Society for American Archaeology

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zenobie Garrett.

The end of the Roman Empire is marked archaeologically by an impressive shift in material culture. Changes in land organization and the use of more ephemeral building materials created a largely invisible and difficult to detect post-Roman landscape. Archaeologists initially assumed such landscapes were abandoned as a result of the political and economic chaos resulting from Rome’s fall. Work in northwest Europe in the past two decades, however has shown that new techniques can help locate these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dana Kollmann.

Archaeological excavations are much like crime scene investigations in that to study them, is to destroy them. Consequently, full-scale documentation, cataloguing, and proper packaging techniques are critical components of archaeological and forensic fieldwork. Archaeologists have the additional benefit to law enforcement of being trained to conduct line and grid searches, interpret soils for evidence of disturbance, and perform exhumations using standardized excavation techniques. Law...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bastiaan Van Dalen.

This is an abstract from the "Islands around Africa: State-of-the-Art and Future Directions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. To help protect the Earth’s diverse species from disappearing at an alarming rate, research is needed in important biodiversity hotspots to understand how humans have interacted with their environment throughout history and how these insights can contribute to their future sustainability. Archaeology and paleoecology are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Omar Alcover. Thomas Garrison. Stephen Houston.

In the last decade, archaeologist have successfully employed active remote sensing technologies, such as LiDAR, to identify ancient settlement in the Maya lowlands. Near the site of El Zotz in northern Guatemala, this technology has aided in the identification of fortresses, terraces, and a network of raised roads. Archaeologist who employ LiDAR focus principally on the structural data acquired from the LiDAR point clouds. Building on these methodologies, we assess the benefits of incorporating...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ben Thomas. Meredith Langlitz.

A growing public interest in archaeotourism has resulted in greater numbers of visitors to archaeological sites as well as tourism being increasingly being seen as a use for sites for both social and economic reasons. While additional visitors can generate more revenue for local interests, they also increase human impact on the site. While tourism operators, archaeologists, and heritage managers frequently work at the same sites, they often work in isolation. While, many sites are preparing for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only April Martinez. John Walden. Delmer Tzib. Carlos Quiroz. Frank Tzib.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Belize is rich in cultural diversity and history but has long faced a disconnect between its citizens’ knowledge and the profound legacy of its precolonial past. Belize's ancient Maya remains attracts archaeologists from around the world. Despite this extraordinary heritage, some Belizeans are disconnected from this past, leading to a diminished sense of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Wilshusen. Kellam Throgmorton. Grant Coffey.

This is an abstract from the "Research, Education, and American Indian Partnerships at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Research by the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center and affiliates has illuminated many periods of history in the central Mesa Verde region; it has also highlighted several lacunae. The Long Tenth Century (AD 890–1030) is one of these lacunae. There is a conspicuous gap in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Reetz. Cynthia L. Peterson. Melody Pope.

Recent federally-funded flood relief compliance projects on the University of Iowa campus provided the University of Iowa Office of the State Archaeologist with an opportunity to involve various publics in our work. It also provided us with an opportunity to reflect critically on how we represent our work and archaeology more broadly to the public and how our work is presented to even wider publics by the media. We first present an overview of the various approaches we took to engage the public...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniela Balanzategui. Marianne Sallum. Yacunã Tuxá. Natasha Gambrell. Stephen Silliman.

This is an abstract from the "Weaving Epistemes: Community-Based Research in Latin America" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents the results of the first panel named “Indigenous Archaeologies, Territories, and Human Rights” as part of the seminar “Indigenous and Afro-descendant Peoples in the Americas: Collaboration, Archaeology, Repatriation, and Heritage,” an inter-institutional collaboration between the Interdisciplinary Research...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lei Zhang.

The bird design, as a distinctive and time-honored decoration in the Chinese culture, has its unique national forms and artistic glamour, which had also condensed and accumulated rich and profound connotations. Being an indispensable part of the ancient Chinese civilization, the head-ware of ancient Chinese women had evolved continuously in the transmission of cultural heritage. Which, reflecting not only the changes in people's aesthetics, but more importantly, the ever-developing ideology and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Vincas Steponaitis. Lynne Goldstein. Keith Kintigh. William Lovis.

SAA was heavily involved in NAGPRA's passage, and played a key role in shaping the compromises embodied in this law. The Society's positions with respect to the many repatriation bills considered by Congress were conditioned by SAA's "Statement Concerning the Treatment of Human Remains," a policy adopted in 1986. SAA strongly and actively supported the final bill precisely because it conformed closely, albeit not perfectly, to the principles articulated in this statement. The policy was also...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emma Cook.

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. Chiricahua National Monument, located in southeastern Arizona near Willcox, holds evidence for thousands of years of Native American occupation. Relatively recent in this timeline is occupation by the Chiricahua Apache. Up through the 19th century, the Chiricahua Apache ranged over a significant part...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Israel.

I began the "Maryland Archaeology: Past Portrait Project" because I came across many undocumented terrestrial, underwater, and advocational archaeologists in Maryland, and realized they provided a large range of information on Maryland’s forgotten and unacknowledged archaeological activities and accomplishments. My goals for this paper were to document, to the extent possible, many of the forgotten contributors of the late 19th, 20th, and early 21st century archaeological surveys and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Brown.

This is an abstract from the "Art Style as a Communicative Tool in Archaeological Research" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Focused stylistic analysis over the past 60 years has made clear that graphic depiction of the creative forces became a vehicle of artistic expression for southeastern societies. Between the 1100s and 1400 such expression was nearly ubiquitous by including, without being confined to, pottery surfaces, marine shell, sheet...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Minnis. Patricia Gilman.

While Suzanne and Paul Fish are endemic to the Sonoran Desert, they have been invasive in other regions of the World. The hybrid vigor from combining Paul's Michigan foundation with Suzy's Texas background added to their wide spread geographic range of experiences. As well, an enduring monogamy, a not well know known for this species, contributes to their impressive contributions in archaeology. Here, we briefly explore the natural history of this unique team.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Harold Dibble. Alain Turq. Laurent Chiotti. Marie Soressi. Laurent Bruxelles.

There are few researchers who have achieved the breadth of experience of Paul Goldberg, whose work spans almost every continent on the planet, and from the early Pleistocene to the Holocene. There are some regions, however, that have greatly benefited from his expertise, including SW France. In this paper we will review some of his work here, beginning with his dissertation work at the site of Pech de l’Azé II, and over the past 14 years at the sites of Pech de l’Azé I and IV, Roc de Marsal,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kirby Farah.

This is an abstract from the "After Dark: The Nocturnal Urban Landscape & Lightscape of Ancient Cities" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Populated by as many as 200,000 people, the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan—like most cities—was buzzing with activity through the night. Given the dynamism of the city, and especially weighed against our modern understanding of the sounds and lights that keep cities alive during the night, it is significant that one...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine Ward.

This is an abstract from the "Coloring the World: People and Colors in Southwestern Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. "Color" often evokes thoughts of vibrancy, boldness, and distinctiveness. With no denigration or judgement of the area intended, a casual visitor to the Jornada region may not be left with such impressions. Miles of exposed sands, stark mountains, and sparse vegetation do not immediately bring images of bright and unique...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Krista Gilliland. Robin Woywitka.

Archaeological sites in Canada’s boreal forest are frequently difficult to interpret due to several factors, including (1) shallow archaeological stratigraphies, (2) non-diagnostic lithics dominate artifact assemblages, (3) low abundances of preserved organic materials, and (4) high potential for disturbance (cryoturbation and bioturbation). These difficulties can contribute to interpretations based on insufficient understandings of site formation processes, producing conclusions that undervalue...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bernard Means. Lauren Volkers.

With support from the Department of Defense's Legacy Program, I am working with undergraduate students in the Virtual Curation Laboratory to create digital type collections of chipped stone tools and zooarchaeological elements. These efforts include scanning stone tools from classic projectile point guides at the New York State Museum (Ritchie's "Typology and Nomenclature of New York Projectile Points") and the Research Laboratories of Archaeology at UNC-Chapel Hill (Coe's "Formative Cultures...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anya Gruber. Amy Fedchenko. Mikala Hardie.

This is an abstract from the "Public Lands, Public Sites: Research, Engagement, and Collaboration" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the most important aspects of the National Park Service is to preserve the “cultural resources and values of the National Park System for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of this and future generations.” However, cultural resources—including archaeological sites—are often inaccessible to the public. In...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa Young.

This is an abstract from the "Ideas, Ethical Ideals, and Museum Practice in North American Archaeological Collections" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Place and context give meaning to the artifacts that archaeologists uncover. Yet, artifacts are usually curated in museums and archaeological repositories far from the sites where they were unearthed. This spatial disconnect is often a source of tension for descendant communities. Using the Homolovi...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa DeLance.

This is an abstract from the "Leveling Up: Gaming and Game Design in Archaeological Education and Outreach" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Starting with the release of the titular game in 2007, creators of the Assassin’s Creed franchise have been showcasing the historical and archaeological record, bringing the past into our living and dorm rooms. Although criticism of the franchise focuses on the pseudoarchaeological connecting storyline, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Myles Miller.

This is an abstract from the "Sacred Southwestern Landscapes: Archaeologies of Religious Ecology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Among prehispanic and historic societies of the American Southwest and Mesoamerica, mountains and caves had multivalent metaphorical and symbolic meanings relating to underworld, ancestors, water, and emergence. Mountains and caves are featured among origin and emergence myths and many contemporary Pueblo societies...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steven Goldstein.

Despite recent advances in characterizing the socio-economic mosaics associated with early pastoralism in East Africa, how this diversity affected social boundaries and manifested identities remain underexplored. Exclusive exploitation of a single obsidian source on the upper slopes of Mr. Eburru in the Central Rift Valley by communities associated with "Elmenteitan" material culture is a strong line of evidence for dimensions of shared identity linking some of these herding communities in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samuel Villarreal Catanach.

This is an abstract from the "From Collaboration to Partnership in Pojoaque, New Mexico" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Until recently, widely accessible published works concerning the Pueblo of Pojoaque, its people, culture, and history, have come by way of mostly non-Native academics and other researchers. While highly valuable for understanding this Tewa community’s past, they often carry the inherent biases of their authors or leave out the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Sharpe. Kitty Emery. John Pfeiffer.

For over a century, the taxonomy of the Central American freshwater mussels (family Unionidae) has been the subject of numerous classifications and reclassifications, with naturalists identifying morphologically identical taxa as different genera or species, while at the same time classifying obviously distinct taxa under the same name. Zooarchaeologists at the mercy of these erratic classification schemes have been unable to effectively compare datasets. This study uses a combined...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Linda Stine.

North Carolina’s Department of Cultural Resources is pressed by state legislators to justify keeping Historic Site’s properties open, and its Office of State Archaeology (OSA) staff gainfully employed. The state university system has also seen its share of cuts. By pooling research interests and resources, OSA and University of North Carolina Greensboro archaeologists and geography professors and students could highlight potential below ground features and excavate at two sites. The project...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Yann.

This paper investigates several common assumptions regarding the economic nature of trade interactions in the Midwest during the period from approximately 1760 to 1820. Using a resource dependency theory framework, this research analyzes archaeological and historical sources to demonstrate that these interactions were more nuanced, and more complex, than typically portrayed. It also demonstrates that these economic interactions were strongly intertwined with political decision making. ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Derek Hamilton. Colin Haselgrove. Chris Gosden.

Traditional approaches to the Iron Age have constructed complex chronologies based on artifact typologies, mainly pottery and metal, with radiocarbon long being neglected. Such views are now untenable, with recent Iron Age research showing that typological dating produces sequences that are regularly too late. Furthermore, regional syntheses anchored by chrono-typologies fail to provide a robust analytical methodology for better understanding the nuances of the settlement landscape and social...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Chenoweth. Mark Salvatore. Laura Bossio.

British colonial ideology originated, in part, from a view of the proper relationship between people, land, and government that was rooted in the ecology of Britain itself. This view was informed in the Caribbean by Barbadian and other large-scale sugar planting colonies, but the British Virgin Islands are ecologically and politically distinct. This paper employs high-resolution satellite imagery and GIS modeling to explore what happens when a British "peasant" ideology is laid onto a very...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marc Vander Linden.

Projecting back notions of "British", "Irish" or "European" back into prehistory does not go without problems as, explicitly or not, these concepts are closely associated with the rise of nation-states, and still echoed in yesterday's and today's turbulent politics. And yet, even advocating a simple geographic meaning for these terms does not prevent any problems, as it raises theoretical and methodological issues regarding the choice of location and scale of case-studies to be analysed. In the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melanie Beasley.

This is an abstract from the "The Intersection of Archaeological Science and Forensic Science" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2009, the National Academy of Sciences report on “Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States” emphasized the importance of change needed in forensic science disciplines to ensure reliability, enforceable standards, and to promote best practices. Over the years many archaeologists and bioarchaeologists have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leila Character. Tim Beach. Takeshi Inomata. Thomas Garrison. Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach.

This is an abstract from the "2023 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Timothy Beach Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Comprehensive maps of ancient structures across the Maya area of Central America can help archaeologists to deepen knowledge of past settlement patterns and regional interactions, potentially leading to enhanced understanding of thousands of years of Maya civilization. However, most Maya archaeological sites are not...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Russell Cutts.

This is an abstract from the "Fire-Cracked Rock: Research in Cooking and Noncooking Contexts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Experiments quantifying the thermal curved-fragment (TCF) model (Cutts et al. 2019) unsurprisingly yielded considerable numbers of fire-cracked rocks (FCR; yet not strictly conforming to TCF definitions). Many exhibited characteristics commonly described in FCR—e.g., broken, cracked, crazed, crenated, crenulated, pocked,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jodi Jacobson.

Until recently, highly fragmented bone assemblages in Texas were almost all attributed to poor preservation. A review of assemblages, however, indicates that while there are a high percentage of heavily fragmented medium-sized and larger mammal bone at many of these sites, bones associated with small mammals, reptiles, avian, and fish have only minimal fragmentation. A review of bone from a variety of sites with deep temporal and well-stratified context and of varying degree of preservation and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nancy Wicker.

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. Many Scandinavian Migration Period gold bracteate pendants of the 5th and 6th centuries show evidence of pre- or post-depositional damage. Impressions of broken edges of the jewelry were made with polyvinyl siloxane (PVS), and the impressions were then analyzed as part of a larger project to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Allison Cuneo.

The armed conflict in Iraq has produced a catastrophic humanitarian crisis, beginning with the take-over of Mosul by the Islamic State (ISIS) in June 2014 followed by their subsequent gains in its northern governorates. Since then millions have become internally displaced or left the country as refugees. These war-wearied Iraqis are struggling with a loss of identity and a lack of control over their lives, and these feelings are further compounded by the destruction of their as a result of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Norbert Stanchly. Jon Spenard. Terry Powis. Christophe Helmke.

The Terminal Classic period in the southern Maya Lowlands was one of great social transition, witnessing the disruption of long-standing economic systems, and the downfall of divine kingship. The manifestation of this "collapse" in the artifactual record has been well documented at many sites throughout the Belize Valley, yet how it does so at the site of Pacbitun, on the southern rim of the Belize Valley, remains poorly understood, in spite of nearly three decades of archaeological research...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Siran Liu.

This is an abstract from the "Craft and Technology: Knowledge of the Ancient Chinese Artisans" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Most studies of early metallurgy in China have focused on style, manufacturing techniques and alloy compositions of bronze artefacts. In rare circumstances, other sections of the bronze production Chaîne opératoire such mining, smelting and metal processing are considered. This research concentrates on early bronze...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Isaac Hart. William Taylor. Bayarsaikhan Jamsranjav. Tumurbaatar Tuvshinjargal.

This is an abstract from the "Steppe by Steppe: Advances in the Archaeology of Eastern Eurasia" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although the late Holocene saw tremendous changes in foodways across the eastern Eurasian steppe, poor preservation of organic and faunal remains make it challenging to trace important changes like the introduction of pastoralism during the Bronze Age and beyond. Here we present preliminary results from two archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dorcas Brown. David Anthony.

The final report of the Samara Valley Project (SVP), a U.S.-Russian archaeological investigation conducted between 1995 and 2002 in the Samara Oblast in central Russia, was published in June 2016. The SVP explored the changing organization and subsistence resources of pastoral steppe economies from the Eneolithic (4500BC) through the Late Bronze Age (1900-1200BC) across the steppe and river valley landscape in the middle Volga region.  Particular attention focuses on the role of agriculture...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Taylor Hermes.

The nature of mobility carries significant implications for social interaction in pastoral societies. This paper presents a preliminary analysis of radiogenic strontium and stable oxygen isotopes of domesticated fauna remains excavated from Bronze Age sites across the mountains of eastern Kazakhstan. Results are contextualized with the ecological and geographic backdrops surrounding the sites and placed into a diachronic perspective of pastoral interaction and herding strategy. This research...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yuqi Li. Xin Wang.

The period from the Bronze Age (2500-900 BCE) to Early Iron Age (900-200 BCE) witnessed the emergence and flourish of some massive pastoralist settlements along the Tian-Shan Mountains in Xinjiang, China. Specifically, these large-scale settlements mainly cluster in three regions known as Balikun, Wenquan and Hejing, located in the eastern, western and middle Tian-Shan Mountains respectively. Recent investigation of pastoralist settlement remains in these three regions offers a wealth of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rasmus Bjørn.

This is an abstract from the "From the Altai to the Arctic: New Results and New Directions in the Archaeology of North and Inner Asia" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Loanword analysis is a unique contribution of historical linguistics to our understanding of prehistoric cultural interfaces. As language reflects the lives of its speakers, the substantiation of loanwords draws on the composite evidence from linguistic as well as archaeology and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jay Stephens. Wayne Powell. Ryan Mathur. David Killick.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Science and African Archaeology: Appreciating the Impact of David Killick" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Southern Africa project (2015–present) uses lead and tin isotopes plus trace element concentrations to infer the geological provenance of copper and tin in Iron Age copper alloys, and to investigate the behaviors responsible for moving these objects from their geological source to the eventual...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mike Teufer.

The Late Bronze Age site of Saridjar was discovered during a survey of the northern Yakhsu valley in 2010. Excavations in 2012, in 2013, 2015 and in 2016 prove that we are dealing with a 200 x 200 m large settlement with at least three construction phases. The proportion of the hand-made ceramics in all levels varies between 80 and 90%. Only occasionally wheel-made ware appears. Andronovo pottery of the Federovo phase is present in small numbers. At Karimberdy nearly all the pottery was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Edwards. Miriam Belmaker.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Micromammal remains have proven to be successful proxies for conducting zooarchaeological research and reconstructing paleoenvironmental conditions in the Levant. Their success as a palaeoecological proxy is due to their sensitivity to climatic change, specific ecological niche, and low rate of human interaction. While there is abundant research on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yan Sun.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Research on Early Chinese Borderland Cultures and Archaeological Materials" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study focuses on manipulation of bronzes of different styles, and mortuary rituals overall, during in the emergence of political power in the northeastern frontier of ancient China. Data are presented on three richly furnished burials M101 at Nanshan’gen and M8501 and M9601 at Xiaoheishigou of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jane Peterson. Michael Gregory.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Material remains and historical documents related to a house in Chicago’s turn-of-the-century Bronzeville neighborhood provide unique glimpses into the everyday life of African Americans who traveled to this northern, industrial metropolis as part of the Great Migration. Excavated deposits produced stratigraphically arranged layers rich in artifacts that speak...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heidi Altman. Tanya Peres.

Archaeological sites in the Southeastern United States often contain remains of the black bear (Ursus americanus), which, upon excavation, are placed into one of two general categories for further analysis: food or modified. The confines of these categories precondition interpretations of the bear remains, and limit possible crucial understanding of the roles of bears in the social life of the people who interacted with them. While the category of "food" can be further divided into quotidian or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Rick.

Competition between Andean Formative centers seems to have stimulated rapid rates of innovation in technology, architecture, art, and behaviors such as ritual. This in turn seems to reflect a significant change of the role and nature of religion as a force promoting or resisting change, introducing a motivation for radical transformation within a background of conservative, heavily tradition-based practices. These processes are particularly evident in recent investigations in Chavin de Huantar,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam Wiewel.

This is an abstract from the "New and Emerging Geophysical and Geospatial Research in the National Parks" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park commemorates the US Supreme Court’s 1954 decision to end legal racial segregation in public education and preserves significant resources like Monroe Elementary School in Topeka, Kansas. Before opening to the public on the ruling’s 50th anniversary, the Midwest...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lindsey Büster.

Broxmouth hillfort in SE Scotland saw continued occupation for almost 800 years (c. cal. 600 BC - AD 200), during which around 30 generations of inhabitants shaped the settlement and its surroundings. Activity at Broxmouth can be broadly split into six (both enclosed and unenclosed) phases, the last of which (c. cal. 200 BC - AD 200) is characterised by re-enclosure, and well-preserved roundhouses of timber and stone. The form, fabric and development of the roundhouses over time suggest that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Siobhan Anderson. Carolyn E. Boyd. J. Phil Dering. David Keim.

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Stratigraphic analysis has long been a cornerstone of archaeological research, and the practice of displaying and analyzing complex relationships between stratigraphic surfaces and layers using Harris Matrix Composer is commonplace. New methods in rock art research have incorporated an understanding of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Glenn Kolyer.

Excavation of large sites in the Hudson Valley is often limited to the availability of resources and labor. The Bryant Site of Ulster County, New York, is a Late Archaic site located on approximately 54,000 m2 of horizontal surface area on privately owned farmland. Scientific sampling of the site was conducted through survey using a grid-based plan. Each grid square was analyzed for debitage, fire-cracked rock, and lithic artifacts. The results of each unit were contrasted and compared. Through...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Greg Burtchard.

This is an abstract from the "Research and CRM Are Not Mutually Exclusive: J. Stephen Athens—Forty Years and Counting" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For the past two decades, research directed at establishing onset of human use, patterned use of montane habitats, integration into lowland subsistence and settlement systems, and temporal change has been imbedded into CRM practices at Mount Rainier National Park. Once thought to be of little value...

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

Fragmented and worked bone continues to be problematic for accurate identification using traditional morphology-based analyses. In this study, we apply a number of ZooMS (Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry) techniques for the identification of bone points from two Pre-Contact Iroquoian village sites in southern Quebec, Canada. The predominance of white-tailed deer in the mammalian faunal assemblages of both sites, combined with the approximate size of the original bones, led to the initial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marcelo Weissel.

This is an abstract from the "Underwater and Coastal Archaeology in Latin America" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This contribution presents the status of research and institutionalization of the underwater and coastal cultural heritage of the city of Buenos Aires. For this purpose, the environmental information and characteristics of the archaeological landscapes surveyed between 1995 and 2019 in excavations carried out in lands "gained from the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mavis Greer. John W. Greer.

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A small sandstone rockshelter overlooking Buffalo Creek in the southeastern foothills of the Bighorn Mountains has been of interest to researchers since the 1960s due to its shield-bearing warriors, but they account for only a few images at the site. Several different animals here include elk, bears, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jon Spenard. Mike Mirro. Javier Mai.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Rio Frio Regional Archaeological Project (RiFRAP) 2022 Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Reserve regional survey resulted in documentation of the Buffalo Hill Quarries (BHQ), the first recorded ancestral Maya granitic rock quarry with a ground stone implement workshop site. Preliminary investigations indicate a complex multicomponent quarryscape with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eva Panagiotakopulu.

The desiccating conditions in desert caves provide a unique opportunity for detailed research on organic materials. Previous examples of insect studies from the desert edge in Egypt, from Akhenaten’s city at Amarna, have indicated the potential of research with fossil insects, both for understanding environmental change and the nature of agriculture, and also for evidence of the early biogeography of insect borne diseases. However, there is limited information on hunter gatherer societies and ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ricardo Antorcha Pedemonte. Lane F. Fargher. Richard E. Blanton. Verenice Y. Heredia Espinoza. John K. Millhauser.

During intensive survey and mapping of the Late Postclassic City of Tlaxcallan, we noted that the inhabitants of the ancient city of Tlaxcallan, in Tlaxcala, Mexico, developed a dense settlement pattern and complex urban landscape during the Late Postclassic (A.D. 1250-1521). Specifically, massive terraces and open and accessible plazas dominated this landscape. In this paper, we present the initial results of excavations on a series of terraces located at the northern edge of the city. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kirsty Penkman. Molly Crisp. Beatrice Demarchi. Matthew Collins. Julia Lee-Thorp.

Chronology underpins our understanding of the past, but beyond the limit of radiocarbon dating (~50 ka), sites become more difficult to date. Amino acid geochronology, which uses the time-dependent breakdown of proteins in biominerals, has the potential to date the whole of the Quaternary. Ostrich eggshell (OES) is often associated with archaeological sites in Africa, as early humans utilised them as a food source, water carriers and for artistic purposes. OES’s calcitic structure potentially...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sara Ayers-Rigsby. Jeff Ransom. Malachi Fenn.

This is an abstract from the "*SE Hope for the Future: A Message of Resiliency from Archaeological Sites in South Florida" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. South Florida contains a vast record of over 10,000 years of human occupation. The archaeological timeline of the area has the capability to demonstrate human adaptation to rapid climate change in the past during the transition from the Younger Dryas to the Holocene. As archaeologists, we have a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Walter Burgos. Cameron McNeil. Edy Barrios.

Rio Amarillo, an ancient town, rests 20 km east of the great Maya city of Copan in Honduras. In the last four years residences from the Late Classic and Postclassic period have been excavated at the site. Investigations of the residential buildings from Río Amarillo have allowed us to better understand the influences and allegiances of the inhabitants of this community resting on the margins of the Maya world. The architecture of the structures reflects ties to both Copan and to areas in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Remi Mereuze. T. Max Friesen.

Western Arctic archaeological sites hold the remains of wooden houses occupied during the second millennium AD by ancestors of the present Inuit people. Although the permafrost helps to maintain these features in excellent condition, the giant puzzle resulting from the collapse of the frame makes it hard to understand their original architecture. During the ArcticCHAR project, we excavated a house at Kuukpak (Northwest Territories, Canada) in 2014 and 2016. Facing the complexity of this feature,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cerisa Reynolds.

This is an abstract from the "AI-Proof Learning: Food-Centered Experimental Archaeology in the Classroom" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeology of food is rarely revelatory of an individual’s diet or of individual meals. Instead, it is usually indicative of a community’s procurement and processing patterns, consumption patterns, cooking methods, and disposal practices. But how can we teach students to understand this distinction and to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ivan Ghezzi. Alan Hogg. Rodolfo Rodriguez. Antonio Mabres. Gretel Boswijk.

We present preliminary results from our project to create dendrochronological sequences for the coast of Peru, from the earliest monumental constructions to the present. Our first results come from Chankillo (400-200 BC), in coastal Ancash, which has numerous in situ lintels made from algarrobo wood. Our study of living algarrobos shows high correlation between ring-widths and climate records of the past century. The principle of uniformitarianism dictates the same was true at the time of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kasey Diserens Morgan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper explores the ways in which local government involvement in the restoration of historic structures and archaeological sites can change the ways in which they are valued and used by local communities. How do opinions surrounding heritage change when people are confronted with differing actors imposing differing values on historic properties? How do...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Mixter.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For the ancient Maya, the second century B.C. was a period of growth and consolidation; populations boomed, and a common set of cultural ideas spread across the Maya Lowlands. This expansion of ideas is evident in the widespread presence of chicanel ceramics, the spread of a unified Late Preclassic figural style found on mural and carved monuments, and in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Martindale. Konrad Gajewski. Michelle Chaput. Pierre Vermeersch. Carley Crann.

Since the launch of the upgraded Canadian Archaeological Radiocarbon Database (CARD) in April 2015, CARD has expanded to contain more than 70% of the world’s online 14C archaeological dates across six continents. CARD’s transformation into a global repository raises concerns about access, security, protocols, management, capacity and the prospects and long-term future of a single, comprehensive global 14C archaeological database. CARD is a template for that global database Here we present a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kenichiro Tsukamoto. Fuyuki Tokanai. Toru Moriya.

This paper aims to refine the Maya chronology during the Classic period (A.D. 250-950) through the development of Bayesian models. In so doing, we combined radiocarbon dates with stratigraphic information, ceramic data, burials, and calendric dates from stone monuments. At the Center for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry of Yamagata University, we ran 78 radiocarbon samples recovered from the Guzmán Group, an outlying group located 1.3km north of El Palmar in southeastern Campeche, Mexico. To...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shawn Joy.

This is an abstract from the "Liquid Landscapes: Recent Developments in Submerged Landscape Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Offshore wind is increasingly vital as the United States intensifies efforts to reduce its carbon footprint and improve energy security through renewable energy. Currently, the time and cost of planning, permitting, and building offshore energy projects are daunting, and mitigation for these projects is in its...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Waters.

Chronology is key to understanding the story of the first Americans. Accurate and precise ages from sites are necessary to develop chronological relationships and overlaps among different Paleoindian complexes. Proper dating of any Paleoindian horizon requires an understanding of the geological context, geochemical environment and potential contamination factors, material and chemical fraction dated, number of ages obtained, and many other variables. Without understanding these factors of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jakob Sedig.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient DNA in Service of Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient DNA (aDNA) data have provided unprecedented new insights on demographic changes through time. This paper demonstrates that aDNA can also enhance well-established archaeological techniques, by building on research that has explored how aDNA data can help refine radiocarbon date range estimates. Previous research established that since there...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexander Antonites.

Regional social complexity in southern Africa is closely tied to the rise and development of the Mapungubwe polity of 13th century South Africa. Expanding political power and influence meant that Mapungubwe increasingly articulated with communities on its periphery - a relationship that is reflected in shared material culture. These hinterland sites are all located in areas where there is an absence of earlier twelfth century occupation, which suggests a process of active settling of these areas...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Makayla Harding. Andrew Fairbairn. Nathan Wright. Trudy Gorringe. Josh Gorringe.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Archaeobotany Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With a wide variety of biomes and extreme fluctuations in water availability, Australia’s Channel Country saw Indigenous Australians develop a unique suite of subsistence strategies to live in this environment. Ethnohistoric accounts report combinations of semipermanent habitation and seasonal mobility, intensive seed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angela Jaillet-Wentling. Samantha Taylor.

Small-scale and volunteer-driven public archaeology efforts undertaken at the site of Pandenarium (36ME253) aim to bring the results and practice of archaeology to many publics with recent outreach efforts including partnerships between state agency personnel and university archaeology programs, fieldwork opportunities for volunteers, interviews with local media, and presentations at local, regional, and national conferences. With changing methods and times, our definition of hybrid...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Dudgeon. Pamela Pascali. Rebecca Hazard.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over 20 archaeologically-identified obsidian sources occur as inter-bedded surface exposures and stream-transported alluvial deposits within and along the margins of Idaho’s Snake River Plain. Previous research has documented the differential frequency of source use through time and variation in material transport distance for southern Idaho obsidians,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julie Hruby.

While fingerprint impressions have been used archaeologically to approach a range of cultural questions, the methodologies developed to date tend to be labor intensive, statistically unsophisticated, or require large numbers of complete prints. Recently, numerous quantitative print attributes that correlate with sex in modern populations have been discovered, almost always from two-dimensional data. It is probable that there are additional, yet-unrecognized features that correlate with producer...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erika Malo. Jeanne Moe.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology Education: Building a Research Base" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Project Archaeology, a national archaeology education program, relies on a diverse network of educators, museum professionals, and archaeologists certified as Master Teachers. Master Teachers provide nationwide professional development on the implementation of Project Archaeology’s curricula. Master Teachers are trained through a weeklong...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa DeLance. Jaime Awe.

Nearly every excavation at the site of Cahal Pech has recovered ceramic figurines. The ubiquitous nature of these figurines in a multitude of stratigraphic levels illustrate the importance of a figurine industry during the Formative Period. A comparative analysis of figurine attributes in this collection, in addition to collections found at neighboring sites in the Belize River Valley, reveals a unique style of figurine representation not found in any other regional figurine style in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bernard Means. Vinod Nautiyal. Mohan Naithani. Sudhir Nautiyal. Akanksha Rai.

The Virtual Curation Laboratory at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in Richmond, Virginia, and the Archaeology Department of Hemwati Nandan Bahuguna (HNB) Garhwal University, in Garhwal (Srinagar), India, have partnered to create three-dimensional (3D) models of artifacts and sculptures from the trans-Himalayan region of northern India. Many of these items are on display in the HNB Garhwal University Museum of Himalayan Archaeology and Ethnography. This partnership seeks to preserve these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Georgi Kyorlenski.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although the Inca civil war (1528–1532) set the stage for the transatlantic encounter in the Andes, it has been relegated to a historical footnote. This is largely due to the fact that the relatively short Inca imperial period (or Late Horizon, 1440s–1532) has been mostly studied as a monolithic whole. Yet Inca material culture varies dramatically through...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hayden Bernard. Ryan Kennedy. Eric Guiry. Peter Sauer.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological and historical data speak to the importance of turtles in the Chesapeake Bay region, which includes the eastern portions of Maryland and Virginia and which serves as a home to nearly 20 species of terrestrial, freshwater, and marine turtles. Despite the many roles that turtles played in pre- and post-contact communities in the area, there...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alyce De Carteret.

In the late sixteenth century, King Philip II of Spain sent out a request to the local administrators of his overseas colonies, asking that they complete a questionnaire designed to collect information about the lands he had conquered. The responses to this questionnaire, completed primarily between 1578-1586, form a set of documents now known as the Relaciones Geográficas. Question 31 asked respondents to describe the form and construction of the local houses and the materials used to build...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Barber. Arthur Joyce.

This is an abstract from the "Checking the Pulse II, Current Research in Oaxaca Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Formative period civic-ceremonial facilities like the Río Viejo acropolis in the lower Río Verde Valley on the coast of Oaxaca emerged from the combination a wide range of elements: conceptual, material, environmental, infrastructural, human, and divine. Built rapidly in the first centuries of the Common Era, the multiple...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachael Aleshire. Olivia Navarro-Farr.

Artifacts are crucial to the understanding of past societies. Archaeologists are able to learn about the values and cultural practices through material remains left behind by ancient civilizations. Museums display artifacts not only to educate the general public, but to make modern nationalistic statements connecting the country in possession of material to the ancient civilization which created it. The critical point with most of these exhibitions is that many of the artifacts are not excavated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hannah Herrick.

Traces of early modern European presence in the Sonoran Desert endure today as plaster-white mission churches dotted across the arid landscape. Established by Jesuits as early as 1691 AD, Mission San Xavier del Bac in Tucson, Arizona is unique in its continued usage as a modern Catholic church. Its long-standing occupation necessitates nearly-constant conservation practices, which must be complementary to the church’s original construction. However, the absence of nearly two-hundred years’...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wade Campbell.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Property Regimes" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the mid-1900s, American anthropologists characterized Diné society as a four-tiered social organizational structure with “natural communities” at the highest level. Often referred to as regional “bands,” these geographically defined, economically self-sufficient, multifamily social entities were loosely organized under the nominal leadership of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melissa Baltus. Sarah Baires.

Human engagement with the world includes forging and maintaining relationships with social agents, both visible and invisible. Among Native North Americans, these relationships are simultaneously religious, social, and political. We explore these relationships using data from our 2016 excavations at Cahokia’s CABB (Courtyard Area Between Borrows) Tract, located southeast of Woodhenge and west of the Grand Plaza. The CABB Tract is situated north of two known borrow pits (Fowler’s 5-5 and 5-6) and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Wilson. Sean Stcherbinine. Roger Kiers.

This is an abstract from the "Byways to the Past: An American Highway Archaeology Symposium" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dam removal is restoring the culturally significant ecosystem of the Elwha River on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, but the resulting increase in water flow at the US 101 Elwha River Bridge has accelerated erosion at pier foundations, necessitating replacement. Ethnographic and archaeological evidence indicate the area...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maureen Marshall.

This is an abstract from the "The South Caucasus Region: Crossroads of Societies & Polities. An Assessment of Research Perspectives in Post-Soviet Times" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bioarchaeological analysis of human remains excavated by Project ArAGATS in the Tsaghkahovit Plain, Armenia has allowed for a unique view onto Bronze Age life and has offered a glimpse into the lived experience of populations constituting early complex polities....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ethan Watrall.

This is an abstract from the "Capacity Building or Community Making? Training and Transitions in Digital Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As digital methods have become ubiquitous and critical in archaeology and heritage, the challenge of teaching those methods has become more complex. More importantly, we’re being faced with an equally important challenge - how do we build and foster communities in which scholars are connected through...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ramie Gougeon. Gregory Cook.

This is an abstract from the "Submerged Paleolandscape Investigations in the Gulf of Mexico" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In spite of an increased interest in submerged terrestrial landscapes and an increased need for trained professional archaeologists to support offshore energy development projects, educational programs in the advanced survey technologies, analytical software and methodologies, and educational coursework necessary to discover...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexis Jackson.

The monastery of Saint Fortunatus in Charlieu, France, was built and rebuilt several times from the ninth to the twelfth centuries. In the twentieth century, the monastery was excavated by American archaeologist and art historian Elizabeth Sunderland, who relied heavily on its relationship to mega-monastery Cluny to reconstruct the smaller abbey’s chronology. However, re-examining Charlieu’s timing and phasing with attention to material and labor costs over time exposes an alternative chronology...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lewis Borck. Jeffery J. Clark.

This is an abstract from the "Why Platform Mounds? Part 2: Regional Comparisons and Tribal Histories" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists have offered multiple explanations for the dramatic architectural, subsistence, and political shifts that happened at the end of the Hohokam Classic period. Many of these explanations are good at exploring potential factors leading to these changes in regional contexts, like the Phoenix Basin where it...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julie Woods. Jesse Bergevin. Marla Taylor.

This is an abstract from the "In Search of Solutions: Exploring Pathways to Repatriation for NAGPRA Practitioners (Part IV): NAGPRA in Policy, Protocol, and Practice" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Northeast NAGPRA Community of Practice was founded in 2023 in an effort to build community and strategize on issues and opportunities related to NAGPRA implementation that are unique to the region. Our goal is to improve trust, develop...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniela Hernandez Sarinana. David Carballo.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Teotihuacan is an ancient city located in Mexico that was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987. It was the largest city in the Americas during its peak between 100-550 CE and its significance as an early, cosmopolitan center has been demonstrated over decades of continuous study. The Proyecto Arqueológico Tlajinga Teotihuacan (PATT) began in 2012...