential dumps (Pozorski 1976, 1979; Billman et al in press), and multiple lines of evidence for the nature of the political relationship between the residents of CLV and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Jolly.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bodies formed a significant component of the ritual practice at Waywaka, an early farming village in the Andean highlands (Andahuaylas, Apurímac, Peru) that was occupied from 1600 BC - AD 700. Recent excavations from 2019 show that the village's early inhabitants buried their dead in their domestic areas and used parts of bodies of the dead in various ways...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Duncan Chappell. damien huffer.

Within the global antiquities trade, especially that (significant) portion of it conducted online, the size and scope of the trade in archaeological and ethnographic human remains continues to be poorly known. In 2014, the authors researched and published the first comprehensive update of what is known about the online component of this trade c. 2013, conducting common search engine queries over two months to creating a database to record recent or ongoing sales, and then explore questions of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rick Schulting. Joanna Ostapkowicz. Michael Pateman. William Keegan. Fiona Brock.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in the Archaeology of the Bahama Archipelago" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Bahamas were among the last islands to be settled in the Caribbean, with no known occupation prior to ca. AD 600 and reportedly complete depopulation by ca. AD 1520. The constrained island setting and restricted timescale provides an excellent opportunity to address a range of questions relating to island adaptations, all...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Theo Kassebaum.

This is an abstract from the "Animal Bones to Human Behavior" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sheep (*Ovis aries) and goats (*Capra hircus) are foundational to the discussion of the spread of domestication across Anatolia and southeastern Europe, but the similarity of their archaeological remains poses a major hurdle to understanding species-specific management practices. Responding to the difficulty in separating caprines by species, this paper...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan McRae. Gary Aronsen. Erin Gredell.

Efforts to repatriate Native American human remains and artifacts are of immediate importance to American archaeology. Excavated in the early 20th century, Casuarina Mound (8-Br-0122) was first dated to the Malabar II period (750-1565CE) by Irving Rouse in his 1951 publication A Survey of Indian River Archaeology, Florida. Historical accounts describe the removal of at least 112 skeletons and numerous funerary objects from three successive interments. A small subset of this material was donated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard McAuliffe.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Eagle Nest Canyon, Texas: Papers in Honor of Jack and Wilmuth Skiles" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bonfire Shelter in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas provides evidence of sporadic human occupation of the site across the Archaic period. The deposits known as the Intermediate Horizon, bound by two bison bone beds dating to ca. 12,000 BP and 2500 BP, do not reflect the persistent site...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Ramsey.

This is an abstract from the "The Big Bend Complex: Landscapes of History" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bonfire Shelter is a rockshelter in Eagle Nest Canyon, a short tributary of the Rio Grande in West Texas, that contains three distinct bone beds of varying ages. The middle bone bed, Bone Bed 2, is a Paleoindian-aged deposit dating to ~12,000 years BP. Bone Bed 2 was originally interpreted as the remains of one or more bison mass kills;...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rafael Corteletti. Paulo DeBlasis.

Bonin site is one of many pit house villages located in Santa Catarina state, southern Brazilian highlands. It has been excavated since 2011. In this paper, we aim to present new data on pottery analysis, chronology, and spatial analysis which are suggesting a village plan organized in a circular shape. Dated from 13th to 17th centuries this village has 23 pit structures, many of them used as pit ovens, filled with basalt rocks and ceramic vessels. Micro-botanical remains analysis reveals the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Savanna Moore.

This is an abstract from the "Partners at Work: Promoting Archaeology and Collaboration in the Chiricahua Mountains" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the goals of the Student Conservation Association (SCA) is to develop the next generation of conservation leaders. While the focus is often on natural resources, cultural resources, as a nonrenewable resource, have, until recently, been neglected. Chiricahua NM has been partnering with the SCA...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Munro. F. Joan Mathien.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the San Juan basin, two multi-century ancestral Pueblo architectural traditions are well documented: orientations to the south-southeast and to the cardinal directions. Beginning in 2007, new surveys at 21 Great Houses and two stand-alone Great Kivas were conducted under a series of NPS and BLM permits. These surveys confirmed the two aforementioned...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joshua Keene. Ted Goebel.

Though often considered parts of two different culture areas, the upper Snake River Plain of southeastern Idaho and the Bonneville Basin of the eastern Great Basin may have more similarities in land use and lithic technology than usually thought. In fact, commonalities can be easily documented in projectile point chronologies, subsistence patterns, and even the use of some of the same obsidian sources. In this paper, we consider the early Archaic period, when comparable ecological changes...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sveta Yamin-Pasternak. Igor Pasternak.

This is an abstract from the "Celebrating Anna Kerttula's Contributions to Northern Research" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Nearly three decades after her dissertation fieldwork in the village of Sireniki, which she conducted in the late Soviet period, anthropologist Anna Kerttula de Echave continues to be closely entangled within the life and social relationships of the community. In many Sireniki households, Anna’s book 'Antler on the Sea: the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Weston McCool.

This is an abstract from the "Global Perspectives on Human Population Dynamics, Innovation, and Ecosystem Change" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With the transition to agricultural economies human populations underwent profound changes including, in many regions, rapid growth accompanied by marked volatility. The Colorado Plateau in western North America offers unique insights into volatile population dynamics, as it represents one of the few...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Luisa Escobar. Guido Pezzarossi.

Located in the cacao-rich Pacific piedmont region of Guatemala, the colonial period Kaqchikel Maya community of San Pedro Aguacatepeque produced cacao for the Iximche Kaqchikel polity prior to colonization. With the 16th century global cacao boom that followed Spanish colonization, cacao producing communities in the region became critical sources of this increasingly desired regional and global exchange good. The bust of the global cacao market in the latter part of the century, coupled with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Clark.

In the spring of 2011, the Missouri River Mainstem received unprecedented combination of snow melt and rain causing widespread flooding unseen since the construction of the Missouri River Dams. One of the consequences of the flooding was damage to archaeological sites located on the lands surrounding the reservoirs. As a result, South Dakota State Historical Society (SDSHS) partnered with the University of Arkansas Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies (CAST) to assess potential damages...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine VanPool. MacLaren Law-de-Lauriston. Heidi Noneman. Andrew Fernandez.

Ceramic ethnographic research from Africa shows that the fermenting of alcohol in low-fired pottery results in a variety of tribochemical processes, which cause pitting in the interior of the vessel. Jars and sherds from the Casas Grandes region (AD 1200-1450) have similar pitting, causing researchers to propose that either alcohol or hominy was made in these jars. To evaluate these hypotheses we created low-fired vessels and used them for boiling water, making hominy, fermenting corn (corn...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Narges Bayani.

How frontiers and borders are conceptualized in archaeology is critically influenced by the approaches and perspectives in culture contact research. Absence of written documents from Bronze Age Central Asia severely limits the application of such theories. The nature of the Bronze Age civilization of Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC) in Central Asia, and its dispersion to neighboring NE Iran has been a long-lasting question in study of Prehistoric Western Asia. This paper aims to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Myrtle Shock. Filippo Stampanoni Bassi.

Amazonian occupations from 2500 BP to contact have been characterized into expansive traditions based on ceramic vessels. Meanwhile, ethnographic records point to diverse ethnic groups residing across the basin. Seeking variables that may be associated with pre-columbian cultural diversity we explore a possible intersection between groups, an area located at the headwaters of five tributaries to the Negro and Amazon Rivers. Archaeological data deriving from analyses of settlement structure,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nathan Acebo.

Post European contact the historicity of the Santa Ana Mountain landscape of Orange County, California has been popularly constructed around the narratives of bucolic mission and ranch life, and that of the "wild frontier". The interplay between both histories has contributed to a memorialization of the Santa Ana Mountains as a borderland space during the Spanish, Mexican and American colonial eras that deemphasizes indigenous social life. This paper seeks to complicate the historical concept of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Evan Muzzall. Alfredo Coppa.

Territorial and cultural boundaries remain some of the most elusive and compelling areas of anthropological study. We examine biological continuity at Campovalano (Teramo, Abruzzo, Italy) to highlight ways that biology can be used to elucidate interpretations of frontiers and borderlands. We test the hypothesis that geographic location strongly influenced biological continuity in Italian history. Eighteen cranial (n=278) and five maxillary dental (n=377) metric traits, and dental morphological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lourdes Henebry-DeLeon.

In looking at all available population specific data for the Columbia Plateau, the Ancient One falls within the variability exhibited on the southern Columbia Plateau at the same time period and throughout time. He was not outside of the norm for the population existing during the Early Cascade period when he was alive and for the population that followed for which he has a shared group identity. The Ancient One’s biological identity, cranial morphology, stable isotope values, and DNA data...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claire Maass.

This is an abstract from the "Afro-Latin American Landscapes" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Children and childhood have emerged as important topics for understanding the history of African slavery in the Americas. In historical archaeology, analyses of subadult skeletal remains have provided valuable information about the biological and social conditions of captivity. However, in spite of these contributions, children are still infrequently...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lourdes Henebry-DeLeon. Angela Neller.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. NAGPRA’s preponderance of evidence standard is utilized to demonstrate a relationship of shared group identity between the Ancient One (Kennewick Man) and the Colville, Nez Perce, Umatilla, Wanapum, and Yakama tribes. Data is presented within the evidentiary standard applicable to cultural affiliation determinations under Section 3 of NAGPRA. Scientific...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Hechler.

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. The Inkas’ social constructions of physical difference recognized ‘disability’ as a permanent state of being, one that Guaman Poma de Ayala suggested was considered a specific calle or passage of life. Unlike much of the contemporary Late Middle Ages of Christian Europe, such individuals were not...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Graeme Barker.

Borneo has a 50,000-year record of Homo sapiens’ interactions with rainforest, a history assembled by the inter-disciplinary studies of human occupation evidence in the Niah Caves on the coastal plain of Sarawak. That project involved a collaboration in particular between archaeologists and environmental scientists, with studies for example in geomorphology, palynology, zooarchaeology, archaeobotany, palaeobiology, and material culture studies. More recent work by many of the same team in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anastasia Iorga. Katheryn C. Twiss. Kathleen M. Wooton. Carrie C. Wright. E. Troy Rasbury.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ethnographic and historical evidence shows that wetlands are highly variable environments, and humans exploit them in both spatially- and seasonally-specific ways. Reconstructing such patterned use with currently-available archaeological methods is extraordinarily difficult or, in most cases, impossible. We have identified a promising new tool for precise...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lindsay Scott. Anna Marie Prentiss. Matt Walsh.

Cultural transmission is an evolutionary process that involves the transfer of information between people that over time can lead to the establishment of cultural traditions. This approach permits development of hypotheses regarding the cultural evolutionary process in a variety of contexts. In this paper we examine cultural transmission between generations by analyzing the effects of vertical and horizontal inheritance using archaeological data from the Bridge River housepit village. The Bridge...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carla Klehm. Eileen Ernenwein. Katie Simon. Jeremy Menzer. Mica Jones.

This multi-component project addresses how societies in Iron-Age Botswana (550-1650 CE) experienced the change from small, rural-centered life to centralized power based on increasing involvement in trade across the Indian Ocean. How this change occurred remains a central focus, with increasing pressures on the environment in this desert-margin landscape a likely contributing factor. It features the Bosutswe region, situated on the eastern edge of the Kalahari Desert, where the site of Bosutswe...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aurora Montúfar López. Julia Pérez Pérez.

In this paper, botanical remains in sedimentological samples from offerings and fill are analyzed for biological identification. Seeds, fibers, resins, and other vegetal structures recovered using Struever’s floatation technique, modified by members of the Paleobotanical and Paleoenvironmental Laboratory, in the Institute of Anthropological Research (IIA), at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), yielded propagules, charred bits of textiles, copal, thorn fragments, splinters, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jenna Battillo. Karen Lupo. Jaime Mata-Miguez. Rick W.A. Smith. Deborah A. Bolnick.

Over the last few decades archaeologists and paleontologists have made great strides in paleofecal analysis, not the least of which was the application of aDNA testing. However, most aDNA analyses of paleofeces have focused exclusively on studying human populations and researchers have largely ignored the potential for using this tool to study dietary constituents themselves. In this study, we present analyses of aDNA from both the faunal and floral dietary constituents of 20 Basketmaker II...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Venicia Slotten.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Tropical Montane Cloud Forests" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Paleoethnobotanical investigations at domestic contexts in Arenal, Costa Rica, reveal the plant resources utilized by past peoples living in a tropical montane cloud forest setting. Macrobotanical remains recovered through horizontal excavations of household structures at G-995 La Chiripa and G-164 Sitio Bolivar and flotation of soil...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chuck Riggs.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Investigations into the use of space at two sites in southwest Colorado have yielded strong evidence suggesting that archaeologists’ understanding of the pit house to kiva transition warrants further study. For many years, archaeologists have asserted that pit houses became formalized ceremonial structures called kivas by the end of the Pueblo I period (A.D....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brendan Weaver. Nicola Sharratt.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Botijas were the universal packaging for dry and liquid goods transported throughout the global Iberian empires of the Early Modern world. Heirs to the potting traditions of Mediterranean amphorae, these vessels are the most ubiquitous ceramics at Spanish colonial sites in the Americas. We present new research combining stylistic analysis and Portable...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lori Lee.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Classification systems that focus on primary function can obscure the cultural significance of objects for the people who used them. Glass bottles store liquids and glass beads are used for adornment. Yet these same objects sometimes had unique cultural meanings for Africans and African Americans who used them. In large assemblages bottles often get...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emma Blake. Robert Schon. Rossella Giglio.

This is an abstract from the "Contested Landscapes: The Archaeology of Politics, Borders, and Movement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Sicilian Channel receives global attention as a major migratory route for undocumented people entering Europe clandestinely, a tragic nexus of transnational displacement and desperation. While the plight of massively overloaded and unseaworthy boats of people justifiably receives media attention, there is a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Swantek.

For at least the last 5,000 years, competition for social and economic control led to the acquisition of social power and wealth by some individuals or groups and the emergence of complex social systems. This paper will present the preliminary results of a larger study intended to identify the changing network structures that underlie society at the household, village and regional scales and led to the emergence of social complexity as a system level phenomenon during the Prehistoric Bronze Age...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ethan Cochrane. Seth Quintus. Matiu Prebble. Ta'iao Matiu Matavai Tautunu.

This is an abstract from the "Supporting Practical Inquiry: The Past, Present, and Future Contributions of Thomas Dye" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Explanations of sociopolitical complexity are often linked to competition over the control of resources and changes in resource structure, including productivity, predictability, distribution, and other characteristics. These explanations also reference variables of human demography and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sherene Baugher.

Discovering Enfield Falls is dramatically different from academic managed heritage projects that are top-down projects initiated by archaeologists. In our project, the heritage planning originated with stakeholders who were determine to preserve the history of a community that was demolished in the early twentieth century to create a state park. This 19th century hamlet was both a commercial center for farmers and a regional scenic tourist destination. The stakeholders did not need...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erika Blecha.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Located in the Sierra Vieja breaks, a subset of the Chihuahua Desert near the Rio Grande in far west Texas, are fields of thousands of small vesicular boulders and survey work found some contain petroglyphs. Beginning in the fall of 2018 the Center for Big Bend studies led a thorough investigation and documentation of over 200 petroglyphs pecked into these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dani Nadel. Margie Burton. Jenny Adams. Mark Willis. Laure Dubreuil.

Ubiquitous cultural features such as mortars, basins and slicks on rock outcrops, boulders, and cave floors attest to the long history of human use of landscape features. Although widely noted, methods for systematic investigation of such features lag behind well-developed study protocols for other archaeological material categories. Answers to questions such as how cultural landscape features were manufactured, how they were used, and how they were incorporated into the spatial organization of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Wagner. Ryan Campbell.

Lewis and Clark recruited 11 soldiers from the small US Army outpost of Ft. Kaskaskia (1802-1807), Illinois, in 1803 to join their expedition to explore the American west. This event traditionally has been identified as having occurred at a 1750s French fort of the same name. The 2017 SIU summer field school investigations within the fort walls including the use of LIDAR, GPR, and hand excavations revealed that the fort is primarily a single component French construction dating to the mid-1700s...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amedeo Sghinolfi. Patrick Mullins.

This is an abstract from the "Beyond Borders at the End of a Millennium: Life in the Western Andes circa 500–50 BCE" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The centuries following the disintegration of the Chavín interaction sphere (~500/400–200/50 BCE) were experienced in myriad ways throughout the ancient Andes. In the Moche and Virú Valleys in northern Peru, the late Early Horizon (~500–200 BCE) generally saw earlier traditions of large ceremonial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julia Haines. Saša Caval.

This paper discusses research on the most complete and well-preserved 18th and 19th century sugar estate on Mauritius and how communities and identities were constituted under the conflicting conditions of both physical control and local/regional connectivity. Established in 1786, the Bras d’Eau Sugar Estate (now a national park) grew in the following century when the island shifted from French to British colonial rule. The slave trade and the institution of slavery were later abolished across...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Arbuckle.

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches in Zooarchaeology: Addressing Big Questions with Ancient Animals" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although cross-cutting disciplinary boundaries from its inception, zooarchaeology has traditionally been most at home among the positivist sciences. As a result, interdisciplinary work has proceeded most easily with science and science-adjacent fields (stable isotopes, aDNA, ecology, etc.) with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Mongelluzzo. Jose Garrido. Jean-Baptiste Le Moine.

This is an abstract from the "Making and Breaking Boundaries in the Maya Lowlands: Alliance and Conflict across the Guatemala–Belize Border" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. An exploration of how modern borders of different kinds have influenced, and sometimes impeded, our understanding of ancient borders and territories. The Guatemala-Belize border has ramifications in terms of the ways in which scholars interact and how the archaeology is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nancy Wicker.

This is an abstract from the "New Work in Medieval Archaeology, Part 2: Crossing Boundaries, Materialities, and Identities" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While interdisciplinarity in archaeology increasingly has blurred the borders between humanities and sciences, an additional boundary in archaeology exists between what is considered Iron Age and what is medieval. The terms have been defined largely from the Continental point of view. In the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only J. Gregory Smith. Alejandra Alonso Olvera. Soledad Ortiz. Atasta Flores.

Social boundaries of the past and present are usually nebulous, contested, and fluid. In this paper we examine the ancient towns and villages between the two Maya kingdoms of Chichen Itza and Ek Balam in northern Yucatam. We hypothesize that the boundary area between these two cities in the 9th century AD was based on Classic Maya concepts of ruler-centered polities but changed dramatically in the 10th century as Chichen Itza became a fundamentally different kind of Maya city the likes of which...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rossana May. Tomás Gallareta. William Ringle.

In the course of surveying a kilometer-wide strip linking the archaeological sites of Labna, Kiuic and Huntichmul, several types of rare feature clusters were recorded that are difficult to interpret. Although some spatial patterns of these "special" features with respect to the local topography were recognized as the survey proceeded, it wasn’t until the sample of 10 km2 was completed and analyzed using GIS "least cost routes" that we were able to offer a more thorough interpretation of their...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kyle Wright. Lawrence Todd.

In the early 21th Century, the Washakie Wilderness, which encompasses roughly 2850 km2 of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, was a virtual blank spot on the map of prehistoric archaeology with only three sites reported and no systematic inventories having been completed. By 2017 cooperative investigation between the Shoshone National Forest and Greybull River Sustainable Landscape Ecology (GRSLE) has completed 16 field seasons in the Washakie and documented 388 previously unknown prehistoric...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christophe Darmangeat. Jean-Marc Petillon.

This is an abstract from the "The Global “Impact” of Projectile Technologies: Updating Methods and Regional Overviews of the Invention and Transmission of the Spear-Thrower and the Bow and Arrow" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The nearly worldwide diffusion of the bow is often interpreted in terms of its superiority over other weapon systems. There is, however, at least one exception to this diffusion: Australia, where this weapon was never...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caroline Parris.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The term “curation crisis” describes the challenges facing collections care on a large scale: issues of limited space, staff, and funding and of meeting federal curation standards. Yet, beyond these big picture problems, some of the greatest challenges of managing archaeological collections are the smaller collections problems one inherits from previous...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lawrence Chiatti.

Within the collections housed at the Canyon de Chelly National Monument there are many archaeological artifacts and natural resource materials which were taken and subsequently returned by visitors to the park, along with associated letters and correspondence. While the existence of these returned unauthorized collections, also known as "Guilt Mail", is not common knowledge among the general public or park visitors, many national parks have similar items in their collections. Within the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dylan Clark. Patricia McAnany. Sonya Atalay.

This is an abstract from the "Braiding Knowledge: Opportunities and Challenges for Collaborative Approaches to Archaeological Heritage and Conservation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recently, archaeologists have turned to more collaborative and participatory approaches and are considering more centrally the impact and relevance of archaeology to the contemporary world. The past is deeply rooted in communities, and integrating local...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Silliman. Katherine Sebastian Dring. Natasha Gambrell.

This is an abstract from the "Braiding Knowledge: Opportunities and Challenges for Collaborative Approaches to Archaeological Heritage and Conservation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A key challenge in the development and sustainability of collaborative archaeological approaches with indigenous communities is ensuring that community members participate as true partners in knowledge production and dissemination. If not, hopes for a braiding...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Debra Walker.

Ours is the first generation of Maya archaeologists to be fully rooted in Maya history. Thanks to our mentors, and especially cooperation between epigraphers and archaeologists, we have come to know the faces, names and life stories of important figures in our own New World history, epics that rival those of the Old World. The telling of these stories is a work in progress, however, our mentors, Linda Schele and David Freidel, provided a courageous and insightful first effort at embodying the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hilary Becker.

The ancient trade in olive oil and wine is well understood thanks in no small part to typologies established for their transport containers. A synthetic survey of the containers used to transport other naturally-sourced products, such as pharmaceuticals, perfumes, and pigments, is lacking. Such products were subject to counterfeiting and adulteration in antiquity, thus packaging and labelling were often valuable tools for ancient consumers to help them recognize products. For example, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Marla Toyne. J. Marla Toyne. L. Alfredo Narvaez.

In early 17th century historical descriptions, Garcilaso de la Vega describes the Chachapoya people of Peru as "very brave", "the men well-formed and the women extremely beautiful". While the archaeological remains cannot address the veracity of these statements, the analysis of the skeletal remains from important Chachapoya complexes, such as Kuelap, provide the only direct means of reconstructing a biological profile of these ancient people, including aspects of their physical morphology,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shannon Iverson.

In 1524, only three years after the military conquest of central Mexico was complete, twelve Franciscan friars arrived in New Spain to begin an ambitious religious conversion program. The friars arrived in a territory where landscapes, buildings, and everyday objects (such as foodstuffs and ceramic objects) were already “mythologized”—deeply imbued with supernatural connotations. For the Spanish priests, Indigenous worlds were always potential minefields of spiritual pollution. Therefore, though...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sadie Weber. Lauren Santini.

San Bartolo, located in the Petén of Guatemala, boasts the earliest examples of Maya murals and writing known to date in Mesoamerica. Despite the extensive work in the monumental sector of the site, comparatively less work has been carried out on the domestic sectors. Like many Maya sites, chultúns are a common though enigmatic feature. High quantities of charcoal and household refuse recovered during the chultún excavations, including ground stone, animal bones, worked bone, and wood charcoal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ann Eberwein.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents the results of research on a collection of food from Robenhausen, a lake-dwelling site southeast of Zurich. These specimens are part of a larger collection that was recovered in the late 19th century and is housed at the Milwaukee Public Museum. The material includes thirteen bread fragments, seventy-five apple pieces, and thousands of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lindsey Bouldin.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While historical documents can provide a plethora of information for the historical archaeologist, they are often incomplete in revealing holistic images of the day-to-day life of humans that lived centuries ago. This poster presentation outlines my ongoing research on the diet of students at seventeenth-century Harvard College. In particular, I address...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brittany Mistretta. Jonathan Hanna.

In a previous paper, we examined past faunal studies from Troumassoid period (AD 800-1600) sites in Grenada, concluding that an expansion of diet breadth likely occurred during this time. Our conclusion contradicted the traditional "crab-shell" dichotomy proposed by Rainey and Rouse, but confirmed findings from elsewhere in the Caribbean. Presented here is a continuation of this work, with new faunal analyses incorporated from recently excavated inland, western, and earlier (Saladoid) sites, as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marlieke Ernst. Corinne Hofman.

Placed within the context of the ERC-NEXUS1492 research, this paper focusses on transformations in indigenous social and material worlds in Early Colonial Hispaniola. The initial intercultural encounters in the New World have led to the creation of entirely new social identities and changing material culture repertoires in the first decennia after colonization. The incorporation of European earthenwares in the indigenous sites of El Cabo and Playa Grande will be contrasted with the presence of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Guzman.

Grog is a technological phenomenon present in archaeological assemblages spanning widely across time and space. Traditionally defined as a grounded down, previously fired ceramic used as temper during clay preparation, grog belongs to a wider category of additives which increase porosity and reduce shrinkage, thereby lessening the likelihood of vessel crack progression during the drying and firing stages of ceramic production. Beyond this basic description of its functional properties, grog has...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Needham. Stephanie Piper.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology to Transform and Disrupt: Teaching, Learning, and the Pedagogies of the Future" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Studying a non-school subject such as archaeology at university can be challenging. This knowledge gap can compound barriers for new students, including living away from home, arranging a new job, and making friends. Creating a collaborative learning community is therefore important for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Warren. Sergio Calla. Sonia Alconini.

In the last decades prior to the Spanish conquest, the Inka Empire expanded its frontiers into the ethnically and culturally diverse region of the Bolivian Chaco, ushering in a brief period of limited colonial control over its indigenous inhabitants. In a geographically isolated area far from the imperial heartland, the Inkas and their imperial allies established settlements in the vicinity of Saipurú; in this context, several disparate highland and lowland cultures met, interacted, and created...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Austin. John Arthur. Wendy Edwards. Sharlene O'Donnell. Christina Perry Sampson.

The Weedo(e)n Island site is well-known among archaeologists in the southeastern US as the type site of the Weeden Island culture, a mortuary complex shared by geographically wide-spread cultures ca. AD 200-900. Recent research (survey, excavation, artifact and faunal analysis, radiocarbon dating) by multiple institutions focusing on the domestic sphere have added new details about the site’s history and use during the Archaic, Woodland, and Mississippian periods.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Roxanne Recinos. Sarah Rowe.

This is an abstract from the "Working with the Community in Ecuador" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological investigations began in Dos Mangas in 2006, and continued with excavation of a Valdivia village site, Buen Suceso, in 2009. Those and subsequent excavations carried out by Sarah Rowe have combined archaeological inquiry with community engagement activities such as presentations in the primary school, workshops for community guides,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cristina Franco.

The relationship between the academia and non-academic individuals is often challenging, as there are tensions between who owns the power to produce knowledge. Citizen science is breaking this untold rule by incorporating the communities, fostering interactions that help transform segregated relationships. Recovery of knowledge from traditional and local perspectives has shown that individuals and communities hold very valuable, deep knowledge regarding their specific surroundings and daily...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Klarich.

The Formative Period in the Lake Titicaca Basin (1500 BC- AD 400) is often characterized as a time when diverse groups were linked through their participation in the Yaya-Mama Religious Tradition (YMRT). Small temple centers—characterized by sunken court temple complexes, stone sculpture, ritual paraphernalia, and shared iconography—dotted the Middle Formative landscape across the Basin (800-200 BC). In this framework, the temple centers formed a ceremonial network, providing access to non-local...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eleanor Harrison-Buck. Timothy Pugh.

This is an abstract from the "Making and Breaking Boundaries in the Maya Lowlands: Alliance and Conflict across the Guatemala–Belize Border" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Following the Classic Maya "collapse" a clustering of traits appear at sites in the Peten – Belize area of the Southern Maya Lowlands. These include new architectural forms, such as circular and colonnaded buildings and the introduction of distinctive portable goods such as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Teresa Fernández-Crespo. Andrea Czermak. Rick J. Schulting. Julia A. Lee-Thorp.

Stable carbon and nitrogen data of adult/adolescent human bone collagen from north-central Spanish Late Neolithic (ca. 3500-2900 cal. BC) provide evidence for the existence of significant isotopic differences among and between communities living in close proximity and burying their dead in caves and megalithic graves. This, together with previously identified distinct funerary selection patterns, suggests an unsuspected complex social or cultural differentiation. The purpose of this paper is to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Allan Cobb.

This is an abstract from the "Studies in Mesoamerican Subterranean Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Maya explored caves with torches and burned copal with wood fires during ceremonies. These activities, in a confined space such as a cave, used up oxygen and produced carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. The effects of high carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide on the human body are well studied by OSHA and documented in environmental and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Klarich. Elizabeth Arkush.

This is an abstract from the "Thinking Big in the Andes: Papers in Honor of Charles Stanish" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this introductory paper, we celebrate Dr. Stanish’s impact from both personal and professional angles. We review some of the major contributions of Dr. Stanish’s career over four immensely productive decades, including long-term research projects in several regions and “big ideas” that have significantly influenced Andean...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marvin Kay.

Excavations by W. Raymond Wood and then by Ronald A. Thomas first exposed late glacial/early post-glacial archaeology in 1961 and 1962. In 2012 renewed excavations by Arkansas Archeological Survey personnel re-exposed 1960s test units of up to 3m thickness to further evaluate the unusually deep deposit and its stratigraphy; and to collect sediment, associated artifacts, and radiocarbon samples. Compared to Rodgers Shelter and Big Eddy, two well-dated alluvial archaeological sites in the western...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Moore.

Brian Fagan has been a leader in illuminating the human past for students, and the public of all ages. From his writings and lectures thousands of people have come to understand how human societies have shaped the world in which we live. In recent years Fagan has built on these insights to bring a compelling message to his many audiences: that climate change has profoundly impacted human communities in the past and that it continues to do so in the present. He invites them to ponder these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Catherine Popovici.

Comalcalco displays a radical departure from traditional Maya building materials in its brick and seashell mortar construction instead of the paradigmatic Maya limestone. Incised animal, architecture, hieroglyph, and human forms adorn the brick slabs of principal buildings of Comalcalco’s ceremonial core. However, their inward-facing, or concealed, orientation rendered these markings invisible. Because monumental architecture benefited from the labor of non-elites, the purposeful placement of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Donnermeyer. Trent Skinner. Michelle North. Nicholas Guest.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Logging was an economic and cultural pillar of the Pacific Northwest. The Bridal Veil Lumbering Company, a logging company operating in the Columbia River Gorge in Oregon State, was the longest continuously operating early lumber mill west of the Mississippi. The company spanned a timeframe that encompassed a wide range of technologies, immigration trends, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Donnermeyer. Brittney Cardarella. Bobby Saunters.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Logging was an economic and cultural pillar of the Pacific Northwest. The Bridal Veil Lumbering Company, a logging company operating in the Columbia River Gorge in Oregon State, was the longest continuously operating early lumber mill west of the Mississippi River. The company spanned a timeframe that encompassed a wide range of technologies, immigration...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emilia Tifental. Anna Marie Prentiss. Meradeth Snow.

Excavations at the Bridge River site have been on-going since 2003, increasing our understanding of the communities that inhabited the Middle Fraser Canyon, British Columbia, over 1,000 years ago. The most recent excavation at Housepit 54 in the summer of 2014 supplied further data regarding relationships between people and their dogs. Dogs are well documented in the Middle Fraser Canyon through both archaeological excavations and traditional knowledge. A household's possession of a dog has been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sandra Lopez Varela.

This is an abstract from the "Building Bridges: Papers in Honor of Teresita Majewski" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2014, I had the honor of interviewing Terry Majewski, one of the most influential women in the CRM industry. The insightful dialogue was facilitated through meticulously crafted questions curated by female students participating in my BA course on Heritage Business and Marketing. This conversation delved into her transformative...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mica Jones. Ruth Tibesasa.

Environmental heterogeneity and climatic instability in the mid-Holocene (~8,000-3,000 BP) are linked to increased socioeconomic diversity in East Africa. Increasing aridity ca. 6,000-5,000 BP encouraged early herders to migrate south into the region, while local hunter-gatherers intensified their reliance on ecologically-rich environments. Kansyore hunter-gatherers of the Lake Victoria basin established specialized subsistence systems that incorporated heavy pottery-use and seasonal site...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelly Jenks. Lauren Jelinek.

This is an abstract from the "Building Bridges: Papers in Honor of Teresita Majewski" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Preparing students to work in heritage management is a difficult and increasingly urgent task. Some of the biggest challenges faced by educators include large student-to-teacher ratios, the logistical demands of transporting students to and from project areas, the expense of purchasing and maintaining appropriate equipment and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julia King.

This is an abstract from the "Deep History, Colonial Narratives, and Decolonization in the Native Chesapeake" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists (including the author) investigating seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Native sites in the Chesapeake point out how materially different these assemblages are from those recovered from contemporary colonial sites. Characterized by materials almost wholly produced by Native hands with some...

DOCUMENT Citation Only C. Margaret Scarry. W. Flint Dibble.

Excavations at the Archaic (7th-6th centuries B.C.) city of Azoria on Crete demonstrate the value of intensive environmental archaeology for understanding an historical Greek context. Texts document the important role of food and dining to ancient religion and politics; however, ancient authors presented a normative picture and excluded details they assumed were common knowledge. Studying plant and animal remains can "ground-truth" ancient sources on foodways and provide contextual nuances not...