Society for American Archaeology

DOCUMENT Citation Only Linda Wheelbarger.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Trade and Exchange" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. San Juan College field school sessions and volunteer work have been conducted over the past 15 years at Point Pueblo on the B-Square Ranch where a multistory D-shaped great house is associated with a great kiva. This is one of several Chacoan communities in the Middle San Juan region of northwestern New Mexico and artifacts there indicate...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joseph Cronin. Anna Guengerich. Parker VanValkenburgh.

Here we present preliminary results from targeted prospection and an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) flight over the relic agricultural landscapes of the Tambillo Valley in northeastern Peru. This work was carried out as part of the first phase of Proyecto Arqueológico Tambillo (PATA), a project investigating the organization of political landscapes in the montane forest region of Chachapoyas. Specifically, PATA aims to determine whether the densely-clustered Late Intermediate Period settlements...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shawn Fields. Jamie Arjona.

During the antebellum period, ceramic industries began to sprout up across South Carolina’s agricultural landscape. In the Edgefield district, located near the South Carolina-Georgia border, a number of family-owned kilns contracted enslaved laborers from nearby plantations to mass-produce stoneware for sale throughout the Southeast. Innovative alkaline glaze technologies became the foundation for experimental ceramic traditions and styles. A long-held local fascination with these ceramic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Boleslaw Zych. Dorota Bojkowska. Juan Luis Velásquez.

This is an abstract from the "The Maya Wall Paintings of Chajul (Guatemala)" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological, epigraphic, and ethnohistoric data indicate that Chajul was an important precolumbian center of the Ixil Maya. In this paper we present an overview of archaeological investigations conducted in the Ixil region sites. Moreover, we present the results of archaeological excavations conducted at Chajul in the 2021 season. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Celso Jaquez.

In 2004 Dr. Karl Taube outlined the ancient Mesoamerican concept of a celestial floral paradise where souls were transported after death. This presentation will focus on what I believe to be the earliest representation of sacred transport of souls to the celestial realm. Serpent representation, often depicted with floral adornments or exhaling flower blossoms, were often depicted as either vehicles for the transport of souls to the afterlife, or as was the case of the cosmological murals at the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julio Amador. Ofelia Márquez Huitzil.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper is dedicated to carrying out a detailed study of some of the reliefs that were carved on the slopes of Cerro Chalcatzingo, during the Middle Formative period, as well as to present some critical reflections about the interpretations that have been made by other authors. All descriptions imply interpretation, in consequence, every process of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Miruna Achim.

This is an abstract from the "Polychromy, Multimediality, and Visual Complexity in Mesoamerican Art" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A well-known passage in the Florentine Codex offers a natural history of *chalchihuitl: its revelation to a few “knowledgeable ones” by the vapor it exudes from underground when viewed against the sun’s first rays; its varieties of green, luminosity, and hardness; the lapidary methods that bring out its brightness and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christophe Pottier.

For a quarter of a century, the concepts of an open city and a low density urban megalopolis have largely broadened our understanding of Angkor (Cambodia), which was based on the morpho-chronological vision of a succession of perfectly geometric walled cities. As the researches progressed, the identification of the elements that make up the archaeological landscape of the Great Angkor has been developed, mixing temples, palaces, settlements, reservoirs, road networks, hydraulic systems and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Marsden. Andrew Martindale.

Archaeologists have referenced the oral record throughout the history of their research in Tsimshian territory. In this paper we frame our recent collaboration against this legacy and argue that that a symmetrical relationship is a necessary foundation for any conjunction between these complex datasets. Our collaboration recognizes the common history they represent, but also their different logical frameworks and empirical scope. In our context, the oral record was more complete, detailed, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Schilling.

Jefferson National Expansion Memorial is an anomaly in the National Park Service. The park was designated in 1935 as the first national historic site, memorializing America’s westward expansion, yet it is best known for the Gateway Arch, a modernist monument that towers over the city. Archaeological information from the St. Louis riverfront is sparse, but the park is located in an area that was densely settled from prehistory to the beginning of the twentieth century. In the late 1930s, NPS...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ramesh Shrestha. Juan Carlos Fernandez Diaz.

The Olmec polity of Tres Zapotes, which developed on the southern gulf lowlands of the present day state of Veracruz in Mexico, is nestled between the Papaloapan river delta and the Tuxla Mountains. Topographic, geological, ecological and cultural context of the region presents unique challenges and opportunities to archeological prospecting using airborne lidar mapping due to extensive cultivation of sugar cane which can hinder the capability of the lidar to map the ground beneath it; cultural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert L. Kelly. Erick Robinson.

The use of large radiocarbon datasets has the potential to transform archaeology and its place in the social and natural sciences in the coming decades. Radiocarbon ‘big data’ enhances the unique contribution of archaeology to reconstruct human demography over vast spans of time. This move towards big data is confronted by some central challenges in archaeological method and theory, such as the use of legacy data of disparate quality and working over broad spatial and temporal scales. For some,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alan Farahani. R. J. Sinensky.

This is an abstract from the "Defining and Measuring Diversity in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The measurement of the richness and diversity of archaeological plant remains recovered from sites is an essential, if not always explicitly recognized, aspect of paleoethnobotanical practice and interpretation. The range of different recovered plant taxa can be indicative of routes of taphonomic entry, diet breadth, local responses to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Montoya. Helen O'Brien. Pearce Paul Creasmen.

This is an abstract from the "Community Matters: Enhancing Student Learning Opportunities through the Development of Community Partnerships" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The University of Arizona and Pima Community College collaborated to initiate an archaeological expedition to Nuri, Sudan in January 2018. The site, looted in antiquity and excavated by George Reisner from 1916 through 1918, includes 56 mud brick pyramids and 72 known tombs. One...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Whittington.

Curating exhibits focused on Mesoamerican archaeology in two small university museums between 1993 and 2013 involved challenges with both similarities to and differences from those involved in curating blockbuster exhibits in large museums. Four exhibits included long-term and short-term installations, as well as traveling versions, and focused on the Maya, West Mexico, and Mesoamerica in general. Challenges were small budgets and staffs, negotiating loans and venues with staffs of other...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arlene Fleming.

There is general awareness among cultural heritage professionals, including archaeologists, that a drastically changing climate requires re-examination of our responsibilities and practices for identifying, documenting and managing sites and objects. The occurrence and effects of phenomena such as warming temperatures, sea-level rise, desertification, violent storms, and flooding, are frequently discussed. However, the socio-economic ramifications of a changing climate and severe weather events,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Barzilai. Andrea Bridges.

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. For over 100 years, large museums, universities, and institutions in the United States have amassed extensive collections of Native American remains and sacred objects from archaeological sites. The outcries of Native American communities who sought to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Becca Peixotto.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Speckled with mesic islands and peat hummocks, the soggy lowlands and standing water of the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia and North Carolina were home to thousands of African and African American Maroons (ca. 1608–1863) and a significant feature of the landscape of Indigenous Americans for many centuries prior. In part due to the extensive reuse and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ricardo Elia. Amalia Perez-Juez.

The island of Menorca, Spain, belonged successively in the 18th century to Spain, England, France, again England, and finally Spain. During this period, the British constructed their first purpose-built naval hospital on Isla del Rey, a small island in Mahon Harbor. To date, heritage-related efforts on Isla del Rey have focused on the architectural restoration of the hospital buildings, as well as on the development of exhibit spaces. In 2013, Boston University started a collaboration with the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anabel Ford. Frank Speraq.

This is an abstract from the "Ceramics and Archaeological Sciences" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The major components of ceramics consist of clay and temper. It is assumed that these components are local. The Maya lowlands are dominated by limestone, and its use as temper is ubiquitous. Therefore, the distinct presence of fresh volcanic ash in the Late Classic period pottery is noteworthy. Efforts to identify a local volcanic source closer than...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Stanton. Jennifer Byrd. Vanessa Carrillo.

Archaeological excavation in the wilderness is a new frontier in archaeological data collection. With most of the documented and excavated sites being outside the wilderness, usually within driving distance of a town or city, this offers an untouched and uncorrupted view of past cultures and their material remains. Most archaeology conducted in the wilderness takes the form of surveying, with little to no excavation being done. The South Diamond Creek Pueblo Project offered us one of the first...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Martha Palma Malaga. Krzysztof Makowski.

The archeological study of human burials presents many special challenges. Deterioration begins or accelerates with the exposure to new environmental conditions after recovery. In many cases, the context has to be analyzed in situ by bioanthropologists to record information before the removal of the materials to the laboratory and storage area. Continuous participation of bioarchaeologists is also vital for subsequent analysis of the funerary context many months or years after the end of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paulina Przystupa. Katherine Brewer.

As we move towards increasing open access to archaeological knowledge, textbooks are an integral part of that transition. Unfortunately, open access textbooks are not a well established form of knowledge dissemination amongst archaeologists and currently do not hold as much credibility as traditionally published works such as peer reviewed journals or printed textbooks. In hopes of contributing a chapter to an open access textbook, what are the keys to making such a background chapter...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandra Ptacek. Matt Peeples. Matthew Kroot. Eunice Villasenor Iribe. Jessie Kortscheff.

This is an abstract from the "Training a New Generation of Heritage Professionals in the Valley of the Sun: The ASU Field School at S’eḏav Va’aki" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Preservation projects differentially affect rights holder and stakeholder communities. Heritage management professionals can try to accommodate such disparate communities through active collaboration, consultation, and accountability practices. Yet, compliance practices in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Powless.

Over the past few years, I have had the opportunity to excavate a couple of large sites in California, working on behalf of a developer to keep their project in compliance with their permit. In conjunction, I also worked with the local tribe to resolve their burial issues with each excavation. During these two excavations, I have had to opportunity to observe the challenges that the tribe encountered when dealing with fast-paced cultural resource management (CRM) projects where burial retrieval...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelly Harkins. Laura Weyrich. Lars Fehren-Schmitz.

The trypanosomatid parasites are responsible for devastating human disease worldwide. In the Americas, Trypanosoma cruzi is the causative agent of Chagas Disease (CD), the most epidemic zoonosis in Latin America today. The clinical manifestations of CD, however, have been recognized in archaeological human remains from South America as early as 9,000 years ago. We present preliminary results of a project that applies paleogenomic methods, including targeted enrichment and next-generation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daunte Ball.

This is an abstract from the "Hood Archaeologies: Impacts of the School-to-Prison Pipeline on Archaeological Practice and Pedagogy" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While the recent uptick in the amount and frequency of contemporarily, socially relevant sessions and symposia held at SAA annual meetings can certainly be said to be commendable—truly, a much-needed and beneficial pursuit/meta-analysis—I think that a significant intersectional aspect...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tom Connolly. Perry Chocktoot.

This is an abstract from the "Heritage Sites at the Intersection of Landscape, Memory, and Place: Archaeology, Heritage Commemoration, and Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. People recognize places on the landscape that have historical and spiritual importance to their communities, and it is often the case that different cultural communities sharing the same space have very different cultural maps. Among Tribal communities, identifying...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Richards.

The 1987 Wisconsin Burial Site Preservation Statute (WisStats 157.70) serves as the basis for the protection of all burial sites in the State of Wisconsin and assures that all human burial sites be accorded equal treatment under the law regardless of age or affiliation. Recently, challenges to the law have taken the form of an introduced bill (LBR 2890 – eventually withdrawn), and the convening of a Wisconsin Legislative Study Committee of the Preservation of Burial Sites. This committee is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Regina Hilo.

This is an abstract from the "Braiding Knowledge: Opportunities and Challenges for Collaborative Approaches to Archaeological Heritage and Conservation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Working and consulting with the community is built into Hawaii’s historic preservation laws and statutes. I work for the History and Culture branch of the State Historic Preservation Division, and my main role is mitigating effects to human skeletal remains, iwi...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tiziana Gallo. Craig Cipolla.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Birdstones are a morphologically diverse group of ground stone objects found across eastern North America with concentrations around the Great Lakes region. In this paper, we revisit an assemblage of birdstones from the Royal Ontario Museum’s Archaeology of the Americas collection to challenge the fixity of existing birdstone types. Popular among...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eugénie Gauvrit Roux.

This is an abstract from the "Current Research and Challenges in Arctic and Subarctic Cultural Heritage Studies" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Microblade technologies are a structuring component of the Late Pleistocene archaeology across the Bering Strait because of their wide chronological and geographical extension. To fully understand the technoeconomical strategies underlying the success of this innovative toolkit in periglacial environments,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kirsten Ziesemer. Menno L.P. Hoogland. Corinne L. Hofman. Christina Warinner. Hannes Schroeder.

Ancient DNA (aDNA) studies have had a major impact in archaeology. However, until now most aDNA studies have been conducted on samples from cold or temperate environments, as DNA degrades more rapidly at higher temperatures. With average annual temperatures of over 25°C, the Caribbean represents a particularly challenging environment for aDNA research and very few aDNA studies have been conducted in the Caribbean to date. Yet, there are many questions in Caribbean archaeology that could be...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Ames.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research addresses structures of migrant ship-board space during nineteenth-century transatlantic crossings. I ask to what extent did controlled use of space reinforce conditions of class on nineteenth-century migrant vessels, and in what ways were boundaries challenged by passengers? I argue that challenging shipboard boundaries was a means by which...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jose Raul Ortiz. Francisco Saravia.

This is an abstract from the "A Celebration and Critical Assessment of "The Maya Scribe and His World" on its Fiftieth Anniversary" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Late Classic period, a distinct painting style in ceramics emerged in the northern Maya highlands of Guatemala, revealing both the mastery of artisans and the worldview of the Maya. The Chamá style, whose vessels were manufactured on the banks of the Chixoy River, shows clear...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angelo Robledo. Alan Farahani. Bruce Routledge.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The decline and replacement of stone tools with their metal counterparts in regions with traditions of metallurgy has been shown to have been a slow and variable process that involved specific types of tools marking the metallurgic transition at different times and in specific contexts.  For example, in the region of the southern Levant (Jordan, Palestine,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kazuho Shoji. Takayuki Omori. Vanessa La Rosa.

Excavations in 2016 and 2017 at the Cruz Verde site which is located in the coastal area of the Chicama Valley, revealed a stratified record of preceramic mound-building practices. These practices are constituted by various mortuary contexts and are particularly noted for their use of architectural reconstruction, an activity repeated from around 4000 cal. BC ~1900 cal. BC divided into two phases, the CV-1 phase and the CV-2 phase. We conducted a stratigraphic examination of these contexts, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alan Farahani.

The archaeological site of Kani Shaie is a small (<3ha) tell site located in Iraqi Kurdistan not far from contemporary Sulaymaniyah. Archaeological evidence as well as radiocarbon dates procured from excavations at the site indicate in-habitation from at least 3500 BCE until the Middle Islamic period, ca. 1400 CE. Excavations in 2015 and especially 2016 included a substantial archaeobotanical sampling component, which entailed the sampling of every archaeological deposit and the subsequent...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Francesca Fernandini.

Cerro de Oro, a 150ha settlement located on the lower Cañete valley presents a long term occupation that spans from the Early Intermediate Period through Colonial times (0-1600 A.D.). Research performed by the Cerro de Oro Archaeological Project at the site during 2012-2013 has focused on the Early Intermediate-Middle Horizon occupation (500-1000 A.D.) yielding important information regarding the nature of the settlement, the sequence of its construction and use, as well as its possible...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elisa Fernández-León. Geoffrey McCafferty.

Ethnohistorical sources describe migrations of Mesoamerican peoples into the Greater Nicoya region of Pacific Nicaragua and Northwestern Costa Rica during the Classic to Postclassic transition, ca. 800 CE, a period known regionally as the Bagaces and Sapoa periods. Recent research has targeted this transition in order to better understand the material culture dynamics, as a means to further understand historical linguistic and genetic data. This paper contrasts two case studies: one from the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Willis.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Eagle Nest Canyon, Texas: Papers in Honor of Jack and Wilmuth Skiles" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper investigates the use of drone-based 3D photogrammetry for mapping and monitoring landscape changes at Eagle Nest Canyon. Mapping before and after an extreme 2014 flood enables change detection modeling (CDM) using geographic information systems (GIS). By comparing elevation data from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gayoung Park. Ben Marwick.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Stone artifact assemblages can be an important source of information about hunter-gatherer mobility and subsistence, according to behavioral ecological theory that links technological changes to environmental adaptation. We examined stone artifacts from 28 sites in South Korea to investigate technological innovations during the Late Pleistocene and their...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Luke Stroth. Rebekah Truhan. Jacob Foubert.

This paper applies the chaîne opératoire analytical framework to hearth maintenance behavior. There are distinct phases of production involved in creating and maintaining a hearth, as new hearthstones are introduced, exhausted, and discarded. These stages may be identified through spatial distribution of new and exhausted hearthstones. The authors argue that these stages may also be identified geochemically. We use pXRF to compare a series of experimental burnings to those from a hearth feature...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Noe.

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 mission documents, agricultural production reports, and faunal remains recovered from three middens situated alongside the Native American barracks at the Spanish mission site of Santa Clara (1777-1836). Mission Santa Clara housed a diverse population of differing Native American groups including predominantly Ohlone speakers, as well as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Donta. Kimberly Smith.

This is an abstract from the "Changes in the Land: Archaeological Data from the Northeast" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A cluster of Native American sites was first identified in the early 1970s at the junction of Fife Brook and the Deerfield River in western Massachusetts, and was further examined 15 years ago. Recent additional work has expanded knowledge of site distribution on this portion of the Deerfield and added to the inventory of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Silvana Espinosa. Amalia Nuevo Delaunay. Gisela Cassiodoro. Martin Acuña Lugo.

This is an abstract from the "Current Perspectives on Historical and Contemporary Archaeology of the Southern Cone" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human occupation of the last centuries in continental southern Patagonia has been described as a stage in which a great variability of processes stand out, such as the arrival of allochthonous groups, the introduction of new resources such as horses, sheep and industrialized products, the emergence of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hector Hernandez. Victor Medina. Guadalupe Camara.

This is an abstract from the "Adventures in Beekeeping: Recent Studies in Ecology, Archaeology, History, and Ethnography in Yucatán" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the first part of the twentieth century, Yucatec ranchos and haciendas were spaces where various technological, economic, and landscape changes occurred derived from new beekeeping production strategies. The adoption and cultivation of Apis mellifera to produce greater quantities...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Enloe.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology on the Edge(s): Transitions, Boundaries, Changes, and Causes" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the midcontinent of North America, the transition from the Archaic to the Woodland Period is generally signaled in the archaeological record by the presence of ceramics and the adoption of agriculture, particularly of low yield indigenous plants including barley grass, goosefoot, sunflower, and squash during the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Gontarski.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The late Early Horizon (400-200 BCE), also known as Salinar in the north coast of Peru, was a key moment immediately after the influence of the Chavín de Huantar sphere of interaction. Salinar pottery bears distinct designs and motifs that have never been properly studied. This paper presents a first systematic analysis of the varied decorative designs on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara Roth.

Changes in household organization were a major catalyst for social change in the Mimbres River Valley of southwestern New Mexico across the transition from pithouses to pueblos. This paper summarizes recent work at a large Pithouse period village, the Harris Site, and the Elk Ridge site, a large Classic period (AD 1000-1150) pueblo that is illuminating the relationship between households, community integration, and social change. Work at the Harris Site has documented the important role that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sonja Rossi-Williams.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster summarizes the preliminary results of a survey conducted in eastern Pennsylvania exploring land use through time performed as part of a master’s thesis. The Red Hole site is in Schuylkill County’s anthracite region and was identified in 1968 as a multicomponent campsite with occupations ranging from the Archaic to the contact periods. Due to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rowan Flad. Josh Wright. Zhanghua Jiang. Kueichen Lin. Zhiqing Zhou.

This is an abstract from the "The Chengdu Plain Archaeology Survey (2004–2011): Highlights from the Final Report" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Various available aerial imagery from the 1960s through 2000s allow for examination of changing ground surface conditions in the Chengdu Plain in recent decades. Surface conditions impact accessibility, visibility, and preservation of archaeological evidence of ancient human activity in the area. They...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dawn Crawford. Brigitte Kovacevich.

This is an abstract from the "Holtun: Investigations at a Preclassic Maya Center" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Imported obsidian is often representative of regional trade patterns in Meosamerica. Such patterns for the Central Lowland Maya have been documented and allow for comparisons between sites and between periods within a single site. In this paper we compare the procurement and use patterns of obsidian between the Preclassic and Classic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aurelio Lopez Corral. Mari Carmen Serra Puche. Gabriel Vicencio Castellanos.

The Puebla-Tlaxcala region witnessed several shifts in political and economic power during the Classic to Postclassic transition. This area played a pivotal role in the development of cultural complexity following the demographic rearrangements that followed the fall of Teotihuacan as a pan-regional state power. However, little research has been carried on understanding shifts in exchange networks, especially on the trade of obsidian materials. Using XRF-p analysis, this paper seeks to provide...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mari Carmen Serra Puche. Aurelio López Corral. Alonso Gabriel Vicencio Castellanos.

The Puebla-Tlaxcala region witnessed several shifts in political and economic power during the Classic to Postclassic transition. This area played a pivotal role in the development of cultural complexity following the demographic rearrangements that followed the fall of Teotihuacan as a pan-regional state power. However, little research has been carried on understanding shifts in exchange networks, especially on the trade of obsidian materials. Using XRF-p analysis, this paper seeks to provide...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jordi Rosell. Ruth Blasco. Florent Rivals. M. Gema Chacón. Andrea Picin.

The aim of this work is to contribute to the debate about Neanderthal behavioral diversity from the Middle Paleolithic site of Teixoneres Cave (MIS 3, Barcelona, Spain). During the formation of Unit-III, the landscape was dominated by a deciduous forest with wet meadows and a progressive climatic tendency toward cooling and aridity. The alternation between large carnivores and human groups marks the upper part of the unit. In this sub-unit, human occupations correspond to small groups that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sachiko Sakai. Hector Neff.

Artifact assemblages from the Arizona Strip and adjacent area are characterized by widely distributed ceramics tempered with olivine, a volcanic mineral. Sources of olivine lie in the vicinity of Mt. Trumbull and Tuweep, near the northwestern part of the Grand Canyon. The olivine-tempered ceramics were distributed mostly westward from Mt. Trumbull, up to 100 km to the lowland Virgin area in southern Nevada between A.D. 200 and 1350. Ultimately, the goal of this study is to understand why ceramic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Bergh.

After more than forty years of zooarchaeological research on prehispanic collections from coastal Georgia, it is clear that people exploited the same suite of estuarine resources from the Late Archaic through the Mississippian periods, despite changing socio-political conditions. However, changes in resource use over time are evident when fine-grained recovery and multiple analytical techniques are applied to vertebrate and invertebrate collections from the Mississippian period on St. Catherines...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Whitney Lytle.

The Mopan Valley Preclassic Project has been conducting research at Group D, Xunantunich, a Late Classic elite residential unit with an eastern ancestor shrine. This research has significantly changed our understanding of the establishment and ritual re-use of this group. Recent investigations have revealed Late/Terminal Preclassic constructions including a small courtyard platform and an early structure buried within the Late Classic ancestor shrine. Thousands of ceramic sherds were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Hedgepeth Balkin. Arthur Joyce. Marc Levine.

This is an abstract from the "Cholula to Chachoapan: Celebrating the Career of Michael Lind" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Michael Lind investigated major sociopolitical changes between the Late Classic and Postclassic periods in Oaxaca, particularly involving Mixtec and Zapotec peoples. His interpretations integrated both ethnohistorical and archaeological evidence. In the lower Río Verde Valley, an ethnohistoric record provides insight into the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edward Banning.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The size and spatial organization of facilities for the storage of cereals and pulses provide important clues to the socioeconomic organization and degree of inequality of households and communities. In the context of late prehistory in the southern Levant in the Middle East, we might expect changes in storage to result from the growing importance of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sachiko Sakai.

Various forms of social interactions seem to have been adopted as risk-buffering strategies in the marginal agricultural environment of the Virgin Branch Ancestral Puebloan region. The olivine-tempered ceramics are widely distributed in this region and the sources of olivine are in the highlands near Mt. Trumbull and Tuweep. Thus, the presence of olivine-tempered ceramics in the lowland Virgin area indicates economic and social ties between the highland and lowland populations. This ceramic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kellam Throgmorton.

This is an abstract from the "Living Landscapes: Disaster, Memory, and Change in Dynamic Environments " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Chaco Canyon is the center of one of the best known archaeological cultures in North America, and its influence spread widely across the northern US Southwest between AD 850 and 1150. Because of the well-preserved road segments, shrine networks, earthworks, and petroglyph panels associated with the Chacoan culture,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Ellyson. William Lipe. R.G. Matson.

Previous zooarchaeological studies in the Southwest indicate that over time, larger animal resources such as deer are replaced by smaller ones such as lagomorphs (cottontails and jackrabbits) and domesticated turkey in Ancestral Pueblo sites. These trends are identified on the basis of various faunal indices that measure the proportional abundance of one animal resource against another. In this study, we utilize an index that measures the proportion of domesticated turkey relative to artiodactyl...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa Kealhofer. Peter Grave. Ben Marsh.

Throughout the 1st mill BCE, the inhabitants of Gordion engaged with multiple changes in political power and agricultural strategies, within a diverse landscape with shifting climate regimes. Over most of this period, the city, its industries, and its hinterland population thrived. Using multiple lines of evidence, both material and environmental, this paper explores what we know about changes in the organization of different production spheres at Gordion in order to understand how changing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Seetha Reddy.

Despite considerable diversity in plant communities across coastal and inland California, the region’s hunter-gatherers often have been viewed as having broadly similar plant resource orientation. This paper reassess this perspective by explicitly examining spatial and temporal variation in plant use west of the Sierra Nevada. In doing so, the study capitalized on a growing body of paleoethnobotanical data to explore similarities and differences in plant food resource emphasis across six main...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Nicholson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The climate niches that early modern humans and our earlier hominin ancestors inhabited have undergone major changes over time. This study documents climate niche expansions, contractions, and stationarity across four time periods (Last Interglacial, Last Glacial Maximum, Mid-Holocene, and 1950¬–2000) in western Eurasia. Using spatially gridded global...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lina Campos Quintero. Luis Carlos Choperena-Tous. Julián Gamboa-Mendoza. Marcos Martinón-Torres. Agnese Benzonelli.

This is an abstract from the "Materials in Movement in the Isthmo-Colombian Area" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although the colonial order between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries transformed the use and trading of metal objects employed in indigenous funerary practices in Colombia’s Caribbean region, it also enabled local goldwork traditions to continue. Particularly, in the lower-Magdalena River region, the “Malibú” buried their dead...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachna Chhay. Piphal Heng. Visoth Chhay. Yukitsugu Tabata.

Stoneware ceramic production began in the 9th century CE in the Angkorian core region, and its cross-draft kiln technology, paste types, and vessel forms changed during its multi-century tradition. This paper compares kiln morphology, ceramic technology and vessel form from two Angkorian kiln sites: the 9th-11th century Bang Kong site, and the 10th-12th century Thnal Mrech. The sites are located in discrete geological regions: one in the Phnom Kulen hills (Thnal Mrech), and the other on the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cherra Wyllie.

Group identity is visible in the archaeological record in the form of discrete burial practices, site planning, ceramic and artifact assemblages, settlement patterns, and architecture. Yet notions of ethnic identity are multi-layered and complex; the more so during periods of intense migration and social upheaval . The Late Classic to Early Postclassic transition was one such period, characterized by observable changes in practices and materials. In Veracruz (at sites such as El Tajin, Las...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jerry Howard.

In the early 1980s the Southwest Archaeology Team was formed under what is now the Arizona Museum of Natural History. Reacting to a need for an emergency response team to preserve information from archaeological sites, not protected by state or federal regulations, but being destroyed by development. While initially considered as outsiders and non-professionals, the acceptance of the public working on archaeological excavations quickly changed. This paper focuses on the changing attitudes and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zyncli Ramirez.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This ethnographic study examines the relationship between the local people of Chavin de Huantar, Peru, and their sense of identity as Chavinos in relation to the national museum, the monument, and the 2022 collapse of the mountain peak Shallapa. Through face-to-face interviews with local townspeople, local workers on two different archeological digs,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Murphy. Louise Purdue. Maurits Ertsen.

Societies that rely on irrigation face challenges arising from the variability and unpredictability of water supply and the physics underlying the flow of water through open channels; they overcome these through structured social interactions and institutions ranging from simple to complex. To better understand these past interactions we combine geoarchaeological studies with flow simulations and Agent Based Modeling. Fieldwork conducted during CRM projects on Hohokam irrigation structures in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Candace Sall.

This is an abstract from the "In Search of Solutions: Exploring Pathways to Repatriation for NAGPRA Practitioners (Part III)" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Curation practices changed at museums as human remains and funerary objects went from being seen by practitioners as scientific specimen to individuals. When this happens, how the individuals are handled and cared for changes as well. Consulting with Tribal Nations about the care of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hannah Koon. Mandi Curtis.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Isotope analysis of bulk carbon and nitrogen from tooth dentine and bone collagen are now commonly used in studies of dietary reconstruction from past populations. Teeth do not remodel once formed, so bulk dentine values provide an “average” dietary signal from the few years of childhood when the tooth was formed. Bones, on the other hand, continue to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelly Derr. Colin Grier. Adam Price.

A high-resolution lake sediment core recovered from Shaw’s Bog on Galiano Island provides a window into the paleoecology of the island and region back to the Late Pleistocene. The extensive time depth represented offers an opportunity to evaluate ecology and climate prior to the known arrival of people in the southern Gulf Islands. It also provides a mechanism to measure impacts on the local ecology following the establishment of major, long-term village locations such as Dionisio Point and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Courtney Williams.

This zooarchaeological study examines the recovered faunal remains from a mid- to late-18th century household site on the Eastern Pequot reservation in North Stonington, Connecticut. The results of this study indicate the residents’ incorporations of European-introduced practices and resources with traditional subsistence practices. The site yielded a mixture of faunal remains from domesticated and wild species. Over the course of the 18th century, the residents came to rely on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lucia Henderson.

The site of Kaminaljuyu experienced intensive ideological and material cultural change from the Preclassic through the early Classic period. Certain artistic forms and ideological precepts, however, simultaneously demonstrate remarkable continuity. This talk focuses specifically on public messages communicated through stone sculpture as well as, to a lesser degree, messages communicated by elite and royal funerary contexts in order to access continuity and change in Kaminaljuyu’s archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephanie Orsini. Carolyn Freiwald. Keith Prufer.

Very little is known about Paleoindian and Archaic subsistence strategies of the people of Mesoamerica prior to the development of ceramics as food processing, storage, and serving containers. Rockshelters with good preservation and stratigraphic deposits can provide excellent contexts for a comparative faunal analysis though time. We examine subsistence patterns using the faunal remains from the Maya Hak Cab Pek (MHCP) rock shelter in the Toledo District of southern Belize before and after the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Salinas Acero. Jennifer Salinas.

The process of domestication has interested archaeologists working in the Andes for decades but for many years problems of preservation and access to certain analyses have caused a lag in the recovery of concrete evidence. Although, previous research carried out in the 1970’s and 1980’s at the preceramic sites of Tequendama, Aguazuque, and Zipacon on the altiplano of the Eastern Cordillera of Colombia yielded a wealth of paleoenvironmental, tool use, and faunal data, few botanical remains were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Whitney Goodwin. Kacy L. Hollenback. Fern Swenson. William C. Hockaday.

Disentangling drivers of technological change and continuity in culture contact situations is complex. In the northern Great Plains, earthlodge village groups are reported to have abandoned traditional ceramic containers for certain tasks by the early 19th century. The veracity of these observations is confounded by other contact situation processes, such as epidemics, which also impacted ceramic production and use. Ethnoarchaeology has documented the use of particular vessel types exclusively...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charity Upson-Taboas.

Pre-Columbian Native Americans of Illinois have had a long history of plant production from foraging to cultivation via horticulture to domestication via agriculture. Isotopic analysis has been used as a standard for comparing diet from different sites and isotopic ratios are given as parts-per-mil (‰), and reflect the consumption of types of food. Carbon isotopes (δ13C) can indicate the types of plants eaten and nitrogen isotopes (δ15N) indicate the trophic level of protein sources in the diet....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Shepard. Kisha Supernant. Kenneth M. Ames. Andrew Martindale.

Traditionally, Northwest Coast houses were rectangular, post and beam dwellings. Architectural details varied regionally, ethnically and even locally. It is presently impossible to trace this variation archaeologically beyond a few coarse-grained statements. The earliest structures date to at least ca. 5000 calBP; they are rectilinear and some at least are semisubterranean. The longest continuous sequence of houses is presently documented in the Prince Rupert Harbor region of northern British...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Wake. Lana Martin. Tomas Mendizabal.

Recent field and laboratory archaeological findings in Bocas del Toro, Panama offer data that changes and amplifies our understanding of the prehistory of the region. Detailed paleoethnobotanical study, further zooarchaeological examination, preliminary ceramic thin-section analysis, and continuing ceramic analysis have all produced results that call in to question entrenched assumptions concerning the timing of settlement, the nature of the subsistence economy, trade, exchange and cultural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anne Poole. Ben Marwick. Setareh Shafizadeh. Jess Beck.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Tenure-track employment is a highly sought-after career path for many graduate students. Recent surveys have helped to document the supply of applicants in terms of the numbers of graduates per year and per institution. However the demand for applicants for tenure-track jobs has not been studied in detail. We examine the text of advertisements for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mike Carson. Hsiao-chun Hung.

Toward understanding the Paleolithic/Neolithic transition in Taiwan, a paleo-terrain approach allows reconstruction of the ancient landforms and habitats of where people lived. Those ancient contexts help for us to situate the activities of people using their landscapes in different ways at intervals of 7000, 6000, 5000, and 4000 years ago. This approach needs to account for significant change in tectonic movement of land masses, slope erosion and re-deposition patterns, fluctuating sea level,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Salvatore Vitale. Calla McNamee. Toula Marketou. Denitsa Nenova. Jerolyn E. Morrison.

Landscape as a concept incorporates not simply the geographic and environmental characteristics of an area, but also the cultural and symbolic value vested in places. Understanding the relationship of these factors, which are often closely linked, to past societies remains a challenge in archaeology. In this paper, we attempt to reconstruct the Final Neolithic (FN) through Bronze Age landscape on the island of Kos, Dodecanese, and investigate its cultural meaning to the prehistoric peoples. We...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Peterson.

This paper reports on findings from the analysis on lithic collections from several Medio period small sites uncovered during the 2013/2014 summer excavations in the Casas Grades region of Chihuahua Mexico. While prior excavations within the region have placed focus on the large and medium sized site types found throughout the region, the summer 2013/2014 excavations focused solely upon the small, lesser-understood sites in order to evaluate their relation both specially and temporally to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marijke Stoll. Hilary Leathem.

This is an abstract from the "A Construir Puentes / Building Bridges: Diálogos en Oaxaca Archaeology a través de las Fronteras" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past century, archaeology in Oaxaca had gained a reputation among American researchers as a space rife with contentious debates. On the other side of the border, Mexican researchers remained disconnected from these scholarly debates, in part because little effort was made to build a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dana Bardolph. Amber VanDerwarker. Marcie Venter.

This is an abstract from the "Olmec Manifestations and Ongoing Societal Transformations in the Tuxtlas Uplands: A View from Matacanela" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although there has been much speculation about the nature of agriculture along the Formative and Classic period Gulf Coast of Mexico, the local and regional subsistence economies of these periods remain poorly understood, particularly for Classic-period sites. In this paper, we...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bart Victor. Arthur Demarest. Chloe Andrieu.

Following the trajectory of the work of Rita Wright, recent research has focused on production, producers, and exchange in a "borderland" zone, the "frontier" between Classic Maya lowland city-states and less complex, but more diverse, polities of the resource-rich highlands to the south. These "borderland" studies led to insights concerning exchange, production, and the roles of elite managers and non-elite "labor". Archaeologists and economists examined the material culture of dozens of sites...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gerald Schroedl.

British occupation of Brimstone Hill Fortress on St. Kitts from 1690 to 1854 developed in response to local conditions relating to the economics and organization of enslaved labor and to the strategic needs of maintaining a military garrison. The use, size, placement, and chronology of structures, and their associated material culture show that African slaves differed depending on ownership and military status, whereas branch affiliation (Ordnance, Medical, Artillery, or Infantry) and to a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fumiko Ikawa-Smith.

This is an abstract from the "Current Issues in Japanese Archaeology (2019 Archaeological Research in Asia Symposium)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Apart from sporadic finds of human bones and artifacts, systematic research on the Palaeolithic began in Japan with the Iwajuku excavation in 1949. In spite of the relatively short history of 70 years, and the negative impact of the "Fujimura Scandal" of 2000, which resulted in nullification of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shanti Morell-Hart.

Botanical residues recovered from the Piedras Negras kingdom have yielded rich information about activities and economies of ancient inhabitants. Data for this paper were derived from large-scale excavations targeting Classic Period craft production areas, defensive features, and dwellings. Evidence of agricultural practices as well as the collection of wild and fallow-dwelling plants has been revealed through charred seeds and other botanical residues. The recovered archaeobotanical remains...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kiri Hagerman.

This paper investigates transformations in the construction and expression of gender in the Basin of Mexico from the late Middle Formative through Classic periods (approx. 600 BC- AD 600). Ceramic figurines from the sites of Teotihuacan, Axotlan, Cerro Portezuelo, and Huixtoco are used to explore how elements of gender were constructed and communicated in the region over the course of a millennium, and how these practices underwent a radical transformation during the emergence and expansion of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steven Kuehn.

Recent archaeological investigations in the American Bottom have resulted in the identification of several hundred individual dog remains from Late Woodland (A.D. 650-900), Terminal Late Woodland (A.D. 900-1050), and Mississippian (A.D. 1050-1400) components. On-going research, including coprolite and isotopic analyses, as well as traditional osteological and pathological studies, is providing important new insight on the diet, treatment, and changing roles of domestic dogs in prehistoric Native...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Taylor Zaneri.

This is an abstract from the "New Work in Medieval Archaeology, Part 1: Landscapes, Food, and Health" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The later Middle Ages saw significant changes in the ways that humans exploited their natural environments, fueled by rising populations in cities and the development of commercial industries. This has been studied historically, often through the lens of urban elites, but it is less clear how these changes occurred...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Grant Coffey. Susan Ryan.

Most studies of ancestral Pueblo communities in the northern San Juan region of southwestern Colorado use clusters of roughly contemporary habitations, often associated with public architecture, to define the spatial extent of residential communities. The term "community" has also been used to define important social groupings at both larger and smaller spatial scales depending on the focus of study and the type of social connection suggested. This study uses the locations of great kivas, one of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Todd Braje. Jillian Maloney. Amy Gusick. Jon Erlandson. Shannon Klotsko.

This is an abstract from the "Coastal Environments in Archaeology: Ancient Life, Lore, and Landscapes" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The California Northern Channel Islands contain one of the best preserved and most abundant records of terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene human occupation in all of North America. These records have contributed to our understanding of early coastal migrations, the importance of Paleoindian maritime economies,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andreja Malovoz.

Funerary landscapes, as places where all fractions of society meet to honour the rituals of social and identity-building importance, can be used to attain an insight into group-specific attitudes towards spatiality. These attitudes allowed for people's engagement with various elements of their environment as a means of deliberate creation of lasting ritual landscapes. However, social spatiality in funerary contexts is not static, but subject to changes in the group's perception of both their...