Society for American Archaeology

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lindsay Johansson. Katie Richards.

Like every archaeological region, current views concerning Fremont are influenced as much by the history of archaeologists as it is by the archaeology itself. This paper presents a (very brief) history of Fremont archaeology and archaeological thought, focusing on how particular developments and individuals influenced how Fremont was understood. Our aim is not to be comprehensive, and we will undoubtedly omit important events and information, including contributions of many in attendance. Our...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Dresser-Kluchman.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Archaeobotany, Part II" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Concerns around sampling methodology, size, and adequacy endure in archaeobotany, centered on one persistent question—how much is enough? At the same time, archaeologists in many areas have become increasingly interested in minimally invasive and minimally destructive methods in response to ethical, community, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robin Skeates.

This paper reconsiders the significance of a generally warmer and wetter climate, expanded plant ranges and sea level rise to human groups in mainland and island Italy between the Final Upper Palaeolithic and Early Neolithic. Fundamental cultural changes in demography, subsistence strategies and social organization certainly coincided broadly with these environmental changes, and do suggest a degree of human adaptation, although the cultural resilience of hunter-gatherer lifestyles should not be...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robin Bendrey. Guillaume Fournié.

This is an abstract from the "HumAnE Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Zoonotic diseases remain a persistent global challenge, with some 60% of human pathogens of zoonotic origin. They disproportionately impact the world’s most vulnerable populations, particularly those living in close proximity with their animals and who have less access to health information and care. Archaeology’s cultural and biological datasets have the potential to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Neil Duncan. Peter E. Siegel. John G. Jones. Nicholas Dunning. Deborah M. Pearsall.

One of the defining characteristics of humans is our propensity to migrate. However, the push or pull factors resulting in human migrations may be impossible to know in some cases. Furthermore, our sole reliance on the archaeological record may mislead our understanding of the timing and impact of migrations. Recognizing migrations in the archaeological past is made especially difficult in cases where migrating groups were small, leaving ephemeral traces of their occupations. Paleoenvironmental...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Triozzi. Anna Semon. Thomas Blaber.

This poster considers social networks derived from artifact assemblages and interment types from early-Irene and late-Irene and protohistoric mortuary contexts on the Georgia (USA) coast. Network analysis can be used to evaluate potential interactions between community members represented in mortuary contexts. The R statistical program is used to model social networks according to multiple parameters and generate statistical indices of network connectivity. I propose that these indices are a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Woolard. Briana Pobiner.

Evidence for hominin meat acquisition in the form of butchery marks on fossil animal bones dates back to at least 2.6 million years ago. With this new dietary behavior came competition between hominins and large carnivores for animal carcasses. Identifying which carnivores hominins were interacting with would allow various models of the timing and sequence of hominin and carnivore carcass to be evaluated. However, many studies of carnivore tooth marking and damage patterns are conducted with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eleanora Reber. Mark Rees. Samuel Huey.

Absorbed organic pottery analysis is a technically easy but interpretively difficult branch of archaeometry. Given the complex interaction between organic chemistry, pot use, pyrolytic effects, depositional effects, and modern contamination, it is often difficult to balance interpretations between appropriately cautious and culturally and anthropologically useful information. This issue is illustrated through the analysis and interpretation of a suite of absorbed organic pottery residues...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samantha Linford. Kelsey Reese. Danielle Huerta.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cavates and mesa top pueblo roomblock sites on the Pajarito Plateau have generally been studied as separate site types. This paper aims to explore what archaeologists can learn by studying mesa top pueblos and cavates as one community based on seasonal living. Ethnographic accounts have mentioned how communities would live in the cavates in the winter and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ann Scott. Melanie Saldana.

During the 2013 season, a team from California State University, Los Angeles worked with the Rio Bravo Archaeological Survey directed by Stanley Walling to conduct a preliminary assessment of Cave 1 (RB-47-142-X) at the site of Chawak But’o’ob. Located within the heart of the site’s public architecture, Cave 1 is surrounded by a ballcourt, a sweatbath and a sinkhole. Though our survey and excavation revealed utilization of the cave that differed from other areas of the Maya lowlands, its...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carlos Rincon Mautner.

This is an abstract from the "The Subterranean in Mesoamerican Cultural Landscapes" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The inhabitants across the Northern Mixteca and the drier sectors of the Tehuacan Valley developed technological innovations to counter the effects of recurrent drought on subsistence. Among measures implemented to conserve soil and water there are terraces, dams, reservoirs, and canals, as well as seed selection and cultivation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Harry. Michael Terlep. William Bryce.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology of the Virgin Branch Puebloan Region" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the last two decades, new archaeological findings have challenged traditional ideas about the Western Basketmaker culture. We now know that the processes involved in the origin and spread of early farming in the western Puebloan region were much more complex than previously recognized. Rather than resulting from a single wave of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael L. Terlep. William Bryce. Karen Harry.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cave du Pont is a Far Western Basketmaker shelter located on private lands within Cave Lakes Canyon, six miles north of Kanab, Utah. Originally excavated in 1920 by Jesse Nusbaum, with artifact analyses by Alfred V. Kidder and Samuel J. Guernsey, Cave du Pont provided the first clear evidence that the Basketmaker archaeological culture extended west of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tobías García Vilchis. Emiliano Gallaga.

The Raramuri, an indigenous people from Chihuahua, Mexico, has occupied the western part of the country for over 1000 years. As many authors claim, their ways of life have changed little, and they remain as one of the only, if not the only, living seminomadic groups existing in North America. In this paper, we will focus on recent ethnoarchaeological research carried out by students and professors of the EAHNM. This research allows us to create an explanatory model to comprehend the nature of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Curtis Marean. Panagiotis Karkanas.

A series of sea caves and rock shelters with strong anthropogenic contributions are found at Pinnacle Point (PP) near Mossel Bay in the Western Cape Province, South Africa. Two of these (PP13B and PP5-6) have been the target of extensive archaeological excavation and both document anthropogenic and geogenic contributions waxing and waning over time. A variety of caves at PP do not bear anthropogenic remains, such as Staircase Cave and Crevice Cave. A third, PP29, is filled with sediment but...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claudia Garcia-Des Lauriers.

In the municipality of Tonalá, Chiapas, Cerro Bernal represents a unique feature on the Pacific coastal plain—one that is both strategic and of economic importance as well as representing a deeply potent sacred landscape. Among the important features of this landscape that have become the focus of cotemporary folklore are a series of caves, or more specifically rock shelters, that have entered the imagination of local residents as important elements of a living and enchanted landscape. ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Mina.

This is an abstract from the "Social Archaeologies and Islands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Caves often occupied prominent locations as visible landmarks or as nodal points in exchange networks and mobility routes. The paper discusses coastal sacred caves, which through the transportation of diverse material culture, provided the backdrop where maritime identities were played out. The study investigates the Late Minoan occupation phase of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Johnson.

Two different versions of a myth, one Kitanemuk and one Kawaiisu, recount the tradition of a man taken into a cave where he was instructed in sacred knowledge by animal spirits. Neighboring Chumash and Yokuts elders passed along accounts of caves being used for shamanistic purposes, in part associated with rock paintings. These ethnographic accounts imply the private use of caves for special rituals by individuals. Nonetheless, there are particular Chumash pictograph sites that appear to have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dan McArthur. David Robinson.

This study aims to explore the purpose and use of bifurcated sticks found in cache caves of Southern California. Known as ‘witchsticks’ or ‘spirtsticks’, little formal research has been undertaken on these enigmatic cave sticks. As suggested by their naming, interpretations presume a ritual connotation despite little evidence; alternately, a purely practical application has equally been poorly considered. With the discovery of new Cache cave comes the ability to observe well preserved cave...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patrick Wilkinson.

Haitian Vodou is a syncretic religion that combines elements of West African beliefs and indigenous Taino culture overlaid onto a rigid framework of forced Catholicism. One aspect of the religion that has not been investigated is the modern use of caves as a specialized local for various types of rituals, each having a specific purpose. This paper will discuss the use of both ethnographic and archaeological investigative techniques to differentiate the various purposes of cave ceremonies and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Brady.

This is an abstract from the "The Subterranean in Mesoamerican Cultural Landscapes" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the 25 years since the publication of “Settlement Configuration and Cosmology: The Role of Caves at Dos Pilas,” a number of significant discoveries of architecture constructed in relation to caves have been made. The discovery of the man-made cave constructed beneath the Pyramid of the Plumed Serpent at Teotihuacan is perhaps the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cinthia M. Campos. James Brady. José Luis Punzo Díaz.

This is an abstract from the "Studies in Mesoamerican Subterranean Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As cave archaeology emerged as a specialty in the 1990, an unfortunate consequence has been the reification of the distinction between surface and subterranean archaeology. We would note that there have always been problems with this dichotomy. Andrews (1970), for instance, mentions that the entrance to Balankanche Cave was in the middle...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer McCrackan. Eric Weaver.

The El Malpais National Monument located roughly 100 miles west of Albuquerque, New Mexico, borders the southern part of the San Juan Basin and the southeastern portion of the Colorado Plateau. The extensive geologic history of volcanic activity has created a seemingly hellish volcanic field rightfully named "the badlands" by Spanish explorers. However, the region is in fact home to a rich cultural history that heavily utilizes the natural environment, including its many cave systems. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joshuah Lockett-Harris.

Growing evidence suggests the ancient Maya conceptualized caves, as well as small crevices in the karstic bedrock (both natural and artificial), as sacred ch’een – portals of shamanic communication, which existed in a liminal realm between the physical world and the ancestral powers of the cave-riddled Underworld. Ch’een represented important ritual foci for the ancient Maya, as well as receptacles for sacred offerings. The interment of prominent ancestors and symbolically valuable materials...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jocelyn Acosta.

In 1910, A. Hooton Blackiston discovered a cave 25 miles from Naco containing a cache of 800 copper bells, a possible mosaic mask of turquoise, and other materials. Blackiston interpreted the cave as a place of worship dedicated to the bat god. Copper, however, has very rarely been reported from caves in Honduras. Metals enter Mesoamerican late in its history but quickly assume an importance equal to jade in the native value system. The only other cave known to have held copper bells is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wendy Layco. Jessica Strayer. Samantha Lorenz. Toni Gonzalez.

In June of 2017, the Contested Caves Archaeological Project (CCAP), explored what was thought to be a partially capped chultun at the site of La Milpa, Belize. On entering, however, it became clear that the feature was actually a small, natural cave with a classic chultun-style entrance carved into it. Two of the cave’s three chambers contained small pools of water, which receded into the porous limestone, within days of their discovery. The pools make any possibility of storage infeasible...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angélica María Medrano.

When the Spanish entered northwest Mexico in1529 they confronted a bellicose people, the Caxcans, occupying numerous settlements in the southeastern drainages of the Sierra Madre Occidental, los Altos of Jalisco and Zacatecas. The Caxcans—ethnically and culturally related to Nahuatl-speaking groups of Central Mexico, including the Mexica—were one of the northernmost Mesoamerican cultures in sixteenth-century New Spain. Data from recent investigations are presented, clarifying the position of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only ALFREDO FERIA CUEVAS. KARIM BULHUSEN MUÑOZ.

Dentro de la dinámica social de los grupos cazadores recolectores encontramos una evidente relación con el medio ambiente, en donde con base a un gran acervo de conocimientos, explotaban los recursos naturales y aprovechaban perfectamente el uso de los espacios. En ambos casos, dicha explotación se manifiesta con la presencia/ausencia de diversas evidencias materiales, las cuáles mediante un minucioso registro arqueológico sistematizado nos permite reproducir contextos, que una vez analizados...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelly Jenks.

This is an abstract from the "Hill People: New Research on Tijeras Canyon and the East Mountains" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cañon de Carnué (also known as Tijeras Canyon) is a place of transition—between the Rio Grande Valley and Great Plains, the Sandia and Manzano Mountains, the alpine forests and riparian bottomlands, and between the communities—human and nonhuman—that inhabit these environments. We often understand this canyon through the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kenneth Holyoke. Branden Rizzuto.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Carboniferous Chert Geoarchaeological Survey (CCGS) was initiated in 2019 in order to identify and characterize the distribution of geological occurrences of Carboniferous-aged cherts in New Brunswick, Canada, and, to better understand the archaeological exploitation of those lithic materials. Initial fieldwork associated with the CCGS sought to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christina Giovas. Claudia Kraan. Amy Victorina.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Caribbean islands face significant heritage management capacity shortfalls that undermine local direction and control of archaeological research for community benefit. The Curaçao Citizen Researcher (CCitRes) Initiative uses citizen science and public archaeology to develop archaeological capacity on one such island, Curaçao, and empower communities to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elysia Petras.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents the preliminary results of neutron activation analysis (NAA) and laser ablation ICP-MS (LA-ICP-MS) conducted at the University of Missouri Research Reactor’s Archaeometry Lab on coarse earthenware sherds recovered archaeologically from two plantation-era sites on Anguilla, the Wallblake Estate site and the Hughes Estate site. Using...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Douglas Porter. Angelyn Bass. Michael Spilde. Katherine Williams. Noreen Fritz.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. People of the southwestern United States traditionally used earthen materials for building and architectural embellishment. Examples include pointing stone and earthen unit masonry; layering floors and roofs; fabricating architectural features such as mealing bins, fire hearths, and nichos, and; plastering surfaces to protect them from weather and as a ground...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anastasia Steffen.

This is an abstract from the "Ann F. Ramenofsky: Papers in Honor of a Non-Normative Career" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The participants in this symposium have come together to highlight the diverse influences of Ann Felice Ramenofsky’s decades in archaeology. Here we share our appreciation of Ramenofsky’s clarity of intellect through presentations of research, stories of collaboration, and discussions of her contributions. This paper...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wendy Sutton.

Commonly known as “rock art,” pictographs (pigment on rock) and petroglyphs (images pecked or incised into rock) are much more than art. They reflect the history and values of peoples who once lived here and are a tangible reminder of their connection to the landscape. The Gila National Forest is installing interpretive signage at or near multiple well-known “rock art” sites in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA). These signs, and additional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeff Walker. Don Hann. Cathy Lindberg. Alicia Beat.

The Pacific Northwest (PNW) Region of the US Forest Service has engaged partners and volunteers from diverse groups for over four decades: Friends groups to restore lookouts and log cabins; Passport In Time projects to engage the public in archaeological site testing; and universities, museums and independent researchers to investigate and interpret a wide variety of sites. We collaborate closely with the Native American tribes to preserve and protect their heritage and places of cultural and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melissa Twaroski.

The Southern Region of the U.S. Forest Service encompasses fifteen national forests in fourteen southeastern states and Puerto Rico. For decades, the important work of investigating and protecting significant cultural resources on these national forests has depended on partnerships with universities, Native American tribes, and non-profit organizations. In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the National Historic Preservation Act, this presentation highlights some of these key partnerships...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Smith.

This is an abstract from the "Female Firsts: Celebrating Archaeology’s Pioneering Women on the 101st Anniversary of the 19th Amendment " session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Like many archaeologists, the late Bettye J. Broyles discovered what she wanted to do in her twenties while enrolled in college. It was there where Broyles’s archaeological career began to take shape, and by summer of 1954 she had embarked on her first field school. Broyles went on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Del Roble Rios Ortega.

In this paper I present the historic and archaeological records, of social gatherings that formed an integral part of the mining way of life and the material culture that represents it. The study is focused on the town of Magistral del Oro, Durango in northern Mexico. This region was forged by mining activity in colonial times. Though the village today has been largely abandoned, traces of both labor and domestic areas still remain. Furthermore, photographs and interviews with people who worked...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chelsea Fisher.

This is an abstract from the "Advancing Public Perceptions of Sustainability through Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ejido (collective agricultural landholding) of Yaxunah, Yucatán, Mexico is known among archaeologists for its pre-Hispanic archaeological sites. But among a growing contingent of food aficionados, Yaxunah is known for its cooking. Having attracted the interest of celebrity chefs like René Redzepi (Noma, Copenhagen),...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Auchter.

Cultural Resource Management investigations associated with the deployment of telecommunications infrastructure in the United States are unique. From the size of the undertaking, to the task that CRM/NEPA professionals are prescribed to accomplish, cultural resource professionals are able to see a wide breadth of cultural landscapes from across the country for short periods of time. Using examples from across the country, a critical examination will be made of this unique aspect of CRM. How has...

DOCUMENT Citation Only François Remise.

During the first Iron Age, between 600 B.C. and 540 B.C., the ruling elite of the Celtic community at Heuneburg in Southern Germany erected monumental buildings, mainly mud-brick fortifications and funeral mounds. The costs and efforts involved in the construction of these buildings have been estimated using the science of energetics. This study analyses the energy effort involved in the construction, preferentially on the basis of energy values which would have applied in the historical and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patrick Rivera.

In an era of globalization and mass production, archaeological objects and images are not immune to being transformed into commodities and sold for profit. This (re)production of the past can profoundly influence the ways that consumers understand the history of particular times and places—often erasing the experiences of marginality and resilience that archaeologists work so hard to recover. This paper examines two distinct cases in which historical images (and periods) are being transformed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shawn Patch.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lewis and Elmwood cemeteries are the final resting places of enslaved individuals from two antebellum plantations in Granville County, North Carolina. Archaeological investigations show both cemeteries share many of the characteristics typical of Black cemeteries beginning in the antebellum era and continuing into the postbellum period. In much of North...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jerry Lyon. Jeffrey Jones.

The transition from hunting and gathering to increased reliance on farming and the subsequent development of distinct regional cultural traditions represent critical processes in the prehistory of southern Arizona. Previous research at the site of Valencia Vieja in the southern Tucson Basin suggests the development of a distinct Hohokam cultural identity began during the Tortolita phase (Red Ware horizon) when significant population aggregation could be maintained and supported with dependable...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Womack.

Excavated in 1975, the cemetery at the Qijia Culture type-site of Qijiaping in southern Gansu province, China, provides a wealth of data on life and death in Qijia society. Up to this point however, the production and use of the most common type of burial good, ceramic vessels, has never been fully researched. This paper will explore production organization and methods likely used to produce several classes of vessels though statistical analysis of vessel standardization. Ideas of what...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maya Cowan. Vanessa Tallarico.

The goal of our research was to analyze the correlation between decomposition, and damage to memorial structures around the Emanu-el Jewish Cemetery in Victoria B.C. We hypothesized that some concrete fill damage was due to casket decay after the fill was placed, causing it to sink or crack. We used damaged double plots with a single fill as evidence, because the side of the older burial had time to settle before the fill was poured over both plots. We found that damage was almost always on the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Taylor Benoit. Guillermo de Anda. James Brady.

This is an abstract from the "The Subterranean in Mesoamerican Cultural Landscapes" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Gran Acuífero Maya discovered an important archaeological feature constructed within a cenote in Hoctún, Yucatán, Mexico. Cenote Xbis contains a well-built sacbe 3.5 m wide and more than 60 m long that leads to a large pool of water at the back of the cave. Two speleothem columns appear to have been significant in the layout of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cristina Verdugo. Jeremy Coltman. James Brady. Guillermo De Anda Alaniz.

A truism was established very early in Maya studies that the Cenote of Sacrifice at Chichen Itza had a religious function while the nearby Cenote Xtoloc was the source for domestic drinking water. Part of the attraction of this idea was no doubt its close paralleling of the popular Western dichotomy, sacred vs. profane. The problem with truisms, statements so obviously true that they say nothing new or interesting, is that they direct attention elsewhere. This is probably why the Temple of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kevin Schwarz.

Fragmentation theory is premised on the notion that actors purposefully broke valued goods, deposited fragments of them in meaningful places, and enchained other social beings in relationships with gifts and exchange of them. They also accumulated whole objects in caches. This presentation examines the fragmentation premise for censers and non-slipped utilitarian ceramics in and around architectural spaces at the Quexil Islands, Guatemala. The site is a Terminal Classic-Late Postclassic Maya...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melanie Chang. April Nowell.

Binary models of gender are often uncritically applied in paleoanthropology, even if the biological sex or gender identity of a specimen or representation is ambiguous. In the Upper Paleolithic, indicators ranging from simple bifurcating lines to overt representations of secondary sex characteristics may be used to identify an illustration, engraving, or piece of portable art as "male" or "female." These taxonomic rubrics are rarely stated explicitly. Still, the impression given by an overview...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aaron Ott.

This poster displays the relationship between the Great Temple of Tenochtitlán and four smaller pyramids, of similar architecture, concurrently in operation during the period of Aztec dominance in central Mexico. I will demonstrate how the satellite pyramids worked in conjunction with Templo Mayor to form a cohesive religious network, reflecting shared ideology through common ritual use . Using the ethnographic analogy of medieval Catholicism, I will show how Mexica-Aztec religion utilized this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lorraine Williams-Beck.

The center, as the Maya universe’s fifth direction, is a little understood component of Colonial period Maya cosmos. This paper will explore a diachronic notion of function and form for center as umbilicus, placing particular emphasis on pre-Hispanic Canpech and Chakanputun provinces, and Early Colonial contexts at Dzaptun/Ceiba Cabecera, Campeche. Pre-Hispanic Dzaptun, renamed "la Zeiba" and Ceiba Cabecera in later Colonial sources, had served as central cog in a hypothesized regional ritual...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joy Mersmann. J. Grant Stauffer.

This is an abstract from the "Dancing through Iconographic Corpora: A Symposium in Honor of F. Kent Reilly III" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. North American and Mesoamerican material cultures exhibit similarities that were mistakenly seen by early diffusionists as evidence for northward migrations that catalyzed social complexity among Mississippian period (AD 1050–1500) cultures. Iconographically, assemblages from both geographic areas highlight...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cameron Turley.

Postcolonial and Indigenous archaeologies have changed the theoretical, methodological, and political landscapes of our discipline’s engagement with regions and peoples once conceptualized as peripheral to the European core. However, some regions, and the subjects that move within them, still occupy the conceptual margins. This paper considers the position of archaeological praxes in Greenland, a constituent of the Kingdom of Denmark, and the late arrival of the postcolonial critique to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robin Robertson. Lauren Sullivan. Laura Kosakowsky. Fred Valdez.

This is an abstract from the "“The Center and the Edge”: How the Archaeology of Belize Is Foundational for Understanding the Ancient Maya" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For many years the notion of a core (or center) versus periphery (or edge) dominated models of prehistoric Maya development. However, in 1979 David Freidel argued against the idea that there was a center or edge, asserting that the lowland Maya belonged to an interaction sphere....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Francis Allard.

First incorporated into China in 214 BCE, the southern region known as Lingnan (which consists of the present-day provinces of Guangxi and Guangdong), has traditionally been regarded as one of China’s peripheral regions. Not only was Lingnan distant from imperial centers in the north, its native pre-literate ‘Yue’ inhabitants spoke non-sinitic languages and were known for their distinctive ‘uncivilized’ behaviors. Along with its location at the southern margin of modern China’s territory, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yongxian Li.

The two large settlement sites of Ka’erdong and Zebang which were radiocarbon-dated to 3000-1500 BP probably belong to the former Zhangzhung Kingdom (1500 BC – AD 645). These two sites are unusually large, covering an area of 130,000 m2 and 500,000 m2 respectively. Both sites have large cemeteries, residential areas, ritually-used spaces, and defensive structures. The largest structure observed is a large stone-mound tomb with a diameter of 60 m and a height of 6 m that can be attributed to a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Thompson. Alex Mackay. Sheila Nightingale. Flora Schilt. David Wright.

The Late Pleistocene Middle Stone Age (MSA) records of southern and northern Africa increasingly provide evidence for diversity in technological systems, with both exhibiting early examples of standardized stone tool production achieved through complex manufacturing sequences. This superficially implies a long-term trend toward greater complexity in MSA technology at a continental scale. However, within both regions, various lithic elements received different emphases over time and space –...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexander Benitez.

The Central American Ceramics Research Project, a student driven and collaborative research program carried out between 2009-2013, completed a scholarly survey of more than 13,000 ceramic objects in the collections of the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). The project originated as an effort to update old catalog information and bring to light important but largely forgotten collections of ceramics. However, it quickly developed into a major collaborative research effort that brought...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Louise Stone.

On top of Caral Peru’s amphitheater mound, an entry passageway opens to an inner sanctum—tiered benches surrounding a sunken floor and a central ceremonial hearth. This concentric design recessed into the earth repeats in diverse ways throughout third millennium BCE Kotosh Religious Tradition temples in the central Andes. Whence the concentric sunken design and hearth? I propose the hearth functioned as Andean portals for communication with unseen worlds, giving offerings, remembering ancestors....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Lincoln.

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. This paper will chronicle some of the history of the Federal investment in Big Archaeology for the Central Arizona Project. Specifically, the decisions to support a philosophy of Cultural Research Management, which facilitated a huge contribution to the archaeology of Arizona, and more broadly to the Southwest...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marie Annereau-Fulbert.

Compared to its Guatemala counterpart, the region of the Chiapas highlands is known to have a marginal history in the Postclassic period. This misrepresentation is due to limited investigations since the 1960´s and to inexistent ethnohistoric sources, which could provide clues for the interpretation of ethnic and settlement patterns on the eve of the Conquest. However, Spanish documents described "cacicazgos" as Chamula and Zinacantan near Jobel Valley, which is the focal point of our study....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Prudence Rice.

Jato Black-on-Gray is an extremely rare Terminal Classic pottery type in central Petén, typically recovered as mortuary furniture. It is a hybrid, combining typical Petén forms with aspects of color, decoration, and use borrowed from wares and groups such as Chablekal Fine Gray and Achote Black, more common in western and southwestern Petén. In particular, an incised monkey image on a Jato vase from Tayasal ties it to common motifs on Chablekal bowls, which are also from burial contexts but were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Javier Fernanddez-Lopez De Pablo. Elodie Brisset.

This is an abstract from the "Human Behavioral Ecology at the Coastal Margins: Global Perspectives on Coastal & Maritime Adaptations" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper we use a Central Place Foraging Model to evaluate the impact of environmental changes on subsistence and mobility strategies in the Mesolithic period in the Western Mediterranean. We focus on the analysis of the of El Collado site because of its position in the interface...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Storozum. Tristram Kidder. Zhen Qin. Haiwang Liu.

Over the past five years, the authors have conducted a geoarchaeological survey in Northern Henan Province, China, to test three hypotheses of regional and global significance. First, many Chinese archaeologists consider this area void of archaeological remains. Based on our data, most archaeological material is far below the surface - approximately 5 to 8 meters. Second, the location of the Yellow River during the Bronze Age year is argued to flow to the south, entering the ocean near Shanghai....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Glenna Nielsen-Grimm. Greg Farley. Edgar Ortega. Richard D. Hansen.

The Great Central Plaza of the West Complex at El Mirador lies on an early and important alignment for the entire city. Excavations of two small altar platforms, and test units of structures on the boundaries of the plaza and the Leon Plaza suggest that this was probably among the earliest areas of the city, and continued to have symbolic and ritual importance throughout the Middle and Late Preclassic periods at El Mirador. The Central Acropolis creates the southern boundary, the east and west...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard McAuliffe. Stephen Black. Raymond Mauldin.

This is an abstract from the "Hot Rocks in Hot Places: Investigating the 10,000-Year Record of Plant Baking across the US-Mexico Borderlands" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Burned rock middens, large accumulations of thermally fractured stone and charred earth representing earth oven facilities, are ubiquitous in the hunter-gatherer archaeological record of Central Texas, upon and near the Edwards Plateau. The subject of study for over a century,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stefani Crabtree.

This is an abstract from the "Entangled Legacies: Human, Forest, and Tree Dynamics" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Often when we examine past ecologies we focus on food webs--what people ate, and how people were connected to larger trophic entanglements. However, by analyzing the networks that form around the myriad uses beyond food of other biota we can see how humans embed themselves in and structure ecologies worldwide. As part of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Wickler.

The definition of island marginality in northern Norway was radically altered by the advent of motorized fishing vessels in the early 20th century. Prior to this development, small offshore islands were of central importance for settlement and marine related activity due to their proximity to fishing grounds. In this paper I discuss three settlements on small and ‘marginal’ islands in Arctic Norway from 68°19’ to 71°05’ N latitude that illustrate the centrality of such locations since the Early...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patrick Dolan. Colin Grier.

The Marpole Period (2500 to 1000 BP) was a time of social transformation in the Salish Sea region of the Northwest Coast of North America. During this period, social and economic relations became increasingly bound up in the operation of centralized, long-lived, multifamily households. Yet, centralization arguably failed to extend far past plankhouse walls, producing regionally decentralized economic communities. This paper examines the processes underlying this pattern from the vantage point of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa Kealhofer. Kaseka Phon. Peter Grave. Miriam Stark. Darith Ea.

This is an abstract from the "Paradigms Shift: New Interpretations in Mainland Southeast Asian Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Historically, international archaeological research in mainland Southeast Asia (MSEA) has been typically site-focused and ‘origins’ oriented (e.g., agriculture, metalworking). Theoretical framing has been inductive, frequently emphasizing the role of migration in culture change. More recently, interest in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yoko Nishimura.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper explores a possible correlation between central planning and economic segregation in ancient urbanized cities. A pre-planned and constructed urban residential area may have fostered an aggregate of inhabitants who had similar traits, such as ethnicity, class, wealth, occupation and religion. Different clusters of people may be discerned between...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Ljungkvist.

The Valsgärde burial ground is one of key sites for the Viking phenomenon project. This burial site was used for more than 1000 years. It is the best preserved and the only "entirely" excavated boat grave site in Sweden. Here we can follow the changing burial rites and interactions with the world during the 1st Millennia AD. Valsgärde has been seen as a place where an unbroken series of male elite individuals were buried for nearly eight centuries. However, detailed studies of all burials, both...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Deats.

Chief Looking’s Village (32BL3), also known as Ward Earth Lodge Village, is located near downtown Bismarck, ND. This site, occupied for a relatively short period in the mid-1500s, displays two distinctly different house types, one "local" and one "foreign" in design. Potential storage pits within two house outlines at Chief Looking’s Village, identified through remote sensing, were excavated by the Paleo Cultural Research Group during the 2015 summer field season, and the artifacts analyzed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Bubp.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Robert Davidson's Holly Bend, an early 19th century plantation located in the Piedmont region of North Carolina, was documented in the 1850 Mecklenburg County census as having 109 slaves. The plantation continues to be the focus of excavations and research projects over the past several years. Each year, excavation during these projects produce numerous...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jason Vandervort.

This is an abstract from the "Hill People: New Research on Tijeras Canyon and the East Mountains" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper will present my analysis of ceramics recovered during the 2022 New Mexico State University Archaeological Field School at the land grant plaza settlement of San Miguel de Carnué (LA 12924), located in Tijeras Canyon. This analysis offers new insight into the lifestyles and trading patterns of the settlers who...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marco Martinez.

Casas Grandes is an archaeological prehistoric site located in the state of Chihuahua, Northwest Mexico. The region’s chronology remains unclear, with knowledge gaps between its time periods, one of these gaps includes the possible social configurations after the collapse of Casas Grandes. This research aims to provide new data obtained from the analysis of the ceramic assemblage of an archaeological site whose architecture seems to linger between late Casas Grandes and Spanish. This site, 291,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thiago Kater. Jennifer Watling. Fernando Almeida. Eduardo Neves.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human agroforestry and landscaping practices in the Amazon Forest are now well-accepted phenomena among Amazonian archaeologists. Along the Amazon River, the oldest evidence of visible landscape modifications is largely associated with contexts in which pottery from the Pocó-Açutuba Tradition is identified, from 3,500 years BP. This tradition, in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Wilson.

The Washington Mounds site is an Early to Middle Caddo period (A.D. 800-1300) mound site with 11 mounds, some of which contain burials; two village areas are associated with the site surrounding the mounds. It is located in southwest Arkansas between the Red River and Little Missouri River Basins. Some level of ritual activity occurred at the site, but the types or scale was previously unknown. Two excavations have been done at the site: first in the early 20th century by M. R. Harrington, and a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matt O'Mansky. Arthur Demarest.

Recent popular interpretations have proposed that the "Terminal Classic" in the southern lowlands was a gradual transition or slow multi-stage process or that many ninth and tenth century centers continued to prosper; or even have proposed a "What collapse?" scenario. Yet systematic site by site review of ceramic chronologies and evidence reveals that these characterizations and, indeed, the whole debate are poorly informed due to errors in ceramic typologies and limited understandings of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angela Huster.

This is an abstract from the "Central Mexico after Teotihuacan: Everyday Life and the (Re)Making of Epiclassic Communities" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, I present an initial ceramic seriation for the Epiclassic site of Chicoloapan Viejo, in the southern Basin of Mexico, with a discussion of issues particular to periods of political fragmentation. I demonstrate that two phases can be distinguished at Chicoloapan Viejo, based on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carrie Tucker. Jeffrey Glover. Dominique Rissolo. Michael Callaghan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ceramic sequence developed for Vista Alegre, a Maya port site on the northern coast of Quintana Roo, Mexico, demonstrates both the site’s persistence through time and its extensive trade relationships across the Maya world. The Proyecto Costa Escondida (PCE) team has synthesized an official site chronology from an ongoing analysis of the ceramic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alice Hunt.

Sir Flinders Petrie revolutionized archaeological ceramic analysis in 1904 by developing ‘sequence dating’ —the relative dating of strata, buildings or tombs based on changes in formal and stylistic attributes of vessels overtime as determined by seriation. Since the efficacy of sequence dating is directly related to the quality of the typology upon which it is based, stylistic typologies and classification of ceramic have been the norm for the last century, despite their manifold limitations....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jason Paling. Hannah Dutton. Justin Lowry.

This paper discusses patterns of production and distribution of pottery recovered from the site of Chiquilistagua through the use of X-ray Powder Diffraction (XRD) and Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis (INAA) compositional data. Dominant types found in the Chiquilistagua assemblage include Usulatan, Espinoza, Segovia, Chavez Astorga, and Nejapa Roja. Occupational episodes at Chiquilistagua extend across the Tempisque and Bagaces ceramic spheres, which have been associated with widespread...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kirk Costion. Donna Nash.

This poster will present the results of the analysis of household ceramic assemblages from the slopes of the secondary Wari center Cerro Mejía in the Moquegua Valley. The slopes of Cerro Mejía are divided into distinct domestic neighborhoods by fieldstone walls. Based on differences between these neighborhoods observed during excavations it has been hypothesized that this site was a multiethnic community similar to Inca mitmaqkuna with local inhabitants from throughout the region and possibly...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Totsoni DeLuna.

This is an abstract from the "Mogollon, Mimbres, and Salado Archaeology in Southwest New Mexico and Beyond" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ceramic creation and distribution within the Upper Gila region allows us to better understand trade and migration of early southwestern Indigenous peoples. Collections of various ceramic types leave us with more questions than answers, such as who made them? Where did they come from? And what led many of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Margie Burton. Patrick Quinn. Rhiannon Byrne-Bowles.

We selected 40 pottery samples from different levels within three separate excavation units at the site of Mine Wash (CA-SDI-813, 1100-310 BP) in central Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. The composition of these small, undecorated sherds was characterised by a combination of thin section petrography and INAA. This was compared to a now extensive petrographic and geochemical database of ceramics and raw materials from the San Diego region. Our analysis reveals a compositionally diverse assemblage...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nuria Sugrañes. Gustavo Neme.

Hunter-Gatherers from Southern Mendoza started to use ceramic at 2000 years BP, and it starts to diversified rapidly in each environment. Such diversity shows a contrast between highlands and lowlands tipologies. According to Lagiglia, this ceramic diversity was motivated for exchange between agricultural communities from western side of Andes and northern Mendoza. In this poster, we present new ceramic information from six archaeological sites located in the Atuel river basin. This information...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Valerie Bondura.

"This landscape is animate: it moves, transposes, builds, proceeds, shifts, always going on, never coming back, and one can only retain it in vignettes, impressions caught in a flash." —Ann Zwinger, Downcanyon We might think of ceramics as landscape "caught in a flash", a bringing together of different geological places into newly combined forms. Ecological thinking in Northern Rio Grande Pueblos frames this bringing together as a fluid gathering of forces that flow in and out of one another....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara Stark.

A systematic evaluation of emulation of powerful capitals using ceramic comparisons requires consideration of (1) degrees of similarity, (2) legacy traditions, and (3) depositional contexts and sample sizes. This analysis uses ceramics from the Mesoamerican Gulf lowlands on the west side of the Lower Papaloapan River to compare with ceramics from Teotihuacan during the Early Classic Period and from the Aztec Triple Alliance during the Late Postclassic Period. Replication, imitation, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kea Warren.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Calixtlahuaca is a Middle-to-Late Postclassic (A.D. 1130-1530) Mesoamerican site located in the Toluca Valley of Central Mexico. While originally a Matlazinca settlement, the site was conquered by the Aztec Empire, and documentary evidence suggests subsequent Mexica immigration to the region. I use the site to examine immigration patterns based on the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alison Rautman. Julie Solometo.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the American Southwest, regional sub-divisions in the archaeological record have been defined using linguistic evidence, similarity of artifact assemblages, and ceramic technology and/or styles. In central New Mexico, H. P. Mera’s ceramic sub-divisions from the 1930s are still helpful in understanding some issues of social and political boundaries during...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelsey Willis. Destiny Crider. Clifford Brown.

The ceramic record of Pacific Nicaragua can be interpreted as showing evidence of migration in the form of both normal and anomalous diffusion. Normal diffusion is seen in the Department of Chinandega through the ceramics of the early facet of the Late Preclassic Cosigüina complex, which derive from the Providencia Sphere. This ceramic sphere originates from the southern highlands of Guatemala and western El Salvador and now extends at least to northwest Nicaragua. The evidence of superdiffusion...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anya Frashuer. Christopher Carr. Michael D. Glascock.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper examines ceramic exchange as a proxy for the social interaction aspect of community organization in Middle Woodland Period Hopewell groups living in the Scioto River region of Ohio. The results of instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA) and electron microprobe analysis (EMA) are discussed as they relate to the interaction and influence...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charmaine Thompson.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Research in Montezuma Canyon, San Juan County, Utah" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Nancy Patterson Village (42SA2110) is a large Ancestral Pueblo site in southeastern Utah. The site spans the entire Ancestral Pueblo sequence, although most of the remains come from two relatively short periods when it was a village-sized settlement. Brigham Young University excavated at the site from 1983 through 1986,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alicia Gorman. Kevin Vaughn. Michiel Zegarra Zegarra.

This paper investigates negotiations of power on the south coast of Peru through ceramic attribute analysis. The ceramic sample comes from the site of Cerro Tortolita, which contains both ceremonial and habitation zones. This site’s emergence in the upper Ica Valley during the 3rd century AD coincided with a broader increase in local settlement hierarchy. The timing of Cerro Tortolita’s rise and its religious nature provide a unique opportunity to isolate and investigate the relationship between...

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

For the first time, archaeological data from excavations at The Hermitage, Andrew Jackson’s nineteenth-century cotton plantation near Nashville, Tennessee, are being made available to researchers through the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS). These assemblages are associated primarily with enslaved laborers who lived in three Antebellum quartering areas on the plantation. Building on previous research about slaves’ acquisition of non-provisioned goods, this poster...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jillian Galle. Lindsay Bloch. Jeffrey Ferguson. Fraser Neiman. Suzanne Francis Brown.

Archaeologists have long been intrigued by hand‐built, open‐fired coarse earthenwares found on 18th‐ and 19th‐century sites occupied by enslaved Africans in the Caribbean and United States. In Jamaica, these hand‐built coarse earthenwares, often referred to as Yabbas, were likely manufactured and marketed by enslaved specialists. Several different varieties of glazed and/or kiln‐fired coarse earthenwares, not easily assigned to a known ware-type, are also routinely found in plantation contexts....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marc Levine.

Lost-wax casting in prehispanic Mesoamerica reached its apogee in Late Postclassic Oaxaca, Mexico. Nowhere is this artistry more evident than in the spectacular gold and silver offerings from Tomb 7 at Monte Albán. Researchers have long understood the general process of lost-wax casting, but have incompletely examined variability in techniques utilized through space and time. This poster presents new evidence of ceramic molds from Late Postclassic Tututepec that are believed to have been used to...