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

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nolan O'Hara. Tiffany Raymond. Carl P. Lipo. Hannah Elliott.

A common class of prehistoric ceramic vessels are those that share attributes related to the processing, cooking, storage and serving of food resources. Depending on the specifics of the use contexts, attributes will vary systematically and depend on the range of activities, the details of the food resources, and the heating technology in which the vessels are used. Thus, we can expect that many technological traits of vessels such as temper, wall thickness, porosity, firing temperature, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Spencer Pelton.

Human cold intolerance unambiguously suggests that mid to high latitude prehistoric foragers used thermoregulatory technologies, such as clothing and housing, to cope with the environment, even if archaeologists rarely find them in the record. Others have recognized this, but none have developed a formal means of expressing variation in thermal technologies in the archaeological record over widespread temperature clines. I draw from observations collected during ethnoarchaeological fieldwork...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christina M. Giovas.

Prehistoric commensal animal relationships are understudied for the Caribbean, with little explicit consideration for the defining attributes of the insular commensal niche or what taxa may be rightly considered commensal. Here, I address these issues by clarifying the nature of Caribbean commensalism with respect to synanthropy, domestication, animal management, and phoresy. I consider which vertebrate and invertebrate taxa most likely enjoyed commensal relationships with humans in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marcel Kornfeld. Mary Lou Larson.

Forager campsites are commonly thought of as locations where social activities occur, but most archaeologists focus on subsistence (butchery, processing), stone tool production and use, and how these systems relate to mobility strategies. The record is often silent when it comes to the behaviors incidental to what appears central economic endeavors. Often camps yield information beyond subsistence. Ochre, needles, beads, bone rods, structures, and context of various activities provide more...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christina Friberg.

The ‘Mississippianization’ of the Midwest unfolded during the late 11th and early 12th centuries as interactions with Cahokia influenced aspects of local community organization, ceremonialism, material culture, and access to exotic raw materials. For local peoples, these encounters and affiliations also facilitated interactions between Mississippian groups beyond Cahokia. The direct proximity of the Lower Illinois River Valley (LIRV) to the Greater Cahokia area enabled certain social, political,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marian Creveling. Karen Orrence.

The National Capital Region of the National Park Service is rich with archeological resources as can be attested by the vast collection of objects stored at the Museum Resource center. However, for many collections, only a basic identification of the artifacts exists. Collections dating from early Native American habitation to the American Civil War to 20th Century Industrialization are available for further research that could lead to Master's Thesis or Dissertations. This paper will highlight...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sean Dolan.

Excavation is often the way to mitigate for the loss of cultural resources to comply with Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act. However, excavation is not always the most practical solution. A case study is presented to demonstrate how alternative mitigations advance the research value of cultural resources, and increase flexibility in land-use decisions by agencies while satisfying the mutual interests of stakeholders. In 2012, four prehispanic Ancestral Puebloan fieldhouses...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Antoine Dorison. Gregory Pereira. Marion Forest.

Thirty years ago, investigations in the city of Las Milpillas in the Malpaís of Zacapu, provided unprecedented insights on the origins of Late Postclassic tarascan social organization. One was the highlighting of a unique kind of urban organization upon lava flows ; as in all four tarascan cities of the Malpaís. Yet, unlike its counterparts, Las Milpillas specificity resides in the fact that a site portion lies upon older volcanics, providing arable lands at hand for the city dwellers to use....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Geoffrey Cunnar. Edward Stoner.

We argue that it is time to reconsider the use of the term biface in Great Basin archaeology and implement more heuristic terms in its place. In most instances, there is only one role or "one side of a biface" and that was to become a projectile point. It is time we recognize bifaces as such and acknowledge that preform morphology can be an indicator of temporal association and of social agents including children. Stage classification alone is limiting in terms of allowing us to broaden our...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Corey Herrmann. Nicholas Brown.

Archaeologists have long been fascinated with the exploitation and exchange of Spondylus spp. across the ancient world. This is especially true for the Andes, where the "thorny oyster" has been found far afield from its tropical breeding sites along the coasts of Ecuador and northern Peru. However, factors such as the uneven development of archaeology between Peru and Ecuador and the persistence of certain myths about Andean Spondylus have led to a "black-boxing" effect where exchange from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erika Ruhl. Sanna Lipkin.

This paper specifically addresses the cultural construction of children’s age and identity by examining the textiles and burial clothing from a series of pre-Modern mummified children’s burials recovered from beneath church floors in northern Finland. During the pre-modern era, children’s burials in pre-modern Finland take one of three forms: (1) alone, in individual coffins (2) in association with other burials but still in their own coffin (3) co-burial, in the same coffin as others. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edward Jolie.

In North America, some of the largest and most well preserved archaeological collections of perishable artifacts, including objects such as string, nets, baskets, textiles, mats, and sandals, are curated by the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian and National Museum of Natural History. Generally poor preservation of these items has challenged interested researchers to recover as much information as possible from them, meaning that even some of the very early, minimally...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sebastian Warmlander.

The history of South American metalworking still presents a number of unresolved questions, despite decades of archaeological and historical research. This is especially true for the Andean region, where in prehistoric times alloys of copper as well as precious metals were crafted into intricate objects. Here, analytical metallographic techniques such as scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD), and infra-red (IR) spectroscopy are used to investigate different aspects of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chelsea Fisher.

Tzacauil is a small archaeological site in the hinterlands of Yaxuná, a major center in the central Yucatán region of the northern Maya lowlands. Excavations of Tzacauil’s nine house groups suggest that a community formed here twice: first during the Late Formative period (250 BCE – 250 CE) and again in the Terminal Classic period (700 – 1100 CE). Both of these occupations coincide with population peaks at nearby Yaxuná. Judging by the ample open spaces surrounding the site’s house groups,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Skinner.

The analysis and disentanglement of human skeletal elements from commingled burial contexts is an essential step in creating individual identifications. This commingled analysis often includes a reliance on joint articulations to determine holistic element reassociations. Manual methods currently exist to test joint articulations for potential reassociation, but most appendicular joint articulations fall within the low reliability category for this method (Adams and Byrd 2014). Many cases of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Davenport.

In recent years, photogrammetry has emerged as a low-cost solution for the digital preservation of archaeological sites and artifacts. Beyond preservation, the creation of three-dimensional models allows archaeologists and researchers to ask questions of objects or sites remotely and at more refined scales. It also allows sites or active excavations and objects not on display to be accessible to the public. Whole ceramic vessels from Max Uhle’s 1897 excavations at Pachacamac, curated at the Penn...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sherman Horn. Anabel Ford.

Survey at the ancient Maya center El Pilar, along the border between Belize and Guatemala, has incorporated LiDAR imagery since 2013, allowing expansive – yet targeted – coverage of settlement beyond the monumental core. Successive field seasons have revealed a complex picture of landscape modification, resource extraction, and settlement concentration in different micro-environmental zones around the city center. Our fieldwork in 2017 had three foci: 1) explore and map the Amatal Supercluster,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Clasby.

This paper will examine the intensification of long distance intraregional interaction networks among eastern slope (also known as ceja de selva) populations during the late Early Horizon and Early Intermediate Period. The centuries following the decline of the Chavín and Chorrera cultures are thought to represent a period of balkanization and (eventual) regionalization throughout much of the Central and Northern Andean coastal and highland valleys as previously established interregional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeffery Kruchten.

The Emerald Acropolis is an early Mississippian shrine complex constructed atop a high upland ridge approximately 25 kilometers east of Cahokia in southwestern Illinois. The termination and abandonment of a suite of special-use buildings located along an isolated spur at the base of the main ridge is strikingly different than the termination of similar non-domestic buildings throughout the region. These buildings, including large public structures, shrines, temples, and a sweat lodge, are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Rhode.

The Tibetan pastoral economic system that has evolved over the last several millennia involves permanent high altitude herd management combined with mutualistic relationships with lower-elevation agricultural communities. How this traditional pastoralist system developed in the middle to late Holocene from a prior foraging lifeway remains something of a puzzle, requiring the domestication of the native high-altitude adapted yak, the establishment of sustained relationships between Tibetan...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lars Fogelin.

Mani stones are large stone slabs with Buddhist prayers carved into their surface. In many parts of Tibet, Buddhist pilgrims carry these heavy stones during pilgrimage as an act of devotion. Pilgrims subsequently dry stack Mani stones into large structures including temples, walls and piles outside major religious intuitions. These structures lay, both literally and figuratively, outside of monastic control. In this paper I examine the varied ways Buddhist pilgrims use Mani stones, materialized...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kevin Nolan. Mark Seeman. Mark Hill.

Timing of Hopewellian developments plays a critical role in developing an understanding of how Hopewell came to be, and what it was. Focusing on the Scioto Hopewell sites studied by the Scale and Community in Hopewell Networks (SCHON), we present the results of 40 new radiocarbon dates obtained from 15 sites including both habitation and earthwork sites. We also undertake an evaluation of previous dates from these sites to come to a more robust understanding of the timing of key Hopewellian...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Francesca Fernandini.

This work uses the concept of timespace (Schatzki 2010) to follow the construction and habitation of the prehispanic city of Cerro de Oro within the lower Cañete valley between ca. 500-900 AD. The concept of timespace assumes that the temporality and spatiality of the social are considered as intertwined elements that form the dynamic infrastructure where social phenomena such as power, social organization or coordinated action are constituted. ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kirsten Green. Meradeth Snow.

No one expects to face any sort of harassment or discrimination and we can feel blindsided when something occurs that puts us, and/or our career, at risk. The question of ‘what next?’ can be daunting, especially in the face of choices that have massive repercussions personally and professionally. Frank discussion of the variety of ways to best maneuver a harassment situation, based on the literature and the experience of peers and colleagues, will be discussed. Additionally, how harassment and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ariel Texis. Shigeru Kabata. Tatsuya Murakami.

Using ceramics as a proxy for social contact, we discuss a long history of interregional interactions of Tlalancaleca with other areas during the Formative Period. We have observed some clear changes of ceramic assemblages in the transitions between the Middle, Late, and Terminal Formative (or between the Texoloc, Tezoquipan, and Late Tezoquipan phases). While we do not imply that the presence or absence of certain ceramic traditions serves as direct indicators for political control, it is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charles Stapleton. Maria Stapleton.

Abundant water-related art and architecture produced by Teotihuacanos and Mexica-Aztecs in the central Mexican highlands coupled with the rhetoric of today’s farmers from the same region regarding the catastrophic impacts of changes in local seasonal rainfall patterns make it clear that access to rainwater has always been a crucial factor for agricultural success in the semi-arid highlands of central Mexico, especially in communities that lack a reliable water source for irrigation. We collect a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Catharina Santasilia.

Since Tlatilco was discovered in the 1930s by Miguel Covarrubias, our understanding of the Early Formative site has changed with a steady flow over the last 80 years. During the 1940s, 50s, and 60s Tlatilco was excavated revealing the dynamic of the site, with the objective to establish the chronology and preserve the many burials. There seems to be extensive evidence that Tlatilco in fact was more than a burial site. The established (calibrated) dates for Tlatilco to be between 1200-900 BCE...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nezahualcoyotl Xiuhtecutli. Daniel Pierce. Michael D. Glascock.

The debate whether pottery sherds equal people or just their ideas has been ongoing since the days of pioneers such as Ford and Spaulding. The advent of new technologies has given a new wind to old debates in which the questions surrounding pottery styles are examined more closely to determine their origin. Compositional analysis has been especially helpful in shedding new light on the relations between artifacts and people. Compositional analysis carried out on Postclassic Tlaxcallan pottery...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Sarah Janesko. Alison Shepherd. Grace Gronniger. Kevin Bradley.

The Veterans Curation Program has been rehabilitating U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) collections for long-term preservation since 2009. With the dual goal of training and assisting veterans with their professional goals while also archiving and curating USACE collections, this program ultimately produces high quality digital records and photographs of cultural materials from across the U.S. This paper delves into the value of USACE’s digital collections for continued research, education,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Borrazzo.

An anthropocentric perspective governs most of archaeological research into lithic assemblages. Hence, spatial and morphological trends in the lithic record are interpreted primarily in terms of human technological behavior without a systematic assessment of unintentional and/or non-human factors as sources of variation. Surprisingly, controversies on the natural vs. anthropic character of several lithic assemblages or ‘industries’ did not prompt the adoption of taphonomic approaches by lithic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chrissina C. Burke. Katie K. Tappan. Gavin B. Wisner. Julie Hoggarth. J. Britt Davis.

Deciphering middens, feasting, ritual, or terminal deposits in the Maya world requires an evaluation of faunal remains. Maya archaeologists have been and continue to evaluate other artifacts classes, but often simply offer NISP values for skeletal elements recovered from these deposits. To further understand their archaeological significance, we analyzed faunal materials from deposits at the sites of Baking Pot and Xunantunich in the Upper Belize River Valley. We identified the species, bone...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Atkins Spivey.

Archaeologists rarely examine the reuse and reimagining of artifacts within contemporary Indigenous communities. The Pamunkey Indian Tribe, located in the Tidewater region of Virginia, has a long history of utilizing materials from the Reservation’s archaeological record in a variety of ways. For over a century, tribal members have reused artifacts in methods similar to their intended function, and they have reimagined them to create artwork and encourage artistic inspiration. Archaeology has...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Taylor Lawhon. David Mixter.

In 2012, excavations were conducted within a Late Classic noble palace at the ancient Maya site of Actuncan, located in western Belize. Remains of a large deposit of Terminal Classic materials were recovered from a corner of the palace’s primary courtyard. Based on its location on the courtyard surface and below collapse, the deposit was assumed to date to the period of the palace’s abandonment. The placement of this deposit was contemporary with Actuncan’s 9th-century renaissance as a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan deFrance. Edana Lord. Michelle LeFebvre. Catherine Collins. Elizabeth Matisoo-Smith.

The Caribbean Ceramic Age (AD500-1500) was associated with increased interaction between the islands and mainland South America. The domestic guinea pig (Cavia porcellus) was introduced to the Caribbean post-AD500 through human transportation. Archaeological remains of guinea pigs are present on several Caribbean islands. This study used complete mitogenomes from ancient guinea pigs as a commensal model to identify likely human migration routes and interaction spheres within the Caribbean...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sonia Alconini.

The Kallawaya region was an important imperial breadbasket of the Collasuyu, located to the east of the Titicaca basin. Formed by a set of narrow temperate valleys, this region was a natural corridor that led to Apolo and the Mojos savannas to the north, and to the east to the tropical Yunga mountains. Because of its marked altitudinal variation, this region was suitable for pastoralism, the production of corn and coca, and farther east, the exploitation of gold mines. The Inkas at their arrival...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Manuel Perales.

Previous research on the Inca road system have generally developed functionalist perspectives on their associated characteristics and infrastructure, inherited in several cases from procesualist approaches that focused primarily on their economic and military role. However, more recent studies on the nature of the Inca state have varied substantially, granting an outstanding importance to ideology and religion as mechanisms of domination. Based on these considerations, this paper presents an...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Kelly Brown. Alison Shepherd. Josh Wackett.

With the curation crisis growing more prominent in the realm of archaeology, research focus is slowly being shifted to previously excavated collections that are under analyzed and underreported. Many of these previously excavated collections are overlooked by potential researchers because of the perceived difficulties of re-establishing provenience and quantitative control for artifacts that have been long separated from their original archaeological context. Since 2009, the Veterans Curation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alfonso Gastelum-Strozzi. Ingris Peláez Ballestas. Jesús Zarco Navarro. José Luis Punzo Díaz.

This poster presents the results of the application of computational methods to classified archaeological deposits contained within cinerary urns. The method uses morphological properties and textural parameters to create quantitative descriptors that can be related to archaeological interpretations of the objects. The Pre-Columbian cinerary urns were discovered in the municipality of Huetamo, Michoacan, Mexico. The method uses information obtained from a Computed Tomography scan of each urn...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Martin Stein. Laura Hronec.

First implemented in 2008, the Permian Basin Programmatic Agreement (PBPA) is an alternative form of compliance with Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, as amended.The PBPA allows the oil and gas industry and potash mining companies in southeastern New Mexico to contribute funding for archaeological research in lieu of requiring a class III archaeological inventory within the PBPA Area, provided they avoid recorded cultural resources.This paper describes the context in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Forrest Follett. Adam Barnes. Katie Simon. Carla Klehm.

This paper is an effort to create a predictive model for archaeological sites in an area of Eastern Botswana. With a rather arid climate, much of Botswana’s ground surface (and archaeology) is easily visible to airborne and spaceborne sensors. Without sufficient training data for supervised classification, an iterative spectral clustering method was used to group spectrally similar pixels from multispectral imagery into a large number of spectrally distinct but unknown classes. By visually...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Henderson. Kathryn Hudson.

Framing the lower Ulúa valley and adjacent regions as part of a southeastern Mesoamerican frontier has always entailed an interest in external relationships, especially those connecting frontier regions with the Maya world to which they were supposedly peripheral. The belief that the periphery was occupied by simple non-Maya societies, lightly "influenced" by their more civilized western neighbors, appeared early in the development of orthodox frameworks and continues to influence archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claudia Garcia-Des Lauriers.

Artistic evidence of interactions is among the most salient and most debated in terms of the relationships that it represents between different polities and regions. Traditionally, the focus of analysis is on stylistic and iconographic influences and a discussion of retention of original meanings or evidences of disjunctions. Based on my research on the topic of Classic Period interactions from the Pacific Coast of Chiapas, I have come to the conclusion that our perspectives are much too...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lucy Gill.

Traditional narratives within Nicaraguan archaeology, based on primarily ethnohistoric rather than archaeological evidence, have privileged the arrival of external actors from Central Mexico at the expense of indigenous developments and have emphasized imposed change rather than situated continuity. Especially given that as archaeologists, our primary sources are material culture, we should approach mobility from a materialist engagement with the flows and hardenings of matter, sensu Manuel De...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hannah Moots.

In 1875, archaeologist Augustus Pitt-Rivers wrote, "History is but another term for evolution." This presentation will explore the development and trajectory of major schools of thought concerning the relevance (or lack thereof) of evolutionary theory to archaeology and examine the current debate about the nature of evolution occurring in the biological sciences. Lactase persistence, for example, has been intensively studied for nearly 30 years, yet new evidence is calling into question when and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mallory Melton.

This paper uses macrobotanical and microbotanical remains to investigate the impacts of developing sociopolitical complexity on the foodways of Middle Preclassic inhabitants of the Pacific coast of Guatemala. I use these datasets to explore how urbanization affected food-related practices of residents of La Blanca (900-600 BCE). Macrobotanical remains from house floors facilitate comparisons between elite and commoner foodways, while starch grains and phytoliths extracted from grinding...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Mark. Justin Holcomb. David Carballo.

The diffusion and spread of material culture is a cornerstone of archaeological research, particularly understanding the variables which dictate the structure of dispersal. Recent evolutionary approaches have sought to address technological spread through mathematical modeling. One model, the reaction-diffusion model, suggests diffusion occurs at the population scale as a wave-of-dispersal. While previous researchers demonstrated the efficacy of this approach regarding the peopling of a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ethan Watrall.

The spaces we inhabit and interact with on a daily basis are made up of layers of cultural activity that are, quite literally, built up over time. While museum exhibits, archaeological narratives, and public archaeology programs communicate this heritage, they often don’t allow for the kind of interactive, place-based, and individually driven exploration so often craved by the public. In recent years, many archaeological projects, cultural landscapes, and heritage institutions have turned to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only J. Cameron Monroe.

The Archaeology of the African Diaspora has long privileged the analysis of the everyday lives of enslaved Africans living on plantation sites in the New World. Notwithstanding the political and intellectual importance of this approach to our understanding of the emergence of the colonial world and its contemporary legacies, recent scholarship on both sides of the Atlantic has examined the new political entities that arose across the Black Atlantic World in dynamic tension with broader Atlantic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joakim Goldhahn.

This paper will explore the relationship between animated boat prows in different stone media - petroglyphs and geoglyphs - from an ontological perspective. It explores chronological changes in these media and argues for both similarities and differences in how stones participated in unfolding peoples' life-worlds or worldings during the north European Bronze Age.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Crystal Dozier.

The proto-historic period within North America provides a framework for assessing the transformations brought on by contact and conflict between indigenous peoples and European colonizers. In central and south Texas, a distinct archaeological culture, Toyah, spans some 400 years, 1250-1650 CE. The hallmark projectile point and first systemic, locally-produced ceramic tradition in the area have intrigued archaeologists for over a hundred years; interpretations of the phenomena have been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julio Ibarra.

La conservación del patrimonio arqueológico en la región de la Sierra Norte del estado de Oaxaca, representa un gran reto debido entre otros aspectos a su entorno geográfico, a cuestiones del ámbito social que se relacionan con el arraigo a sus costumbres y tradiciones; y más aún, a la falta total de antecedentes sobre trabajos previos de conservación sobre el patrimonio cultural local. En esta ponencia se presentarán los trabajos de intervención para la conservación y restauración de los...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cindy Hsin-yee Huang. April Nowell. Leslie Van Gelder.

Finger flutings are lines and markings drawn with the human hand in soft cave sediment in caves and rock shelters throughout southern Australia, New Guinea and southwestern Europe, dating back to the Late Pleistocene. Two decades ago, Kevin Sharpe and Leslie Van Gelder developed a rigorous methodological framework for the measurement and analysis of finger flutings that allows researchers to identify characteristics of the creators, such as age, sex and group sizes. However, despite a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian McCray.

The ecological setting and the political formations located in the Ceja de Selva raise unique terminological and conceptual questions for the study of interaction networks. Specifically, how do we best recreate meaningful "archaeological regions" within a mosaic of ecological zones and groups with poorly known culture histories? Presenting results from the Proyecto Arqueológico Wimba – 2016, this paper analyzes the chronological development of the Wimba site within the Ceja de Selva of eastern...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yu-chao Zhao. Brian Stewart.

Humans have frequented southern Africa’s highest reaches – Lesotho’s Maloti-Drakensberg Mountains – for ≥90,000 years. As with many high mountain systems worldwide, the Maloti-Drakensberg cast a rainshadow over closely neighboring arid lowlands (the eastern Karoo Desert). Based on previous archaeological and paleoenvironmental work in highland Lesotho, researchers have posited that source populations for human dispersals into the mountain zone often originated in the Karoo, particularly during...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Baustian. Danielle M. Romero. Barbara Roth. Darrell Creel.

Three seasons of excavation at the Elk Ridge site in the Upper Mimbres Valley suggest close familial social structures within this Classic period community. As a part of this preservation project, excavation of endangered burials has revealed mortuary and biological patterns that renew thinking of community dynamics in the region. Previous research by Harry Shafer has proposed that Mimbres communities organized around the family unit and lineage groups. Data from Elk Ridge thus far support this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Virginie Renson. Marx Navarro Castillo. Andrea Cucina. Brendan J. Culleton. Hector Neff.

This study presents the strontium isotopic analysis of enamel, dentine and bones of four individuals recovered from two sites (Miguel Aleman and PIN7), dating respectively from the Early and Late Classic period, both located the Pacific coast of Chiapas. The enamel samples of the four individuals have a Sr isotopic composition that varies between 0.70540 and 0.70631 for the 87Sr/86Sr ratio. The results were compared to data available for human bones and teeth, as well as rock, plant, water, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Smallwood. Thomas Jennings. Charlotte Pevny.

Paleoindian projectile points occur in high incidences in the American Southeast, and compared to other regions in the East, the Southeast has the greatest projectile point diversity. One effective way to understand this diversity is by tracking broad-scale morphological variation in suites of point traits to build cultural lineages. In this paper, we take a more trait-specific approach. We trace changes in projectile point design to understand the evolution of specific point attributes that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristi Feinzig.

Studying beads and changes in use of beads in a given population provide insight into the impact of outside influences on people in a given population. This research identifies bead types that were valued by indigenous cultures in South America prior to the Spanish Conquest in the Sixteenth-Century, and compares their frequency in six geographic regions within Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Colombia with the frequency of glass beads brought by the Spanish to the same regions. This study examines...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Gerard. Matthew Napolitano. Geoffrey Clark. Scott Fitzpatrick.

The initial human settlement of Yap, Western Caroline Islands (northwest tropical Pacific), is one of the least understood in Pacific prehistory, although new archaeological research is beginning to address this issue. Excavations at the southern site of Pemrang in Yap, western Caroline Islands (northwest tropical Pacific) have revealed multiple rich, well-stratified deposits of shell and pottery spanning the known occupation sequence of Yap and extended the date of early human activity by ca....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Max Price.

How do animal morphologies change during domestication? How do different parts of the skeleton adapt to human management? In this poster, I take a quantitative approach to domestication by comparing biometrical data from two species of mammals that were domesticated in the Middle East around the same time (ca. 8000 BC): pigs (Sus scrofa) and sheep (Ovis aries). Both pigs and sheep were domesticated by Pre-Pottery Neolithic B communities in northern Syria/southern Anatolia, but these species...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Roxana Cattaneo. Gisela Sario. Gilda Collo. Andres Izeta. Jose Caminoa.

In the archaeology of the Sierras Centrales of Argentina more than one hundred years ago studies reported the presence of a lithic technology centered on the use of quartz as a predominant raw material. However, little effort has been made to try to characterize its chemical composition so as to understand the circuits of mobility or the exchange networks in the archaeological sites of the region. The results of provenance studies have allowed us to advance in a geochemical characterization of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Wilcox. Paul Nick Kardulias.

This research examines the trade and production of steatite vessels during the Archaic Period in New England. The study focuses specifically on a quarry Located in Barkhamsted, Connecticut where recent excavation has supplemented prior investigations from 1949 to 1951. The material from this site is located at Yale’s Peabody Museum and the archaeology lab at Central Connecticut State University. We also examine the artifact assemblages from other sites in Connecticut and Massachusetts. Along...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caroline Solazzo. Jean Soulat.

Tortoiseshell is made from the scutes of sea turtles; historically, hawksbill turtle was the main source of tortoiseshell but other species might have been used. Between the 17th and 18th c. tortoiseshell obtained in the Caribbean was traded on North American and European markets. Tortoiseshell was used for making combs, fans, boxes, in bookbinding, and as veneering for furniture. Excavations in European workshops (Paris and Amsterdam) attest of the use of this exotic material into luxurious...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Abigail Varlan. Olivia Navaro-Farr.

The Balearic Islands, located off the coast of Spain, were occupied by the Romans beginning in 123 B.C.E. Under Roman occupation, the islands saw the development of Roman-style infrastructure and architecture in place of the pre-existing megalithic style of groups such as the Talayotic people. Sanisera and Pollentia are examples of Roman cities developed to facilitate trade and support the military needs of the empire. While excavations of the Balearic Islands have provided a wealth of data,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samantha Lee.

A decade of archaeology at Wye House Plantation in Maryland has yielded a multitude of information regarding the institution of slavery and the experiences of enslaved individuals. Whether or not enslaved peoples were deliberately bred systematically to produce children for sale by the master is a topic that has been generally neglected in modern scholarship. This practice demonstrates the inherent inhumanity of slavery and is an example of what the scholar Orlando Patterson describes as "the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicola Sharratt.

In many Andean regions, the shift from the Middle Horizon to the Late Intermediate Period, or LIP, is archaeologically identified by stylistic changes. In the Moquegua valley, southern Peru, LIP (ca. AD 1250-1476) Estuquiña architecture and portable material culture is starkly different from that associated with terminal Middle Horizon (ca. AD 950-1200) Tumilaca populations. Until recently Tumilaca settlements were thought to have been completely abandoned prior to the appearance of Estuquiña...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ricky Nelson. Valda Black. Danielle Kurin.

Minimal research has been done on observing whether there have been incidences of stunted growth in populations, in times of environmental stress and social turmoil. One such example are the populations found during the Late Intermediate Period (~AD 1000-1400, LIP) in the South-Central Peruvian highlands. Utilizing Buikstra and Ubelaker’s Standards, nine measurements were taken on the femora of 37 individuals (N=37) from the sites of Sonhuayo, Masumachay, and Mina Cachilhuancaray in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dawn Ramsey Ford. Owen Ford.

Within the boundaries of the United States’ largest state, 44 million acres of land are owned by Native corporations created under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) of 1971. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, approximately one in seven people (15.2% in 2016) in the state of Alaska are Native Alaskan or American Indian. With a significant amount of the Native population managing and utilizing lands their families have occupied for multiple generations, how is the concept of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kevin M. O'Briant. Clay Jenkinson.

During their 1803-05 westward journey, the Lewis and Clark Expedition described the presence of native graves, mounds, abandoned villages, and rock art. Previous archaeological research, centered around the 2005 Bicentennial, focused on the verification of campsites used by the members of the Corps of Discovery. Public interpretation of their Trail has likewise focused on the explorers themselves, neglecting both the Native context in which they traveled as well as the deeper history of their...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Glenn Darrington. Kathryn McDonald. Mary Rogers. Kevin Askan.

The Jocko Wilderness Area is located in the southest corner of the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana. In 2015 a cultural resource study involving the Jocko Wilderness Area was initiated to assess the past, current, and future effects of an existing NorthWestern Energy electrical transmission line that was constructed in 1964. This study, undertaken by the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes (CSKT) Preservation Office, integrated multiple avenues of research including historical records...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amita Gupta. Vinod Nautiyal.

Trans-Himalayan archaeology was always neglected by the historians and Archaeologist. But some recent excavations and my Ph.D field work presented an interesting view of Trans-Himalayan culture. The burial culture of this region dated back to 600-200BCE. I found here the remains of Pyro-technological activities. Steatite bead was first time found in Trans-Himalaya. They are in size from 2 to 4 mm in diameter, 1to3 mm in height, and hole width is about 1 mm. The beads were examined by using SEM...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Fitts. John Mintz.

The North Carolina Office of State Archaeology reviews information about hundreds of newly-identified archaeological sites each year and advises the State Historic Preservation Office regarding their ability to provide important information about the past. The need to synthesize accumulated data so that assessments of site significance can better reflect our potential state of knowledge is both pressing and daunting. Updating prehistoric contexts for North Carolina is a particularly challenging...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joshua Englehardt. Michael Carrasco.

This paper explores theoretical and methodological issues associated with the etic conceptualization of Mesoamerican deity systems and the identification of individual supernaturals in cross–cultural contexts. It critically focuses on previous classificatory systems of Olmec deities. Iconographers often identify individual deities on the basis of defining attributes or material accoutrements, frequently extending these identifications across contexts (as in Covarrubias’ famous "evolution of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Johannes Loubser.

Water helps breach the rock surface in both physical and perceptual ways. The addition of water facilitates the production of petroglyphs not only by weakening the bond between particles in sedimentary rocks but also with the moist particles acting as an effective abrasive slurry. The addition of water to natural earth pigment powder allows the colorant to effectively enter pores and interstices. Many virtually invisible petroglyphs and pictographs "magically' appear when covered with a thin...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Abigail Buffington. Smiti Nathan.

While trees are often integral to the ecology of certain landscapes, the propagation of specific woody taxa can also reflect significant social aspects imbued on anthropogenic spaces. Following the seminal work of Rita Wright, we are utilizing a comparative approach in this paper. We examined woody vegetation management by early food producing societies in two regions of southern Arabia: southeastern Arabia (modern-day northern Oman) and southwestern Arabia (modern-day southeast Yemen). Despite...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joshua Bell.

In the wake of several decades of resource extraction (logging and oil/gas exploration), the past as articulated in particular places, material things, names and narratives has taken on new urgency in the Purari Delta. For over a decade communities have struggled to marshal these assemblages of cultural heritage to demonstrate their traditional ownership to acquire resource royalties. An imperfect and highly political process, claimants must overcome the legacies of out-migration, Christianity,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Catlin.

Eleventh century Iceland was a period of transition. The settlement of the island two centuries earlier set off cascading environmental and landscape changes whose agricultural consequences were then evident, including deforestation, erosion, and wetland alteration. Meanwhile, the rise of a wealthy landowning class altered the economic basis of society from primarily household production towards more centralized structures of rent extraction and tenancy. On Hegranes, a region in Skagafjörður,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Surface-Evans.

Urban landscapes, those densely populated spaces in which generations of people live, play, work, and die, are complex palimpsest of memories. But not all memories are treated the same or are even chosen to be remembered. My own experiences as an archaeologist living in a modest-sized, rust-belt city for nearly two decades has exposed the never-ending rush of "progress" to erase the past. At both my research sites and my home, I see communities harmed by the trauma of forced erasure of the past...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elise Alonzi.

Monasteries were powerful social institutions in early and late medieval Ireland that took drastically different forms over time. Medieval historical records, such as annals and Saints’ Lives, and archaeological data, such as the layout of monastic buildings, suggest that small communities of monks at early medieval Irish monasteries followed ascetic or austere ways of life. Contrastingly, historical and archaeological sources indicate that monks at late medieval monasteries, founded by English...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Francisca Santana Sagredo. Petrus le Roux. Rick Schulting. Julia Lee-Thorp. Mauricio Uribe.

The study of human mobility is key to understanding the social and cultural dynamics of the pre-Columbian groups that inhabited northern Chile’s Atacama Desert. Material culture suggests that during the Late Intermediate Period (AD 900-1450) individuals frequently crossed the desert from the coast to the Andes and vice versa. Fish remains have been found in the interior valleys, and inland textiles and crops at the coast. This paper explores mobility in northern Chile through the application of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Hambacher.

Among the many changes that take place during the Late Prehistoric period in the Upper Great Lakes are greater levels of regionalization and shifts in region-wide interaction patterns. These changes are generally viewed as being reflected in varying degrees of similarity and dissimilarity in ceramic wares, decorative styles, and technology seen across the region during this period. Suites of ceramic types and decorative styles have also been used to link particular ceramic groupings with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adrienne Velasquez.

Some of the least known and best preserved archaeological resources in North America exist within the confines of federal property in the Department of Defense (DoD). The US military acquired large land holdings for the purposes of military training in the early nineteenth century, prior to suburban sprawl in the Northeast. The Army and subsequently the Air Force in a snapshot encapsulated whole communities that evolved in place since colonial times. Those archaeological resources, held in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Locascio.

The Wedgworth Midden (8PB16175), a Late Archaic tree island site near Belle Glade, Florida, produced large quantities of faunal remains during excavations undertaken by Florida Gulf Coast University in May of 2016. Analysis of these remains allows insight into patterns of resource acquisition and reveals ways in which people adapted to the local environment. Comparison of proportions of taxa from different occupational periods allows us to trace changes in resource use and sheds light on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Ntinou. Soultana-Maria Valamoti.

Our presentation, based on an overview of archaeobotanical data from the Aegean from the Neolithic to the Late Bronze Age, attempts a synthetic approach to the cultivation of trees. This work is part of the PLANTCULT research project funded by the European Council Research (ERC Consolidator Grant, GA 682529). As archaeobotanical data we consider the macro-remains of fruits/seeds and burnt wood from archaeological sites. In addition, we use palynological information when available. Our goals are:...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erik Martin. Daron Duke. Andrew J. Hoskins.

The fossil Old River Bed delta, located in the Great Salt Lake Desert, UT, contains one of the highest concentrations of Paleoindian archaeology within the Great Basin. Occupied from 13,000 cal B.P. until its desiccation around 9,500 cal B.P., this productive marshland provided a wide array of dietary resources utilized by the region’s inhabitants during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition. However, changes in climate, local hydrology, and human populations during this dynamic period likely...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Francis "Jess" Robinson. R. Scott Dillon.

This paper will examine several early Holocene archaeological complexes producing Late Paleoindian St. Anne/Varney bifaces, quartz unifaces (Early Maritime Archaic), and bifurcate-based Early Archaic bifaces across the Far Northeast. Recent examinations by the authors have raised questions about the timing and spatial extent of some of these complexes and what the patterns or lack thereof suggest about the cultural and technological origins of the Native Americans producing them, their lifeways,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Velma Valdez. Angela Neller. Lourdes Henebry-DeLeon.

Our knowledge and traditions tell us that the Ancient One is our Ancestor. We have requested repatriation for nearly twenty years only to be blocked at every turn. The final judgment made at the United States Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit placed the Claimant Tribes in the status of "interested party" in the minds of the federal agency. This is the hegemonic framework the tribes found themselves in when the US Army of Engineers made the official determination that the Ancient One is Native...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Yaquinto. Kathleen Van Vlack.

The BLM Utah Monticello Field Office (MFO) selected Living Heritage Anthropology (LHA) to document tribes' connections to and ethnographic resources within their field office. The MFO is located in southeastern Utah and includes much of the greater Cedar Mesa area. In order to achieve this goal, LHA is currently conducting an ethnographic literature review of tribal perspectives of and connections to the MFO. As part of this process, with the field office, LHA has been initiating conversations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam King. Terry Powis. Jaime Awe. Gyles Iannone. Nilesh Gaikwad.

While absorbed residues are widely used to explore subsistence-related questions, more recent work has used them to examine the use of elite and ritual beverages. In this paper, we explore absorbed residues found in ceramic containers and bone tubes recovered from caves, burials, and caches in the Belize Valley. The ceramic vessels presumably held liquids consumed or otherwise used in rituals in these settings, while the bone tubes delivered substances to participants in those rituals as enemas....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shawn Joy.

During last glacial episode, a massive amount of water was locked within ice sheets, resulting in a reduction in global sea-levels by 134 meters. The reintroduction of freshwater into the oceans radically changed global sea-levels and littoral landscapes. Over the last 20,000 years, approximately 15-20 million km2 of landscape has been submerged worldwide. Sea-level rise explains the rarity of glacial period coastal archaeological sites. Understanding Florida’s Paleoindians’ interactions with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Morgan-Smith.

The accumulation of debt by Maya speaking laborers has long been understood as integral to Yucatán’s hacienda system in the 19th century. Though the contexts and nature of creditor-debtor relationships are variable and contested, evidence for debt is consistently present in documents related to large, corporate estates. But what does indebtedness look like beyond the hacienda on small-scale estates? In the absence of historical documents, or evidence of a company store, can debt be observed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alyssa Scott.

This paper examines the archaeology of the Weimar Joint Sanatorium, an institution which functioned as the county tuberculosis hospital for fifteen counties in California during the early twentieth-century. Field data from topographical survey, historic structures recording, geophysical survey, and surface collection are interpreted along with historical information in order to understand how the institution and people connected to it were situated within the larger landscape. Within the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Lena Jones. Cyler N. Conrad. Caitlin Ainsworth. Stephanie Franklin.

Domestic turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) husbandry at Chaco Canyon has been the subject of considerable debate. Previous research has argued, among other things, that turkeys were rare in the Canyon (Akins 1985); that turkeys first were a source of feathers for ritual and ceremonial activities, and only later treated as food (Akins 1985; Badenhorst et al. 2016; Windes 1977); that local wild turkeys were not present in Chaco Canyon and domestic turkeys were imported from the Four Corners region...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Phyllis Messenger. Patrick Nunnally.

This paper will discuss hands-on uses of social media to help students engage with climate change. A central case study is an interdisciplinary design course on the Mississippi River and the city, taught in spring 2011 by coauthor Patrick Nunnally in which students confronted historic floods on the Mississippi River in real time through a series of twitter assignments. The analysis will discuss how the assignments were set up and carried out, what happened, and what the outcomes were, in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Sperling.

There are countless ways to interpret archaeological assemblages. One can take a purely functionalist approach. Plates are for eating and cups for drinking; fasteners keep clothing from falling. However, confronted with a range of symbolically charged artifacts from a Late Colonial through Early Republic period site in Northern Virginia, one is tempted to draw upon our anthropological origins to find meaning. A cuff link commemorating the fox hunt as well as coins and pottery bearing classical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Smith. Taylor MacDonald. Tiffiny A. Tung.

The site of La Real, located in the southern, near-coastal region of Peru, was an elite burial ground where mortuary contexts reveal Wari imperial influence during the Middle Horizon (600-1000 CE). This study examines the mortuary treatment of two human fetus/neonate skeletons placed inside a decorated, ceramic urn and compares funerary treatment to Wari fetus/neonate burials and others in the Andes to evaluate the geographic reach, chronological depth, and cultural significance of this funerary...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wen Yin Cheng. Chen Shen.

Through the previous research on the Royal Ontario Museum’s mould fragments, three main types of moulds were identified. In order to extend our knowledge beyond the moulds themselves and associate the moulds to the bronze vessels this paper brings both the moulds and bronze vessels into the same discussion by looking at the correlation between the mould types and the bronze vessel forms they were made to produce. The correlation can further our comprehension into the reason of produce the mould...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ellie Tamura.

Bagan was the political, economic, and cultural centre of Myanmar during the country’s Classical Period (c. 800 – 1400 CE). This immense empire operated primarily on two institutions: the crown and the sangha (Buddhist monkhood). Kutho (merit) was arguably one of the most important Buddhist doctrines in Bagan as it was believed to guarantee better social status upon reincarnation. Kutho, for the elite, was most commonly obtained by contributing large donations to the sangha. These donations took...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kostalena Michelaki. John Robb.

This poster will examine the degree to which the task of pot-making changed from the Early/Middle (ca. 5700-5000 BCE) to the Late Neolithic (ca. 5000-4000 BCE) periods in SW Calabria, Italy. We will present the manufacturing sequences of all Neolithic wares, based on the results of more than a decade of stylistic, mineralogical, and physico-chemical analyses of ceramics from the sites of Umbro Neolithic and Penitenzeria, as well as the results of laboratory and replicative experiments using...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelly Jones. William Locascio.

Analysis of ceramic sherds collected during excavations at the Wedgworth Midden (8PB16175) permits insight into regional interactions during the Late Archaic period. Saint John's Plain, a chalky ware associated with people to the north of the Okeechobee Basin, constitutes a significant proportion of the assemblage and suggests that Late Archaic communities in the Northern Everglades maintained social interactions with people living in the St. Johns River Valley. While preliminary, these patterns...