Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maia Dedrick. Carly Pope. Morgan Russell.

In Tahcabo, Yucatán, 5% of the town’s municipal land is contained within rejolladas. Rejolladas, like cenotes, are sinkholes formed in the karstic bedrock of Yucatán, although they do not reach to the level of the water table. They make for ideal gardens when located within settlements, as their low elevation allows for the collection of deep and moisture-rich soil that provides an advantage for the cultivation of almost any plant. At the nearby site of Kulubá it has also been shown that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kevin Wiley. Joseph Schuldenrein.

The Riverside 2 site, situated along the original shoreline of the island of Manhattan, presents a unique opportunity for landscape reconstruction within an urban archaeological context. Drawing upon geoarchaeological borings, excavation units, and historical sources, we created a 3D GIS model of the site highlighting its role in the development and transformation of the emerging neighborhood of the Upper West Side in the 19th century. The results of these research efforts have recently been put...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gay Ives. Sheldon Baker. Christine McAllister. Tim Hovezak.

Constructed roads affiliated with Ancestral Pueblo great house architecture are well documented in the cultural landscape of Chaco Canyon and elsewhere across the Colorado Plateau, but the potential for such features has received little attention on the Mesa Verde cuesta. This project examines the archaeological background and provides new insight into one such feature in Mesa Verde National Park. This feature, variously interpreted as a trail, road, and a canal, has been enshrouded in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Stagg. Jason Toohey.

Numerous rock art panels dot the landscape of the Late Intermediate Period (AD 1000-AD 1450) site of Callacpuma in the Cajamarca Basin of northern Peru. The panels are comprised of many distinct motifs and types including a variety of camelids, anthropomorphs, geometric patterns and other zoomorphs. Although the iconographic information held within these motifs is certainly important, this project attempts to move beyond the iconographic significance of individual motifs or panels and examine...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julio Amador.

This presentation describes the process of recording and documenting the pictographs found at the site of Chalcatzingo, Morelos, in central Mexico. It shows the way in which state of the art technology is used for the first time at the site for this purpose. Iconographic analysis, landscape archaeology and the analysis of painting techniques and materials are as well employed to enrich the interpretation of rock art at the site. Upon this basis we elaborate a hypothesis about their relations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melinda Leach.

Prehistoric rock art increasingly is understood to be embedded in complex cultural systems of social routines, kin networks, economic landscapes, technological change, seasonal population movements, domestic and task-specific foraging behaviors, and variable gendered activities. The Holocene record of occupation and use of the High Rock Country in the Northern Great Basin provides an opportunity to explore such complex contexts of rock art. Rich lithic sources, strategic locations for hunting,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bong Kang.

Many aquatic animals, such as whales, sea lions and turtles, and terrestrial animals, such as tigers, wild cats, deer, boars, and weasels, were identified on the rock art of Bangudae, located in the southeastern part of Korean peninsula. Scenes of human figures, whale hunting, boats, and net and fence hunting are also present. Some western archaeologists are suspicious about whale hunting conducted by prehistoric Korean people. They argue that there are not clear depictions at Bangudae of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dagmara Zawadzka.

Unlike most material culture, rock art is firmly embedded in its place. This particular circumstance has shaped its research, as well as its reception among the general public. While famous sites, such as Lascaux, are well known and recognised despite difficulty in accessing them, other sites, especially those in Canada, are still relatively unknown. This paper will briefly address how rock art has been consumed and presented to the general public within Canada. Next, I will address how this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Alberti.

Archaic rock art in the Rio Grande Gorge in northern New Mexico demonstrates an intimacy with the ecologies of which it is a part, from the microscopic life with which it shares its surfaces, to the talus slopes it occupies or watches over. Knowledge of materials and the ecological processes with which they were thoroughly entangled encouraged hunters to lay down tracks and traces of their own, including the geometric patterns and animal and bird prints that constitute the archaic rock art...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carolina Guedes.

A new project carried out in the region of the Rio Vermelho / São Lourenço river basin in the central-western region of Brazil started in 2016. This project focus on the studies of the initial stages of the establishment of the hunters gathers groups in this region. It is intended through excavations, surveys and research in rock art to show patterns of the peoples who inhabited that region. The first systematic field surveys within this project, entitled "Archeology in the Pantanal region"...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan Veness.

Patriot Park North, located in the western side of Fairfax County, is a 67-acre park in which the Fairfax County Park Authority is planning to construct a baseball complex. Fairfax County Park Authority Archaeology and Collections Branch (ACB) conducted a comprehensive Phase I and II survey in Summer 2016, and began Phase III excavation in Fall 2016. An area in the northeastern section of project area contained artifacts from the late third quarter of the eighteenth century. A large feature,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dylan Person.

What is the value of an expedient lithic tool? By what standard is its performance judged? Analysis of lithic debitage has long focused on morphological characteristics of flakes to determine fracture mechanics and other technological aspects of the flintknapping process. As such, most lithic flake termination types are seen as the result of misdirected force as opposed to techniques producing a mechanistically ideal flake type. What does this mean for past humans who did not follow the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Norberto Baldi.

Archaeological investigations in the Caribbean region of Greater Chiriquí conducted over the last two decades have documented occupations dating to the second millennium BCE. Similarities in material culture suggest local and trans-isthmic cultural relationships within Greater Chiriquí and a pattern of scattered hamlets associated with the exploitation of marine and lowland ecosystems. In order to provide a model for this settlement pattern, we offer a theoretical model based on ethnohistorical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eduardo Neves.

The archaeological record of the Middle Holocene is lacking in many areas of lowland South America. The reasons for such hiatuses are yet not clear, but there is an emerging pattern showing that the areas where one finds complete records of human occupation that span most of the Holocene are typically located on estuaries, extensive floodplains or other wetlands normally placed at ecotones. On the other hand, mounting paleoeocological data shows that the climatic conditions of the Middle...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paula Dupuy.

For decades, descriptions of prehistoric Eurasian pastoral societies would present ceramic typologies as material evidence for macro scale economic, social, and ideological cohesion – and trans-Eurasian interaction. However, recent investigations that focus more on human-environment interactions and domestic economies reveal a more dynamic and varied past in micro-regions of Eurasia. Pastoral strategies dating to the 3rd-2nd millennium BCE were regionally diverse, and societies were engaged in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gerald Conlogue. Michelle O'Connor.

The value of a radiographic examination of skeletal remains is unquestionable. Over the past several decades, technical innovations have resulted in more compact equipment making it easier to set up radiography in the field. Digital imaging receptors have replaced film and software has enabled post-processing image manipulation, further simplifying the logistics and efficiency of field imaging studies. Radiography systems are designed to minimize radiation dose in living patients leading to a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marilyn Bueno.

Because of Maya religion’s heavy focus on the sacred Earth, subterranean spaces tend to be seen as sacred landmarks. Caves in particular have been shown to be the most promising context for the archaeological study of Maya religion (Brady and Prufer 2005). Rockshelters, however, have received less attention and appear to have identities and meanings that are negotiable across the lowlands. Recent rockshelter excavations have uncovered skeletal remains (Bonor 1995; Glassman et al. 2005; Saul et...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Gorden.

Yokuts and Western Mono tribes of central California had close cultural ties. While the Yokuts were the most numerous and the dominant culture, many people were bilingual. They shared themes in their pictographs, petroglyphs, and cupules, which are cultural traits of a ceremonial nature that are archaeologically identifiable, and are generally agreed to have magico-religious significance. Forty-one percent of the paintings in their territory occur in shallow caves and rockshelters, which vary in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Kahn.

As studies of sustainability and resilience in pre-contact Polynesian societies proliferate, records of small-scale and large-scale environmental change are being refined. Yet the question of what drives social change, human actions or climatic factors, is still quite hard to discern. My case study focuses on non-human agency, particularly eroding landforms and climatic conditions, as forces of change in pre-contact East Polynesia. A Society Island case study outlines varied human responses to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Dobrov.

This project is centered around the Roman amphorae excavated from the Palatine East Archaeological Project. The site is located on the northeast slope of the Palatine Hill in Rome. The ceramic deposits date from the first century to about the fifth of sixth century CE. I focus on the amphorae produced in North African, specifically those of Tunisian origin. My work is hoping to better understand the geographical location of production sites of these trade vessels. The results of this project...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sandra Joshel.

In the last 20 years, Roman archaeologists have analyzed the remains of Roman streets, counted graffiti, benches, and doorways in Pompeii and Herculaneum, and mapped the spaces of houses, workshops, and villas, and examined as well as the location of objects. Archaeologists have turned the material remains into facts and assembled an archive of the traces of human activities—traffic, movement, work, rituals, etc. How this scholarship has furthered our understanding of a heterogeneous population...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Barse.

A series of radiocarbon dates obtained recently from carbonized encrustations on ceramics sheds new light on the Barrancas to Ronquin ceramic sequence, a chronology that has been long contested in the Orinoco River Valley by many investigators. These new radiocarbon dates clearly argue that the so-called "long chronology" suggested by Rouse and Roosevelt for the La Gruta to Ronquin sequence developed for the Middle Orinoco River, a chronology that was argued to extend close to 4000 years, is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Crown.

A small room in the north-central part of Pueblo Bonito, Room 28 is best known for the large assemblage of cylinder jars discarded in it. The UNM excavations reveal a complex history for the room, including use as an outdoor activity area perhaps under a ramada, construction of walls, remodeling, construction of shelving to hold the cylinder jars, and termination by burning. Ceramics, stratigraphy, radiocarbon and tree-ring dates provide the basis for understanding the sequence of use and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arabella Goodrich. Olivia Navarro-Farr.

In this poster, we explore the production and conservation of mosaics and frescoes, examining their co-occurrence in high elite domestic spaces and how they reveal the varying function(s) of these spaces. Citing both archaeological examples from Villa Cotanello and Villa di San Cesareo, each about a day’s journey from Rome, as well as museum collections, we emphasize the importance of conservation. Standard archaeological practice often consists of removing objects from in situ contexts and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Billman. Patrick Mullins. Jesus Briceño Rosario.

Here we explore the spatial patterning of the Small Irregular Agglutinated Residences (SIAR) at the Chimú town of Cerro la Virgen (1100–1470 AD) in the Moche Valley, Peru. Few examples of "Andean Households" are as enigmatic and iconic as SIAR, which were closely associated with the florescence of the Chimú Empire. Large barrios consisting of SIAR architecture are found at the Chan Chan (the Chimu capital) and at all Chimu provincial centers throughout the empire. Cerro la Virgen once lay in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniela Triadan. Takeshi Inomata.

Our research at the Maya site of Ceibal, Guatemala, has led to new insights into processes involved in the transition of mobile hunting and horticultural populations to a more sedentary lifestyle and emergent social inequalities. Like in other areas of the world, the first architectural constructions at Ceibal, were public-ritual configurations, built communally by a still mobile population around 950 BC. Sedentism developed gradually and may have first involved people with higher social status...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gavin Davies.

Combining archaeological, ethnohistoric and ethnographic data with an analysis of least cost routes, the current paper examines the network connections and craft industries that fueled Lake Atitlan’s prehispanic economy and connected it to the wider Mesoamerican World. The documentary evidence, which I synthesize here, indicates that the lake’s principle exports were perishable goods such as textiles, mats, rope products and foodstuffs. While insufficient to produce significant wealth, I argue...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lubna Omar.

The equid had a vital role in animal economy in Southwest Asia, whether as a wild animal providing primary/secondary products to prehistoric communities, or as a domestic source of energy which supported war affairs and trade during historic periods. Reconstructing the dynamics of humans and the four-equid species, which were present in the region, is a complicated endeavor due to the paucity of skeletal evidence in faunal assemblages; the difficulties in distinguishing morphological traits to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Diane Gifford-Gonzalez.

In 2015, the Executive of SAA discussed the need for action on its part to define SAA’s position regarding sexual harassment and violence, as well as harassment and violence based upon other real or perceived attributes of personal identity. On the one hand, the Board deemed it the moment for a brief general statement on these matters, as was the case with many professional organizations over this span of time. One the other hand, the Board believed that, as a professional organization with an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeffrey B. Glover. Dominique Rissolo. Daniel Leonard.

The Yalahau region of northern Quintana Roo, Mexico is one of the few regions in the Maya Lowlands where a robust Preclassic population was not followed by the emergence of Classic period polities. For that reason it is an important area when trying to understand the unique characteristics of the Preclassic period in the Northern Lowlands. The Yalahau region is defined physiographically by freshwater wetlands (sabanas), which stand in stark contrast the rest of the Northern Lowlands. These...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justine Shaw.

During the Terminal Classic, sacbeob were built at three Maya sites in the Cochuah region of west-central Quintana Roo, Mexico. The roads provided a physical connection between portions of Ichmul, San Felipe, and Yo’okop, running between important structures, out to outlying groups, and even to what had likely been separate settlements. Although they would have been used for processions between termini and may have had numerous symbolic meanings, the impact of some the roadways on the lives of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jay Silverstein. Hamedy Mashaly.

Water management in ancient Egypt entailed harnessing natural and supernatural forces. Thmuis grew to power in the heart of the Nile Delta evolving as a nexus of Greco-Egyptian ideological syncretism within a riverine/lacustrine environment. Water management challenges included mitigating damage from annual floods, optimizing production, and maintaining transport. To survive in this dynamic hydrologic regimen, the people of Thmuis harnessed and controlled the Nile waters through engineering and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jan Simek. Alan Cressler.

Walter Klippel has always focused his research on animal remains from archaeological sites, especially from Southeast North America. In honor of his retirement, we review how animals are depicted in Precontact rock art sites from the region he knew so well. A wide variety of creatures—mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, and even insects—were illustrated by ancient southeastern artists. Animal imagery appears in both open air and cave art, although the kinds of animals vary between these two...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan Parker. Jon Spenard.

Material culture studies allow archaeologists to examine the social implications of the physical world in which people are embedded. Sacred landscapes, for example, inspire social narratives regarding how people should interact with the environment. Components of those landscapes, such as caves and mountains, become active participants in the establishment, maintenance, and mobilization of environmental narratives. They serve as hegemonic tools for conveying morality and proper behavior, and as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brent Woodfill.

The Northern Transversal Region in central Guatemala is one of the most fertile regions of the Maya world in addition to being a key strategic point in the past and present. The rivers flowing out of the highlands provide fertile, volcanic soil in addition to natural communication routes. As a result, it has been subject to multiple waves of colonization over the past two millennia, from Classic period Tikal and Calakmul to contemporary narcotraffickers and transnational corporations. In this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anne S. Dowd.

The Pipestone National Monument, created August 25, 1937, attracts people to mine its catlinite rock containing traces of iron-rich hematite giving it a red hue. The living cultural landscape preserved as a National Monument in southwestern Minnesota is 301 acres, but its modern constituency extends far beyond these borders. In ancient times, raw material from the Sioux Quartzite Formation traveled long distances as well. Archaeological research in combination with ethnography and descendent...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Haskel Greenfield. Justin Lev-Tov. Ann Killebrew. Annie Brown.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Walter Klippel and his former student Lynn Snyder published finds of butchered dog bones from the Dark Age site of Kavousi in Crete. Other researchers, both before and after that published work, noted such finds elsewhere in Greece as well as in Cyprus, and dating to a wide range of post-Neolithic periods. Butchered dog bones are also known from several Philistine sites in Israel. Here, we consider present a detailed discussion of a butchered, apparently...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marielle Pedro Black. Connie Reid.

The Kaibab National Forest has a long history of completing site inventory, recordation, and research within wilderness areas with the help of assorted volunteers. Recent work on the North Kaibab Ranger District of the Kaibab National Forest in the Saddle Mountain Wilderness has been the result of the Wildcat and Fuller fires. Archaeological involvement during the fire planning process helps to proactively identify and protect heritage resources ahead of fire spread. Working with fire crews,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Worthy Martin. Carrie Heitman. Paul F. Reed.

Supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Salmon Pueblo Archaeological Research Collection (SPARC) Project was initiated in 2015 by the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska Lincoln, the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, Salmon Ruins Museum, and Archaeology Southwest. The primary goal of the SPARC Project is creation of an online digital archive of materials from excavations at Salmon Pueblo...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anne Jensen.

Walakpa is an iconic Arctic site with spectacular preservation. Sadly, the once stable site began eroding rapidly in 2013, with ongoing erosion outpacing attempts to obtain traditional funding for excavation. The loss of cultural heritage led to growing international volunteer efforts, starting in 2015, with support from the landowner (an Alaska Native village corporation) and many individuals. I will discuss both the success and challenges of this type of project. Walakpa is only one of many...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Esther Rimer.

The Anthropology department at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History holds over 2.2 million ethnological and archaeological artifacts from the USA and all over the world in its collections, including archaeofauna and bioarchaeological specimens. Every year a handful of researchers sample from our collections for destructive and non-destructive sampling analysis. These analyses run the gamut from portable XRF on textile dyes, isotope analysis of oyster shells from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen L. Black. Charles Koenig.

Eagle Nest Canyon, a box canyon draining into the Rio Grande in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas, houses Bonfire Shelter, the oldest and southernmost bison jump site in North America. Bonfire was excavated in 1963-64 and again in 1983-1984, leaving open a 3m-deep excavation block. Nearby Eagle Cave was excavated in the 1930s and again in 1963, leaving the central trench unfilled. In 2015-2016, the Ancient Southwest Texas Project of Texas State University re-excavated the 4-meter...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Garry Running.

In this paper I link ongoing research along the eastern shore of Glacial Lake Agassiz (GLA) to Doc Holliday, the person who made it possible. Doc instilled in his students an interdisciplinary mind-set, and taught them to emphasize archaeological questions first and to consider past human groups as active agents of paleoenvironmental change as well as sophisticated responders to it. My research up North began where the ancestral Sheyenne River entered GLA from the west. After patient mentoring...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sean Reid.

Humans have inhabited southern Ghanaian forest for millennia, and nearly everywhere there are traces of human activity in the deep past. This paper discusses my integration of satellite remote sensing with traditional archaeological field methods to study longue durée continuity and transformation in both West African societies and the landscape itself. I am consolidating previous survey data and expanding upon them using several methods of archaeological survey and remote sensing with the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sara Ayers-Rigsby. Rachael Kangas.

Miami is often presented as the poster child of sea level rise; while climate change is generally accepted as an observable fact in south Florida, elsewhere this issue is regarded as too politically charged for frequent discussion. This renders sensitive archaeological sites vulnerable to coastal erosion, storm surge, and other factors. The Florida Public Archaeology Network’s Heritage Monitoring Scouts (HMS) Florida program is designed to raise awareness of how these factors will impact...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dru McGill. John Wall. John K. Millhauser. Vincent Melomo. Ruth Little.

Free African-Americans established Oberlin Village outside Raleigh, North Carolina in 1866 at the end of the Civil War. Within two generations, the people of Oberlin had constructed churches, a school, a cemetery, shops, and many homes. Today, Oberlin continues to be an important site for African-American history and identity. For example, Oberlin Cemetery (established 1873) is one of only four African-American cemeteries in Raleigh. The cemetery’s more than 600 graves include many leading...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ramona Harrison.

Siglunes is one of a series of endangered sites in N Iceland where we investigate: the emergence and long-term development of Icelandic fisheries and marine mammal hunting, the changing connections between Eyjafjörður and the larger North Atlantic trade and exchange during the Viking Age and medieval times, processes of marine erosion and its effect on archaeological sites for heritage management efforts in Iceland and the wider region. The site’s archaeological and environmental samples can...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Ortman. Laura Scheiber. Zachary Cooper.

Recent studies suggest many properties of human settlements vary in predictable ways with population size. These studies have shown, for example, that more populous settlements are systematically denser on average than less populous settlements in a wide range of societies. In this presentation we examine this densification effect in mobile hunting and gathering societies by analyzing a database of information for prehistoric stone circle (tipi ring) sites in the plains and intermontane basins...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leslie Reeder-Myers. Kathryn Cross.

Today, the Rappahannock River is known for having some of the best oysters on the east coast of North America, and people have been taking advantage of that resource for thousands of years. A large, multi-component shell midden site at Belle Isle State Park provides a glimpse into shellfish harvesting for the past 4500 years, and suggests that the estuary’s ecosystem changed significantly over that time period. During Woodland and Colonial phases of occupation, oyster makes up between 98 and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kyle Riordan. Julie Field. John Dudgeon.

This poster reports on field-work and laboratory investigations conducted on geoarchaeological samples from Naihehe Cave, located in the Sigatoka river valley of Viti Levu, Fiji. This research employs novel and exploratory methods, including Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), Fourier Transform Infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), and Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) to determine the elemental content of sediment samples and for detailed imagery useful in grain size and shape...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Dresser-Kluchman.

In the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument, at the confluence of the Rio Grande and the Red River, groups of ponderosa pine trees are dotted with peeled trees, scarred by surrounding animals and weather as well as by human consumption of the trees’ cambium. In most considerations of inner bark utilization, the threat of starvation is posited as the key motivation for bark-peeling. This landscape, however, lends itself to narratives that use trees as artifacts, among the full breadth of survey...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hugo Ikehara Tsukayama.

Between 500 BC and AD 500 communities of the coastal valleys of Ancash (Peru) lived in a period of increased conflict and violence. People moved to defensive locations and invested in the construction of defensive infrastructure such as: walls, moats and fortifications. These features are still visible today as scars in the landscape. Two moments have been defined in this period and are related to the Salinar and Gallinazo archaeological cultures, each characterized by different settlement...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erica Begun-Veenstra.

For many people, material objects hold the memory of a time and place. For some families, these objects, collected at meaningful and important times and places, can become heirlooms with an additional, familial significance tying generations to a distant time and place. For others, these objects reflect personal journeys and experiences. By examining two case studies—the Michoacan originating ceramics of the N1W5:19 compound at Teotihuacan and the exchange and collecting of lapel pins at an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melanie Chang. April Nowell.

Paleoanthropological hypotheses are often qualitatively different from questions asked by scientists studying the evolution of other living groups. They are frequently complex and very specific. Rather than seeking to illuminate basic evolutionary processes and mechanisms, they focus on precisely reconstructing events in human prehistory. They are often driven, at least in part, by public interest. These characteristics can enhance paleoanthropological studies because they foster novel research...

DOCUMENT Citation Only D'aundra Lewis.

For millennial alcohol has played a prevalent role in the development of communities and human interaction. Scotland is well known for the creation of whisky that made its way to America during the Colonial Period. The goal of this research is to identify the influence alcohol has had on the development of Scotland. Scotland whisky distribution has caused a change in laws, economics, health perspective, and tradition. According to Bill Walker, "Scotch whisky is more than a whisky. It is part of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alex Kara.

The Classic Maya collapse remains as both relevant and controversial a topic as ever. For over a century, dozens of researchers have proposed different causes that may have driven this complex process. The last few decades have witnessed the academic community’s opinion converge on the notion that many different social and environmental factors, operating at likewise diverse scales, somehow contributed to a temporally gradual and spatially heterogeneous disruption of the demographic, political,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Sparenberg.

Maryland has 8,000 miles of tidal shoreline associated with the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries and more than 12-percent of its surface area in floodplains. These high risk areas for flooding and coastal erosion contain about 40-percent of Maryland’s archeological sites and presumably many more that have yet to be discovered. It is not feasible or prudent to excavate every endangered site, thus choices about which sites to investigate must be made strategically. This paper lays out a reasoned...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Philip Kaijankoski. Brian Byrd. Michelle Goman. Jack Meyer. Manuel Palacios-Fest.

Situated on the southeast edge of San Francisco, the Islais Creek estuary was infilled during early development of the city. Recent geoarchaeological coring searching for prehistoric sites underlying this urban landscape has documented a complex sequence of Holocene landforms deposited as sea level rise transformed the ancestral Islais Creek valley. This exploratory work also identified, in a variety of stratigraphic contexts, an extensive ancestral Native American shell mound that was occupied...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christian Mader. Markus Reindel. Johny Isla.

This research analyzes excavated materials of the Paracas culture (800–200 BC) in southern Peru, particularly obsidian artifacts, malacological finds, and camelid bones. In doing so, different methods including archaeometric techniques, quantification, artifact classification, and species determination are combined to elaborate natural origin, making, distribution, and utilization of the objects. The Paracas remains were excavated by the Palpa Archaeological Project and mainly derive from three...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa Fischer. Mary Anna Hartley.

Digital technologies are changing fundamental approaches to archaeological excavation and analysis. The Jamestown Rediscovery project to examine James Fort, the first successful English settlement in North America, has been ongoing for more than 20 years. Recently the team has been working on re-excavating the site of three of Jamestown’s 17th-century churches, the earliest of which is significant for having been the site of the first representative assembly meeting in English America in 1619....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Logan Kistler. Saiful Islam. Mark Nesbitt. Roselyn Ware. Robin Allaby.

Bengal cotton muslin, a particularly fine type of woven cotton fabric, had legendary status where it was traditionally produced in East Bengal—now Bangladesh—for at least 2000 years. During the colonial influence of the British Empire, muslin was widely traded outside of South Asia, and became a valuable global commodity with major impacts on both local producers and foreign markets. Political turmoil and market forces, especially pressure from the East Indian Company, completely halted muslin...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katerina Douka. Samantha Brown. Mikhael Shunkov. Anatoly Derevianko. Tom Higham.

In 2010, a finger bone discovered in Siberia was assigned using DNA to a previously unknown human group, the Denisovans. The Denisovans interbred with both Asian Neanderthals and modern humans over the past 100,000 years; their geographic distribution is now thought to have stretched from the Siberian steppes to the tropical forests of SE Asia and Oceania. Despite their broad spatio-temporal range, the Denisovans are only known from 4 bones, all from a single cave. This patchy knowledge of an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Loren Davis. Alexander Nyers. Jillian Maloney. Neal Driscoll. Shannon Klotsko.

If the First Americans initially migrated into the New World from northeastern Asia along a coastal route, we should expect to find the earliest evidence of human occupation in the Americas in submerged sites along the northeastern Pacific Rim. Late Pleistocene-aged human coastal migrants would undoubtedly exploit high ecological productivity zones of ancient estuaries and bays that once existed along paleocoastal landscapes. A systematic approach to the discovery of First Americans coastal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Blackwood. Kate Pontbriand.

Analysis of archaeological clam shells can provide important indicators of the seasonality of an archaeological site. To address the question of seasonality at four Woodland period archaeological sites along the coast of Maine, we have collected monthly modern samples of the soft-shelled clam Mya arenaria from nearby clam flats to establish a baseline to which excavated samples can be compared. The analyses of modern shells will show how seasons are recorded in the target species in Maine;...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Glassow.

Data derived from oxygen isotope profiles of mussel shells suggest that sites in the interior of Santa Cruz Island dating between 4700 and 3400 cal BC, the period of the island’s "red abalone middens," were occupied during the spring through early winter, with little or no occupation during the main winter months. In contrast, a small number of oxygen isotope profiles indicates that a large costal site was occupied predominantly during the winter and possibly also the fall, with no occupation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Knut Ivar Austvoll.

Along the northwestern coast of Scandinavia the reliance and utilisation of the sea set the stage for a more advanced sociopolitical organization. The technological innovations prompted by the Late Neolithic (i.e. ship technology), turned the sea into a connective arena of interaction and trade. This is seen with the widespread distribution of finely crafted Jutish flint daggers from Late Neolithic I, followed by a steady increase of metal, burial mounds, and settlement sites in Late Neolithic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matt Liebmann.

The enigmatic first contacts between the Zuni people and Esteban Dorantes, an enslaved Moor, has provided fodder for historical and anthropological speculation for more than 475 years. Conjecture regarding what really happened between Esteban and the Zuni began within a few days of this initial encounter in 1539, and continues down to the present day. Despite centuries of debate, supposition, and guesswork based on scanty historical records, archaeological evidence has yet to be brought to bear...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Dungan. Matthew Peeples. Caitlin Wichlacz. Jeffery Clark.

The techniques used to form ceramic vessels—in this case, coiling and scraping as opposed to the use of a paddle and anvil—have long been treated as key elements differentiating among archaeological "cultures" in the US Southwest. At the same time, finished vessels often retain little or no obvious visual evidence of the technique used in their formation, and this low visibility has implications for both ancient practice and modern archaeological analysis. We utilize computed tomography (CT...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Petra Elfström. Nathan Goodale. Alissa Nauman. Colin Quinn. Emily Rubinstein.

House floors in archaeological contexts often lack the density of artifacts and in situ placement to be able to fully reconstruct the spatial organization of activities. Geochemical analyses of sediments provide an alternative line of evidence for understanding household organization and potentially changing social systems. This study presents geochemical analyses of living floors from several pithouses at the Slocan Narrows site in the Upper Columbia river area of interior British Columbia. In...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher L. Hill.

Quaternary vertebrate assemblages from the northern Rocky Mountains can be used to understand the biogeographic consequences of climate change. Some localities contain strata from before the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), while others consist mostly of Late Glacial and Holocene deposits. The Merrell Local Fauna is from a stratigraphic sequence in Centennial Valley. Radiocarbon dates range from >52,000 to 19,000 BP and fossils are in lacustrine deposits, fluvial sediments, and a debris flow. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Luisa Aebersold. Fred Valdez. Brittany Mitchell.

The archaeological site of Colha, located within the northern Belize chert-bearing zone, is well-known for being one of the largest Maya lithic production sites in Mesoamerica. The site has occupation dating to the Archaic Period as well as the Middle Preclassic through the Early Postclassic. Pollen and geomorphologic evidence suggest intensive forest clearance, wetland soil manipulation, swamp margin, and upland manipulation dating as early as the Archaic Period. Evidence for intensive blade...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarahh Scher.

This paper explores the visual language of gender expression in Moche art, seeking to determine the relationships among ambiguous gender, social role, and status in Moche visual culture. The Moche are well-known for their representations of warriors and warfare, as well as the sacrificial rituals associated with the taking of prisoners. However, this martial focus was not consistent across Moche time and space, and regional variations indicate the existence of a potential field of expression...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marissa Molinar.

This presentation examines traditional, contemporary, and experimental methods of illustration and photography in rock art recording. Addressed accordingly are the processes and problems unique to pictographic (painted) and petroglyphic (pecked) parietal imagery, superimposition and dating. As a rock art researcher, photographer, and artist, many examples will be drawn from my fieldwork; specifically contemporary methods utilizing panoramic photography and an experimental photographic technique...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Pierce. Patti Wright. Rachel S. Popelka-Filcoff.

The Truman Road Site (23SC924), St. Charles County, Missouri, features a diversity of material remains and a long periods of occupation mostly occurring during the Late Archaic (3000 – 2500 BC) and Middle Woodland (100 BC – AD 500). For this region of prehistoric Missouri, ceramics and chert constitute the main evidence for understanding trade and cultural dynamics. Despite its relative ubiquity among sites, ochre has rarely been considered in such studies. Recognizing that this material is a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Frazer. James Bourke. Timothy de Smet. Alex Nikulin.

Poverty Point is a UNESCO World Heritage Site known for its monumental earthworks. The largest and most significant feature on the site, Mound A, is over 21 meters high and 200 meters long. Currently, it is believed to have been built in three months at most. This supports the idea that there was a central leader directing its construction, a more socio-politically complex society than previous hunter-gatherer populations in North America. Evidence of stratigraphic layering, however, is an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Collins.

Recent investigations of Yaxuná, Yucatan, Mexico have provided evidence to suggest that the earliest permanent spaces, by way of the site’s E-group complex, in the Northern Lowlands were roughly contemporaneous with the early developments observed at Central Lowland sites. On the one hand, this data provides an outlet to better explore the large scale social processes impacting the early macro-region of the Maya area. However, material analysis of recovered shell, lithic, and ceramic artifacts...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lingyi Zeng. Jianxin Jiang.

I will use scanning electron microscope with an energy dispersive X-ray spectrometer (SEM-EDS) to investigate both elemental compositions and mineral microstructures of ceramics from the Mongol Empire. I will analyze and compare sherds from multiple contexts, including ceramic production centers, burials and residential areas to acquire qualitative and quantitative data on porcelain bodies, glazes, and pigments with the SEM-EDS technique. A high degree of similarities in chemical compositions...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brandon Gay. Paul Goldstein.

This study investigates geospatial relationships among Late Intermediate Period (1000-1400 CE) and Inca settlement patterns within the Moquegua River drainage of southern Peru which were first identified in the 1990s by the Moquegua Archaeological Survey (MAS). A prevalence of walls and defensive locations and a largely vacant no-mans-land between downvalley Chiribaya and Chiribaya-San Miguel and upvalley Estuquiña settlements likely evidences an increased level of inter-cultural conflict in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Ryan.

With the development of a detailed contextual archaeology, we have gained the ability to identify how termination behaviors are related by subtle linkages in time and space. Individual actions that take place within the various portions of a structure are temporally distinct events, but are contextually related via ultimate decommissioning objectives. Each individual behavior qualified the meaning of those that preceded or followed it. Using multiple ancestral Pueblo sites in the Mesa Verde...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Robinson. Eleni Kotoula. Clare Bedford. Devlin Gandy. Matthew Baker.

The over-painting sequences at the elaborate rock-art site of Pleito, South-Central California, is one of most complex in the Americas. In a region famous for its polychromatic traditions, including Chumash, Yokuts, Kitanemuk, and other Californian native groups, Pleito stands out as the richest in terms of variety of colours, iconography, and over-painting. This over-painting, or superimposition, offers the 'deepest' data rich relative sequence in the region. Integrated work employing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Randall McGuire.

Larry Zimmerman taught us how to do Indigenous archaeology. He told us do not rob graves or lick bones, to ask questions that Indigenous people need answered, to put aside academic capital, to collaborate, to be radical, to listen, to be humble and to atone for the transgressions of our discipline. Such a transgression occurred in the Sierra Mazatan of Sonora, México. In 1902, a party of Yaqui warriors freed hundreds of enslaved Yaquis from haciendas near Hermosillo, and they sought refuge in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Brodie.

Analyses of settlement locations (such as hamlets and farmsteads) within the Volcán Barú region of Panama and their associated periods of occupation suggest that during certain times, such as the Chiriquí Period, soil fertility was an important factor in determining the location. However, during other periods, it does not seem to have been significant. There also is a centralization of the population during the late formative, or Late Bugaga Phase, which correlates with previous findings of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Stowe.

This poster presents the results of five field seasons of intensive survey and total station mapping at the Medicinal Trail Community, a Maya hinterland settlement in northwestern Belize. Mapping during the summer of 2017 has further refined our understanding of the size and distribution of households and numerous landscape features that have been, or continue to be, the focus of excavations. Refinements to the topographical mapping within the area has revealed several complex household groups...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Linda Neff. Ted Neff. Peter Pilles. Ronald Krug.

Ethnohistoric accounts, historic records, and the archaeological record indicate the Yavapai and Northern Tonto Apache lived a mobile lifestyle during Protohistoric time (approximately A.D. 1300 - 1850) across the diverse environment of the Verde Valley area of Central Arizona, just south of the Colorado Plateau. Due to their subtle, portable, perishable, expedient, and reused material traces across the landscape, archaeologists struggle to merely identify protohistoric sites much less...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Philippe Nondédéo. Eva Lemonnier. Julien Hiquet. Louise Purdue. Cyril Castanet.

The classic Maya site of Naachtun is actually composed by a monumental and public core zone of 35 hectares surrounded by an extensive residential area of about 175 hectares. The study of its settlement pattern along with geoarchaeological works focused on agrarian strategies specifically have shown the role of vacant spaces in shaping the settlement as an agrarian town. Mainly dedicated to agriculture since the beginning of Naachtun’s occupation in the Early Classic period and maintained until...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eisei Tsurumi. César Sara. Yuichi Matsumoto.

The excavations at Kotosh by Japanese team during the 1960s demonstrated that in the Upper Huallaga Basin there are many archaeological sites corresponding to the time of the early development of Andean Civilization. One of the most important contributions of these studies is a fine-grained regional chronology from the Late Preceramic Period to the end of Early Horizon. The subsequent investigations in Cajamarca region of northern highland since the 1970s successfully elucidate diachronic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Verna Gentil.

The ancient Maya port site of Conil is located in the modern community of Chiquilá on the north coast of Quintana Roo, Mexico. In 1528 Francisco de Montejo, a Spanish conquistador, reported that Conil was a large town consisting of 5,000 houses. William Sanders was the first archaeologist to work at the site in 1954, but the site core was not formally mapped until 2005 by Glover. Further work was conducted in 2014, 2016, and 2017 as part of El Projecto Costa Escondida (PCE). Data collection and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Abby Baka. Sarah Baitzel. David Browman.

Archaeological studies of the Upper Mantaro Valley region in the central Andean highlands have played an essential role in shaping current models of Andean complex societies and state expansion during the Middle Horizon (A.D. 500–1000) and subsequent periods. Among the pioneer studies of this region was Browman’s pedestrian survey of the Upper Mantaro valley between Jauja and Huancayo, Peru for his doctoral dissertation, during which he registered over 106 sites dating to the Middle Horizon....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chip Wills.

Places where people invest significant human capital and resources in architecture and landscape engineering may nevertheless be abandoned in response to environmental or social factors. Those places might eventually be re-occupied by the original builders, or in some cases, appropriated by others. During migrations, abandoned or largely abandoned places may become destinations for people on the move. Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, has archaeological evidence for episodes of abandonment or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stefan Brannan.

The concept of settlement scaling is increasingly being utilized in archaeology to empirically evaluate mathematical properties of urban and non-urban settlements. However, principles based on settlement scaling theory have yet to be tested in the Eastern Woodlands of the United States despite the existence of a robust sample of settlements, including those containing monumental architecture. As part of a broad regional study, I collected spatial data on settlement size, monuments, and public...

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

Understanding the settlement chronology and degree of interaction and integration of Caribbean western Panama within "Gran Chiriqui" and greater Central America has driven archaeological research in the region since the 1950’s. Hernan Colon’s accounts of Bocas and adjacent Costa Rica depict a populous region, with vast fields of maize, people traveling about in numerous canoes and wearing more gold objects than ever seen in the New World. Lothrop’s 1947 synopsis of the "myth" of the Sigua...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Palus.

The Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) cultural resource responsibilities expand beyond the landscape, to the artifacts recovered from archaeological sites, and the associated records. These "gatherings" under the Antiquities Act and "archaeological resources" under the Archaeological Resources Protection Act (ARPA) were collected in the public interest to be preserved in museums for future generations. Some of these collections may also be sacred and sensitive to descendant communities, and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kirie Stromberg.

Shang (c. 1600 – 1046 BCE) elites were expert manipulators of soundscape. The intimacy of the relationship between music and authority during Bronze Age China has been well established, bronze bells having served as crucial markers of status and political prestige. Before the codification of the ritual orchestra, however, and beyond the performance of "music" per se, soundscapes were defined by factors such as climate and local ecological context, by animals, by the noise of human activity at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gary Crawford. Leping Jiang.

The Shangshan Culture is among the first in China to be associated with at least one domesticated organism: rice (Oryza sativa). A decade of research on Shangshan is providing critical insight on events leading to Neolithic developments in the Lower Yangtze Valley. So far, some expectations are not yet confirmed: e.g., the Shangshan ancestors developed from a local Palaeolithic population, and the first farming developed in the rich lowlands. Collaborative research is documenting potential...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Hyche.

From 1850 to 1860, the Blue Ridge Mountains were home to roughly 1,900 Irish laborers as they worked on the construction of the Virginia Central Railroad. Upon its completion, the railroad stretched from Norfolk, Virginia, to the Ohio River. Along the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Irish immigrants constructed several cuts and tunnels, including the Blue Ridge Tunnel. At its completion, the tunnel measured 4,263ft long and bridged two Virginia counties. This project proved to be an especially...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angela Locke Barton.

While monitoring lead remediation activities around historic buildings at Point San Jose (now Fort Mason) in 2010, National Park Service archaeologists discovered thousands of human bones in a medical waste pit behind the former hospital. Large numbers of medical artifacts, primarily medicinal bottle shards, were also recovered from the pit. Many of these medicinal bottles were produced by the U.S. Army Hospital Department for a limited time during the Civil War (1862-1865). Such precise...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Leigh Anne Ellison. Francis McManamon.

Archaeologists are busy all the time. Often stretching to meet a variety of professional obligations. CRM and government agency archaeologists are among the most stretched given the different directions that pull upon their professional lives. Scholarly pursuits; administrative, bureaucratic, regulatory, and public outreach responsibilities related to physical sites and collections, easily fill or over-fill their schedules. Now the care and curation of digital data adds to the piling up of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only J. Christopher Gillam. Nicolas Zwyns. Masami Izuho. Tseveendorj Bolorbat. Evgyny Rybin.

Ongoing research on the Pleistocene of northern Mongolia has revealed intriguing patterns in the Upper Paleolithic cultural landscapes of the region. The distribution of sites suggest that maintaining social networks was potentially as significant as subsistence and shelter considerations for these early nomadic hunter-gatherers. In 2017, fifteen new Upper Paleolithic sites were documented in the Ikh Tolboriin Gol (Big Tolbor River, n=45) and Naryn Tolboriin Gol (Narrow Tolbor River, n=9)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carola Flores-Fernandez. Veronica Alcalde. Laura Olguin. Jimena Torres. Diego Salazar.

Fishing was a crucial aspect in the lifeway of ancient coastal societies. Along the Pacific Coast, the appearance of shell fishhooks has been interpreted as part of different contexts of growing population, economic specialization, and social complexity, among others. Along the coast of the Atacama Desert (18° to 26° Lat. South), fishhooks on Choromytilus chorus shells (mussel) appear in archaeological sites located along 1.6 thousand kilometers of coast with dates around 7500 years BP. Around...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Biggie. John Walden. Jaime Awe. Rafael Guerra. Julie Hoggarth.

The plaza held special significance to the ancient Maya, and across ancient Mesoamerica. In a reflection of Maya cosmological beliefs, the plaza was seen as a representation of, and a portal to the primordial sea, the watery underworld from which all things originate. This connection is evident in various ways throughout the region, from special dedicatory deposits to decorative architecture and iconography. This presentation explores that cosmological salience through the recent excavations at...