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

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Thornton. Richard Hansen. Edgar Suyuc-Ley.

The site of El Mirador (Petén, Guatemala) is among the largest Preclassic settlements in the Maya lowlands. The site has attracted attention due to its size and antiquity, but also for its location within a region containing few permanent or perennial water sources. This study summarizes current zooarchaeological evidence from the site to assess past diet, habitat use, environment, and exchange. Comparative analysis demonstrates that the inhabitants of El Mirador conformed to certain widespread...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Theresa Heindel.

Research conducted during the 2015-2017 Actuncan Archaeological Project field seasons revealed several land use strategies utilized during the Late and Terminal Classic periods, including terracing, agricultural plots, and cobble mounds. Excavations conducted in the Northern Neighborhood of Actuncan exposed two terracing methods: 1) terraforming, in which earthen berms created to facilitate water drainage and 2) two small agricultural plot systems filled with a large amount of redeposited...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pete Demarte. Scott Macrae. Gyles Iannone.

The Classic Maya, with their towering jungle temples and sprawling cities have been the focus of archaeological studies since the mid-1800s. Although numerous investigations have fostered considerable insights, important questions remain regarding the circumstances in which these settlements originated, interacted, developed, and were ultimately abandoned. The organization of Maya settlements is best conceptualized as a continuum consisting of three basic, but variable types, including:...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Saul Hedquist. Samantha Fladd. Vincent M. LaMotta. Nancy Odegaard.

This paper honors the anthropological contributions of the Homol’ovi Research Program (HRP) and its directors. We reflect on the conception and implementation of field and curation protocols that enabled years of innovative research into ancient Pueblo lifeways, work that continues today. Though fieldwork in the region has ceased, researchers still benefit from exceptional field recording standards, sound conservation techniques, and an explicitly behavioral project methodology. HRP was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only T. L. Thurston.

Anecdotal evidence for rural gender and age-based divisions of labor are known for Medieval and Post-Medieval Sweden, and a handful of historians have discussed their implications in terms of the ‘slices of time’ they represent. Other more continuous geographic and archaeological data address the status of agricultural populations through increased or diminished affordances, economic opportunities, taxation and laws, as well as climate change and demographic transitions. How were these varying...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Piphal Heng. Miriam Stark. Peter Grave. Lisa Kealhofer. Darith Ea.

The Middle Mekong Region played a crucial role in the formation of the pre-Angkorian and Angkor states. Most Angkorian centers are concentrated within the open plains with favorable access to rice cultivation and interconnected by landroutes. Settlements of the Middle Mekong Region are predominantly located within a narrow strip of fertile land between the rivers and the highlands historically associated with different groups of minorities. This paper combines multiple datasets including site...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steven Ammerman.

Humans’ increasingly close relationship to animals constitutes one of the most important cultural, social, and economic developments of the past ten thousand years of our history, as well as being a key factor in the changes in climate referred to as the Anthropocene. Animals are important resources of food, labor, and secondary products in many societies, as well as symbolically important features of the ritual landscape. As relationships with animals intensify, processes such as domestication...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melanie Cootsona.

This paper explores the role of animals as social actors, namely the way natural animal behaviors influence human religious settings. The paper focuses on the case study of a floor organization of a formally closed thirteenth century Northern Tiwa kiva in the Northern Rio Grande region of New Mexico. The worldview and beliefs of the Northern Tiwa were deeply shaped by the species and biomes with whom they co-habited. Through the synthesis of material data, ethnographic information and behavioral...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Lev-Tov.

Within recent years, feasting and other forms of ritual consumption have become more frequently identified in the archaeozoological record of the ancient Near East. Reasons for more frequent identification of ritual sacrifices and feasts vary, but two driving forces certainly are archaeological context, bones found in or near special architecture, and the cultural milieu formed by the region’s ancient textual record. In contrast, I have a skeptical tale to tell of ritual production and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Neusius.

Excavations at the Johnston site (36IN2), a Middle Monongahela village located in western Pennsylvania, have generated a large, generally well-preserved assemblage of faunal remains. Between excavations in the 1950s and those conducted since 2005 by IUP, a significant portion of this large ring village has been sampled. Thus, this assemblage provides a rare opportunity to document the use of animals by the Monongahela. Initial faunal analysis was undertaken by John Guilday of the Carnegie Museum...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dominic Bush.

The archaeological site of Flores is a small, lacustrine island located in Northern Guatemala. Despite lacking in physical size, the island has a lengthy occupational history, dating from the Preclassic Maya period through the present. Flores, which became a provincial capital during the late Postclassic, was able to resist Spanish rule until 1697 AD, making it the last Maya holdout. Given this distinction, the island has been under much archaeological scrutiny and the subject of many...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joshua Schnell. Sarah Newman. Andrew Scherer.

Excavations within the S-Sector at Piedras Negras in 2016 yielded an assemblage of lithic and bone artifacts consistent with evidence of craft production. The Proyecto Paisaje Piedras Negras – Yaxchilan returned to the S-Sector during the 2017 field season to conduct more extensive excavations in an attempt to understand production and exchange at this Maya polity capital. Between the 2016 and 2017 seasons, over 4,300 fragments of worked and unworked bone, both human and animal, were excavated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Johnson.

Modern kichwa-speaking Runa peoples inhabit much of Ecuador’s Upper Amazon. Ethnographic study focusing on Runa communities of both the Pastaza and Napo Rivers indicate these groups share many of the views, collectively known as Amazonian Perspectivism, that characterize numerous lowland cultural groups. This paper will detail some of the ways in which Runa persons perceive and interact with their environment, focusing on relations with socially salient plants and animals thought to be persons,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristen Bos.

This paper addresses the ongoing phenomenon of settler colonialism that permeates even the best intentioned "decolonizing" efforts. This paper gives the same credence to Indigenous and non-Western laws, stories, and epistemologies; practices what Sara Ahmed (2014) calls "citational rebellion;" and putts substantial weight into the lived experiences of Indigenous peoples in order to argue that when white archaeologists capitalize on Indigenous, Black, or People of Colour’s (BIPOC) things, bodies,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Heckenberger. Wetherbee Dorshow.

The Anthropocene is defined here as the time when human-induced alterations of the environment become a driver of regional and global climate. The Amazon has very deep histories of human alterations of forest systems, but settled occupations that dramatically altered forest structure in regional systems of Late Holocene age, particularly following the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), ca. 900-1300 CE. Global population loss in the Old World, beginning in the 13th century, and the demographic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Leppard.

To what extent are Anthropocene dynamics prefigured or anticipated in microcosm during the later Quaternary, and how do scalar differences in environmental organization (result in anthropic processes working at different rates) complicate any search for a Golden Spike? Drawing on datasets from islands worldwide during the terminal Pleistocene and Holocene, this paper explores how humans drive change in biophysical systems, emphasizing similarities of type yet differences of scale between...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Grant Snitker.

Humans have intentionally set fires for millennia to transform the arrangement and diversity of resources within their landscapes, often altering the relationship between fire and ecosystems at multiple scales. Although scholars regularly identify human-altered fire regimes through paleoecological studies, archaeological research has not yet fully incorporated the spatial, temporal, and cultural dimensions of human-caused fire into discussions of the development of agricultural landscapes. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Stewart. J. Lynn Funkhouser. Avery McNeece. Christopher Lynn. Omega Rakotomalala.

Public outreach and education are essential for the future of archaeology. While many organizations are actively involved in informing the public on the value of archaeological knowledge and the importance of preservation, the majority of in-depth education on archaeology and anthropology as a whole remains at the university level. Anthropology is Elemental is an education and outreach program that teaches four-field anthropological concepts to elementary school students through a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Lemke.

Submerged prehistoric landscapes have unique traits which make them invaluable to archaeologists – increased preservation of organic remains, Pompeii-like snap shots in time, and data that either do not exist on land or are deeply buried. These attributes make the few challenges that remain for conducting archaeology underwater more than worth the effort. Early human occupation in the Great Lakes has been difficult to investigate as acidic soils and dynamic water levels left many archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mario Hernández.

La Sub-región Diquís de la Región Gran Chiriquí posee a la fecha un total de 1.595 registros de sitios arqueológicos documentados en la Base de Datos Orígenes del Museo Nacional de Costa Rica. El presente trabajo expone los resultados logrados al aplicar un análisis geoespacial diseñado para conocer la distribución de dichos depósitos arqueológicos, en un contexto fisiográfico modelado para tal efecto mediante sistemas de información geográfica (SIG), que permite aproximarse a las...

DOCUMENT Citation Only A. Dudley Gardner.

From 2002 to the present we excavated five Apishapa Structures in the Purgatoire Canyon. This presentation will provide a brief synthesis of structural types and food ways of the sites inhabitants. It appears that maize and a variety of wild plants made up a considerable portion of the Apishapa diet. Analysis of the floral remains from these sites indicate the sites inhabitants relied heavily on available edible plants but also consumed exotics such as pecans. This brief synthesis puts forth our...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ridel Morales. Carmen Julia Fajardo. Blanca Fajardo.

Los departamentos de Choluteca y El Paraíso al sur de Honduras cuentan con un escaso registro arqueológico de asentamientos prehispánicos y coloniales. El desconocimiento de su historia deriva constantes saqueos y destrucción arqueológica, alterando el patrimonio cultural y generando un vacío histórico a las comunidades aledañas a estos sitios arqueológicos, desvinculándolas con su pasado. El Proyecto Arqueológico El Paraíso y Choluteca (PAPCH) comienza en el año 2016 como parte de los procesos...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Derek Hamilton. Kerry Sayle. Colin Haselgrove. Gordon Cook.

The middle of the Iron Age in southern central Britain (c. 400–200 cal BC) is a period that is often seen as becoming regionally inward-looking. A primary focus of the mixed agriculturalists is on building and maintaining massive hillforts. There is very little long-distance exchange or trade noted in the archaeological record, and the metalwork at the time takes on insular forms (e.g. involuted brooches) that separate it from the Continental connections observable in both the Early and Late...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Striker.

Iroquoian ceramic analysts typically focus on decorative style, in part because this approach maximizes the amount of information that can be obtained from an assemblage in a short amount of time. Decorative attributes can be rapidly identified and recorded, and a significant literature links patterns in decorative styles to social, temporal, and cultural trends. Characteristics of ceramic fabrics including clays and tempers are rarely examined, but adding these elements to the standard...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Reymundo Chapa. Roger Ciuffo.

The Air National Guard (ANG) Cultural Resources Program oversees historic preservation and tribal consultation for 160+ installations throughout the United States and its Territories. One government official and one CEMML Cooperator manage the program centrally from Joint Base Andrews, MD, but the volume of work has prevented officials from managing resources in a proactive and systematic way. As such, managers are applying the Continuous Process Improvement/Lean Six Sigma methodology to focus...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meredith Luze.

The Anthropology collections at the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) have a long history of treatment with pesticides and contact with other materials that contain potentially hazardous elements. When the NMNH Repatriation Office began to use portable x-ray fluorescence (pXRF) technology, it focused on identifying potentially hazardous elements on archaeology, ethnology, and physical anthropology collections. If identified, the Repatriation Office attempted to determine the source of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Gadsby.

For over a century, the National Park Service (NPS) has worked to preserve natural and cultural resources in more than four hundred park units for future generations. In addition, the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) requires all federal agencies to maintain inventories of their historic properties. For decades, the NPS has relied upon three inventory systems: The List of Classified Structures, the Cultural Landscapes Inventory (CLI), and the Archeological Sites Management Information...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Szymanski.

In analyses of paleoenvironmental records, the specific effects of climate/precipitation patterns and human landscape impacts on ancient ecologies can be difficult to discern. As largely substrate-specific in nature, fungal spores may serve as proxy for a range of phenomena, such as soil erosion, landscape burning, vegetation clearance, moisture availability, and the existence of particular plant types in a given area. Microbotanicals, including pollen, fungal spores, phytoliths, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Everhart.

The Woodland societies of the central Scioto Valley are renowned for various aspects of their ceremonial practices. Among the better known are craft production of ornate works from exotic materials and the erection of vast monumental landscapes. Those construction practices led to monuments with an incredible diversity of form, scale, and organization. This variability is yet difficult to explain, with the existing explanations differing widely and being inter-related with various other social...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yolanda Peláez Castellanos. Nawa Sugiyama. Agustín Ortíz.

Candeleros are ceramic artifacts that are almost exclusively found at Teotihuacan and appear in the archaeological record during the Late Tlamimilolpa, Xolalpan and Metepec phases. Their unconventional shape led scholars to propose different hypotheses regarding their specific function (i.e. "candle holders", incense burners, lighting devices, domestic ritual paraphernalia). This paper studies 368 candeleros (fragments and complete pieces) recovered from the 2015 and 2016 excavations carried out...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yamile Lira-Lopez.

El valle de Maltrata se ubica en un punto intermedio de una importante ruta de comunicación, comercio e intercambio entre la Costa del Golfo y el Altiplano Central. Esto permitió que los asentamientos prehispánicos asentados en el valle contaran con la posibilidad de disponer de algunos tipos de artefactos y materiales que no se encontraban en la región cercana. En cuanto a la obsidiana se refiere, la cercanía con los yacimientos del Pico de Orizaba permiten suponer que durante todo el...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Severin Fowles.

In this paper, I explore Ancestral Tiwa rock modifications and linguistic conventions to identify what might be referred to as an "aquatic imaginary" governing Pueblo engagement with the northern Rio Grande landscape. The movement of water, it is argued, emerged out of a preceding Archaic preoccupation with the movement of animals as the dominant new way of both conceptualizing ecological systems and intervening in those systems through the organization and modification of stone. Evidence from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alan Simmons.

It long has been assumed that most of the world’s islands, especially remote ones, were first visited or colonized by fully modern humans. With few exceptions, these events occurred late, during the Neolithic or later, with an implied assumption that most islands could not support hunters and gatherers. We know that this scenario is no longer viable, with examples from Australia and southeastern Asia, such as Flores and Sulawesi, suggesting considerable antiquity extending prior to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Huebert. Melinda S. Allen.

Contact-period accounts point to considerable variability in Polynesian agronomic production systems. In the Marquesas Islands, a mountainous island group in the eastern Pacific, food production in the proto-historic period was narrowly focused on tree cropping and breadfruit cultivation in particular. Early western visitors remarked on the archipelago’s large and thriving island populations, and their stable and productive arboricultural systems. In this paper, we present the results of a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Seth Mallios.

Joseph W. Ball spent a highly successful and influential career identifying archaeological insights into the Maya through detailed, rigorous, and creative ceramic analyses. In honor of his many contributions, this paper draws on Dr. Ball’s methodological and theoretical approaches by using ceramics as a springboard for deeper anthropological discussions into daily life at Jamestown Island, Virginia during the first half century of English settlement (1607-1657). Distinctions in artifact...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yunfei Zheng. Haibin Gu.

The first domestication of rice in the Yangtze river valley in China is recently informed by genetic, archaeological, palaeoenvironmental, and archaeobotanical data. Archaeological sites where rice remains between 10000 and 4000 BP have been unearthed are concentrated in the middle and the lower Yangtze valley, a distance of over 1000 km apart. This study focuses on the morphological and histological features of spikelet bases of rice between 8300 and 4800 BP found in the Liyang Plain of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mackenzie Cory.

Although archaeological field schools are widely accepted as a prerequisite for employment in the field, a disconnect has developed between universities sponsoring these courses and the instructors who teach them. Field schools are unique experiential learning opportunities, the value of which can be difficult to communicate to university administrators who set course minimum enrollments and summer tuition rates. Instead of just thinking of field schools as a means to teach skills necessary...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert DeMuth. Joshua J. Wells. Kelsey Noack Myers. David Anderson. Eric Kansa.

This paper uses "big data" about archaeological sites from the Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA) to reflexively assess and interpret how archaeology has affected minority communities. DINAA’s data set represents an almost complete record of the current extent of archaeological site definitions, within the project’s area of effect. Therefore, collectively, these data can reveal information about archaeologists and archaeology as a discipline, as well as the past. As public...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rob Rondeau.

New research continues to challenge the "Beringia" explanation of the peopling of the Americas. During the Last Glacial Maximum sea level in the Gulf of Alaska was approximately 100 – 120 meters lower than present. Vast areas of adjacent coastline extending south along the Pacific Northwest Coast may have been deglaciated beginning about 16,000 BP; providing a coastal corridor for people using watercraft to move south along the coast from eastern Beringia. The focus, now, is locating a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arlene Alvarez. Corinne Hofman.

The first Dominican heritage legislation indicates that there were private collecting practices of local archaeological materials already by the end of the 19th Century. Heritage museums formed archaeological collections with donations or purchases from private collectors who often depended on individuals that made a business out of locating sites with the desired pieces. The continued institutionalization of collections without context that gave rise to several museums has contributed to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jose Narvaez.

El Paraíso architectonic complex is located in the lower section of the Chillon River Valley, less than 2 km from the Pacific Ocean, in Lima, the capital city of Peru. It is composed by 14 structures, or huacas, distributed in an area of 47 hectares, in a rural place named Chuquitanta. The site is recognized as one of the earliest expressions of monumental architecture and social complexity in Peru since the works of Frédéric Engel in the 1960’s and Jeffrey Quilter in the 1980’s. Since 2015, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joshua Keene. Tyler Laughlin. Michael Waters.

Hall’s Cave is a well-studied paleontological site that has provided a detailed climatic record for the Texas Hill-country from the late Pleistocene through the Holocene. There have been no discussions, however, of the archaeological record of the cave deposits. Archaeological excavations at Hall’s Cave conducted in 2017 revealed a 3 m thick, well-stratified sequence of sediments derived from the watershed outside the cave. Early deposits ranging from 18,000 to14,000 cal yr B.P. contain the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carlton Gover.

Affiliating prehistoric archaeological sites with contemporary indigenous communities in American archaeology is often met with skepticism and criticism. As a means for overcoming the inherent criticism; I utilize the oral traditions, regarding migration, of the Northern Caddoan speaking tribes as a means to construct a relative chronology for which these populations moved across the landscape in prehistory. Then I compare the relative chronology with the archaeological record. By comparing site...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jorge Blancas. Lisa Overholtzer. Luis Barba. Agustín Ortíz. Eos Lopez.

In this paper we present the preliminary results of our field season this past summer in the Cerro Coyotepetl neighborhood of Tepeticpac, a señorío of Tlaxcallan. Archaeological prospection methods and remote sensing included magnetometry, electrical resistivity and photogrammetry by drone. Though our work is ongoing, and another geophysical survey season is planned, results were confirmed by excavations on one domestic terrace. These excavations revealed the remains of four rooms whose...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Guiry.

Over the past 1000 years, rats have spread out globally to become among the most ubiquitous and prolific pests in the world. While the global success of rats is largely owed to their ability to exploit human societies for food, shelter, and transportation, there has been relatively little research exploring rat behavior in urban contexts, where rat populations have been most successful. In this study, I use stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analyses of archaeological rat (Rattus sp., n=87) bone...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gregory Haverstock.

The Archaeological Resources Protection Act (ARPA) of 1979 was partially intended to address shortcomings in previous federal antiquities law. While the act corrected constitutional deficiencies with the Antiquities Act, federal land management agencies still grapple with a number of practical, cultural, and institutional barriers in carrying out archaeological law enforcement. This paper examines issues facing ARPA enforcement from the perspective of a land management agency. Case studies and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sam Lin.

Archaeological science is defined as the use of scientific techniques, typically derived from the natural sciences, in archaeology. In lithic research, archaeological science studies have investigated topics ranging from identifying raw material sources, assessing artefact function and technology, to modelling socio-cultural and evolutionary changes. However, this method-centred definition of archaeological science has also led to a focus on the "sciency" appeal of techniques over basic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Walker. Jennifer Haney. William Marquardt. Rachael Kangas. Sara Ayers-Rigsby.

There are only a very few Archaic period sites in the Charlotte Harbor/Pine Island Sound region of southwest Florida. One of these, composing a large portion of Calusa Island, is an oyster-shell dominated midden. According to a landowner, since ca. 1973-1974 the site has suffered a horizontal loss of 11 m along parts (if not all) of its 80+meter, eroding archaeological shoreline. Based on a 1944 aerial photograph, it is likely that as much as 28 m has been eroded away. We began a monitoring...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kacey Hadick.

Virtual reality (VR) is an exciting new medium for interactive storytelling and holds great promise as a way to raise awareness of heritage sites and the conservation challenges they face. VR can also be used as a way to provide virtual access to parts of an archaeological site that may be too sensitive for traditional tourism activities. In 2017, CyArk developed three virtual reality experiences of geographically diverse archaeological sites around the world that are being adversely impacted by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nadia Khalaf.

The Niger River Valley in the north of the Republic of Benin, West Africa, has abundant archaeology that until recently has been under researched. During a systematic field survey carried out for my doctoral research as part of the European Research Council-funded Crossroads of Empires project led by Prof Anne Haour, over 300 new archaeological sites were discovered and 50,000 material culture objects recorded. This paper will discuss the methodology used to systematically survey the landscape...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Whisenhunt. Kristin Corl. John Whisenhunt. Robert Hard. John Roney.

Southeastern Arizona’s upper Gila River Valley is an understudied area once heavily occupied by prehistoric people from the Early Agriculture to Salado periods. Over time, many important archaeological sites in the Duncan-York Valley, particularly those of large, aggregated communities, were extensively looted or destroyed due to agricultural and construction leveling. To document and, ideally, preserve the remains of these vulnerable sites, we have emphasized establishing relationships of trust...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carina Bramstång Plura. Petra Nordin.

The fortified city of Gothenburg was established around 1620, constructed when the Swedish trade intensified its involvement in the world sea commerce. Parts of the fortification, a Garrison Cemetery and two old country estates have been archaeologically excavated as a result of large-scale development of infrastructure in the city. The excavation results give new perspectives on the garrison and its cemetery. Osteological analysis contributes to the interpretation of everyday life among...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Rogoff.

There is extensive evidence that people are self-serving in the interpretation of data and are very likely to reach their desired conclusions. This paper describes the use of meta-analyses for combating researcher bias in archaeological and the results of my research at El Coyote, a Classic Period center in western Honduras.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jakob Sedig.

In this paper, I provide insight on the field of ancient DNA (aDNA) analysis from my unique perspective as an archaeologist employed in a leading aDNA laboratory. Ancient DNA research has advanced so much that genomic data from thousands of individuals across the globe are now available for study. These data are allowing geneticists and archaeologists to conduct studies that provide new insights into migration, demographic transitions, and relatedness of ancient individuals. They also afford an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Carpenter. Guadalupe Sanchez Miranda.

There is little doubt that there exists cultural continuity linking the Río Sonora tradition and the Ópata (a term referring to an amalgamation of several groups, generally including Eudeve, Teguima and Jova-cf. Yetman 2010; Spicer 1962). The socio-political organization of the late prehispanic Rio Sonora archaeological tradition remains controversial though little studied. Carroll Riley (1982, 1987, 1999, 2005; see also Doolittle 1984, 1988, 2008) proposed that they constitute "statelets",...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maren Hopkins.

The O’odham and other tribes of southern Arizona and northern Sonora have occupied the Western Papaguería since time immemorial. This dry and desolate corner of the Sonoran Desert is home to rich histories and living traditions that have left their subtle marks on the land, and that archaeologists have continuously tried to identify, describe, and interpret. For too long, ethnographic and ethnohistoric records from this region have run in parallel to the archaeology; however several recent...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Salem. Effie F. Athanassopoulos.

Since its rediscovery in 1748, Pompeii has remained a destination for travelers and tourists from around the globe. Originally, a tourist destination during the Grand Tour, mainly in the 17th-18th centuries, Pompeii attracted the educated elite. In the course of the 19th century, the site was transformed into an open-air museum and became accessible to a broader group of visitors seeking an authentic experience. This presentation offers a glimpse at a tourist’s experience in the early 1900s...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carrie Hritz. Marcy Rockman. Robert Winthrop. Torben Rick.

Within archaeology, it is widely assumed recognized that the field has much to offer present and future efforts to address climate change. From an archaeological perspective, this may be directly through data, improved models of human adaptation, building or preserving modern connections to place, to name a few. However, to date these have not been well-incorporated into federal efforts to address climate change, largely as a result of a lack of systematic engagement. To address this gap for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lauren Herckis.

The application of archaeological methods to modern contexts is an emergent trend in cultural anthropology. This paper presents a case study of chaîne opératoire methodologies in the analysis of modern technologies. New materialist ontologies and digital archaeologies offer powerful tools for understand the past. Behavioral archaeologists apply method and theory to relationships between people and things in all times. Dawdy, McGuire and others address the current archaeological turn in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Corey Bowen.

With over 640,000 subscribers and 1.6 million unique monthly views, AskHistorians is the Internet’s largest public history education forum. AskHistorians’ simple Q&A format connects people with questions about the past to those with expert-level knowledge in the topic at hand, be it armored snails or erotic Moche pottery. Users of the popular, if controversial, social media site reddit post questions to the AskHistorians forum, and receive responses from a diverse panel of volunteers selected...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Makensie Jones. Isabel Figueroa. Katherine Knothe. Maria Bruno.

Since 2013, the Dickinson College Archaeology program has partnered with the Cumberland County Historical Society, the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, and PennDOT to conduct research in the Camp Michaux area of Michaux State Forest (Cumberland County, Pennsylvania). This partnership functions through the Archaeological Methods course offered by the college each spring, which teaches students how to plan and execute their own small research projects involving remote sensing,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Pfau. Scott Gajewski. Matt Nelson. Cathy Jo Beecher. Doug MacDonald.

In the winter of 2015-2016 and the spring of 2017, the University of Montana-Center for Integrated Research on the Environment and GAI Consultants (UM-GAI) conducted an archaeological survey and evaluation project at the New Jersey Air National Guard’s Warren Grove Gunnery Range. The project was funded by the Air National Guard through a cooperative agreement with the United States Army Corps of Engineers (Omaha District) and the UM. UM-GAI completed archaeological survey of ca. 9,911 acres of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rosemary Joyce.

Archaeology in the US is undergoing a series of transformations, emphasizing community engaged scholarship, new research questions of contemporary relevance dealing with such things as resilience, social memory, and production of historical identity, and a shift towards non-invasive methods and intensive analyses of smaller samples from more limited excavations. Yet the normative vision of archaeological research still is original excavation of a site selected purposively to answer a question,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Wright.

The 2016 decision by the Working Group on the Anthropocene of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) to designate an Epoch based on a Global boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP) fixed at AD1950 is significant for managing global ecological systems moving forward. There is no serious scientific debate on whether humans have impacted the global ecology, but regardless of the ICS decision to anchor the so-called "Golden Spike" to the advent of the nuclear age, humans are known...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nina Schreiner.

Woodville Plantation, also known as the Neville House, is an important archaeological resource just outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The mansion was constructed c. 1780 by the family of Virginian General John Neville—of the Seven Years War, Revolutionary War, Whiskey Rebellion, and early state and local governments—and was occupied by their descendants until 1973. This unique record of ownership resulted in a relatively undisturbed site delivered into the hands of a private preservation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carrie Heitman. Paul Reed.

The goal of this paper is to bring together disparate data sources on various Chaco-era sites both within Chaco Canyon, NM and outside (Salmon Pueblo) to examine the use of ash in intramural contexts. In light of recent work on the dimensions of animation, precedence, ancestors and heirlooms evident in Chacoan architecture, what patterns emerge regarding the deliberate use and deposition of ash? And how might we use Puebloan ethnographic accounts of ash to help inform our interpretations? ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Schon.

Warren Ballpark is considered the oldest continuously operating baseball field in the United States. The list of athletes who played at the park throughout its history includes Connie Mack (Major League Baseball’s winningest manager), Jim Thorpe (arguably the greatest athlete of the twentieth century), and Earl Wilson (the first African-American pitcher for the Boston Red Sox). Despite this history of competition, very little is known about the spectators who visited Warren Ballpark. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Natalia Moragas. Sandra Montón-Subías. James Bayman.

This paper presents a new archaeological project that we are co-directing in Umatac, Guam. Combining historical written sources and archaeological information, we seek to contribute a better understanding of the historical-archaeological legacy connected to colonial processes related to the Hispanic Monarchy in the western Pacific, and their role in resulting ethnogenesis.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexander Brown.

Much of the literature on performance in cultural and political spheres in archaeology over the last 4 decades has focused on social memory. This paper shifts that discussion from the arena of public commemoration and cultural rites to the de facto performances of the domestic sphere. Private, interpersonal interactions are important in the transmission and creation of social memory as well- they place an individual’s social world in the context of shared social memory, and vice versa. Gossip is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ronald Castanzo. Elgin Klugh.

Laurel Cemetery was created in 1852 in Baltimore, Maryland, as a nondenominational burial place for African Americans in the city. By the 1930s, after perhaps several thousand people were interred at the site, the cemetery company had become insolvent, and the grounds were no longer being maintained. After the property was sold in the 1950s, the cemetery was demolished in preparation for what would become a shopping center. Approximately 300-400 burials were moved, but it was not known how many,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julia Haines.

This paper provides a comparative case study for archaeological studies of slavery and indenture. I investigate the 19th century landscape and material culture of indentured laborers on the Bras d'Eau sugar estate in northeastern Mauritius, Indian Ocean. After emancipation, indentured laborers lived and worked within the same physical plantation landscapes as the enslaved individuals who came before them. However, Asian indentured laborers in Mauritius were immigrants and migrants: one-third...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mudit Trivedi.

This paper presents the results of an extended project directed at an archaeological investigation of religious conversion to Islam in South Asia. The project combined extensive regional survey, excavations and architectural documentation focused upon the site and valley of Indor, located in the region of Mewat on the borders of Rajasthan, North India. The medieval residents of Mewat were stereotyped in contemporary imperial chronicles as primitive rebels, living in a forested hilly backwater,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katrina Bettcher. Lidio Valdez.

THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE ACARI VALLEY AND THE LEGACY OF FRANCIS ALLEN "FRITZ" RIDDELL Katrina J. Bettcher & Lidio M. Valdez In 1954, newlywed archaeologists Francis Allen "Fritz" Riddell and Dorothy Menzel arrived in the Acari Valley on the south coast of Peru with the purpose of investigating the site of Tambo Viejo as part of the Inca Royal Highway Project directed by Victor von Hagen. Various sites in the region were recorded and investigated. After retirement in the early 1980s, Fritz was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mario Borrero.

The region of Southern Belize is part of the Maya lowlands, an area that is geographically circumscribed, and located in-between several larger regional centers such as Tikal to the west, Caracol to the north, and the sites of Copán and Quiriguá to the southeast. The general history of archaeological investigations for this area are presented, along with site-specific studies from the Southern Belize Region. The current archaeological data of four major ancient polities of this region are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam Benfer.

Sometime before AD 1, a dynamic interaction and exchange network developed among the villages and hamlets of Greater Nicoya. The range and frequency of trade within this region is demonstrated by geochemically sourced ceramic and stone artifacts. The travel routes along which these artifacts were traded remain poorly understood. Geographic information systems (GIS) offer a means to predictively model the optimal terrestrial and aquatic travel routes that interconnected the settlements of Greater...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samantha Upton. Jennifer Green. Barbara Heath.

Coan Hall is the site of the first English settlement on the Northern Neck of Virginia, established by John Mottrom, an English merchant-planter, around 1640. Mottrom resided there with his family, servants, and slaves until his death in 1655. His descendants occupied the house until the early 18th century. It was situated on the banks of the Coan River, a brackish tributary of the Potomac River that empties into the Chesapeake Bay. Representative samples of shellfish, predominantly those of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jason Yaeger. M. Kathryn Brown.

One hallmark of Joseph Ball’s research has been integration of archaeological data and ethnohistorical and historical data, put to the service of addressing larger anthropological questions. In this paper, we present new data to examine one research question studied by Joseph Ball and Jennifer Taschek: Classic Maya political dynamics in the Mopan Valley of western Belize. This valley was home to five large centers, spaced 1 to 5 km apart: Las Ruinas de Arenal, Early Xunantunich, Classic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Torben Rick.

While debate continues about when the Anthropocene began, many researchers have shifted focus away from questions about the onset of the Anthropocene to questions of why, how, and what next? Museums are poised to play an important role in societal and scientific conversations about the pressing issues of the Anthropocene and how best to move forward in the age of humans. Building on a variety of ongoing efforts, I discuss the role of museum based archaeological research, collections, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jorge De Juan Ares. Yasmina Cáceres Gutierrez.

The geographical location of Cape Verde islands made them one of most important places in early Portuguese exploration of African coast. The first European settlers were favoured by the Portuguese monarchy in the relations with African coast. Since 1472, they were forced to carry out exchange with local goods. This encouraged the development of cotton and sugarcane crops with slaves from the "Guinea Rivers", as was common in other Atlantic islands and the American colonies. The excavations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ana Soler-Arechalde. Cecilia Caballero-Miranda. Ma Carmen Osorio. Itzayana Bernal.

Archaeomagnetism is a dating technique whose application has been rising. This technique originally required burned materials, but in certain Mexican archaeological sites, volcanic products with magnetic minerals were added to the stucco mix, enhancing the geomagnetic field record and allowing us to determine it in non-burned samples. Thanks to this the number of dating events increased, improving the detail of the chronologies; a clear example of this happened in Teopancazco's neighborhood. A...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jordan Krummel. James Watson.

The La Playa archaeological site in the Sonoran Desert represents one of the earliest agricultural settlements in northwest Mexico. Over 310 mortuary features have been uncovered during salvage excavations since the site was discovered in 1930, revealing a wide variability in mortuary practices that may reflect specific treatments for pathological or transgressive individuals after death. This paper describes analyses of burials uncovered during the 2017 field season utilizing the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara Voorhies. Douglas J. Kennett.

Insights concerning human lifeways during the Archaic Period on the South Pacific coast come principally from archaeological investigations in Chiapas and Guerrero. These data are supplemented by coring programs that permit independent reconstructions of human-plant interactions. We present an overview of what we know and what compelling questions remain.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aaron Deter-Wolf. Tanya Peres.

The Fernvale archaeological site in Williamson County, Tennessee, is a multi-component site that includes a significant Late Archaic cemetery and occupation dated ca. 1600 BC. Although the site was excavated in 1985, it was not fully analyzed or published for nearly three decades. Formal analysis of zooarchaeological materials from Fernvale took place from 2007-2012 as part of an overall effort to reassess the site assemblage. In this paper we describe findings generated by combining traditional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Rangel. Juan Julio Morales Contreras. José Luis Punzo Díaz.

The archeological site of Tingambato, located in the municipality of the same name, is situated between the towns of Pátzcuaro and Uruapan, in the Mexican State of Michoacan. It is located at the south of the Tarascan plateau, at the boundary between the "tierra caliente" and the cold coniferous mountain land. In order to address the issue of occupational temporality of the site, we carried out absolute archeomagnetic dating of seven ceramic potsherds found at the site, taking advantage of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Antonieta Rivera.

There exists a vast literature examining every aspect of Aztec culture. Despite this, few studies focus specifically on Aztec architecture and its implications for understanding broader aspects of Aztec cosmology. This paper contributes to our knowledge of Aztec society through an exploration of architectural and urban design principles that guided the building of their cities and ceremonial precincts. By examining ethnohistoric and archaeological sources, and drawing on evidence from several...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carolyn Rock.

In 2015, Brockington and Associates conducted Phase III Data Recovery at a middle-nineteenth century field slave settlement within the Colonel’s Island Plantation in Glynn County, Georgia. Excavations at five slave dwelling footprints showed that all exhibited nearly identical dimensions and construction techniques. Dwellings appeared to be double-pen wood frame with central chimneys and wooden floors. Rather than set off the ground by wood or brick supports, each dwelling was marked by a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Halona Young-Wolfe.

Defining spatial organization was a key research question for the excavations at the Patipampa sector of the Middle Horizon (AD 500 – 1000) site of Huari in the Ayacucho valley of Peru. In the 2017 excavations we used methods designed to expose the upper portions of walls, in order to define architectural spaces and clarify organization of the sector. Some architectural spaces were excavated more completely, fully exposing walls and architectural features. Our excavations revealed distinct...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tatiana Zelenetskaya Young.

Political leaders among the ancient Maya were actors performing for an audience with the intent to receive the people’s support to govern. These actors often used specific architecture as stages for their performances; therefore, this architecture serves as a source of information on various aspects of political organization. Architecture embodies political symbolism and has the potential to communicate type of political institution. This paper examines the distribution of architecture that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jill Mattes.

In 2017, the postclassic settlement of Guadalupe on the north-east coast of Honduras revealed remnants of wattle and daub (bajareque) constructions. This was an important finding as information on precolonial architecture in north-east Honduras has been scant, due not only to the low number of archeological investigations in the area, but to the use of highly perishable materials in these constructions. Despite this, recent ethnographic reports have provided indispensable information about...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rubén Morales Forte. Maxime Lamoureux St-Hilaire.

The regal palace of La Corona flanks Plaza A to the west and is the largest construction at the site: a complex of structures sitting atop a sustaining platform extending over ca. 80 x 55m, and 7m in height. This paper describes the architecture of the two northern groups of the regal palace during their two last phases of construction, spanning roughly 750-850 A.D. While the Northeast Group comprised elaborately decorated corbel-vaulted buildings, the Northwest Group featured a mix of sturdy...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Whitridge.

Gender and landscape have each proved to be such powerful archaeological tropes that thinking them together seems sure to yield interesting results. In the precontact Inuit world, gender and related dimensions of embodiment were key axes of spatial practice and place-based identification. Women’s and men’s activities were differently distributed across the landscape – in general, women occupying and managing domestic and near-community spaces, and men employing watercraft and dogs to operate...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jon Clindaniel.

Inka khipus--the knot and cord recording devices of the Andes--have been said to have recorded everything from accounting, to histories and songs. Leland Locke demonstrated in the 1920s that Inka khipu knots often have standard numerical values. However, non-numerical Inka khipu signs remain elusive and undeciphered. Recent work by Gary Urton, however, has identified Inka khipus and individual khipu cords with knots that do not obey the standard numerical rules Locke identified. May Inka khipu...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Milton. Kurt Rademaker. Peter Leach.

Rapidly evolving modern technology has resulted in powerful tools for preserving and visualizing archaeological materials. Extensively recording a site with digital technologies enables new explorations of site discovery and recovery processes while concurrently providing a permanent, detailed record of the material. Here, Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene maritime sites in coastal Peru are reconstructed at various scales. Drone photography and GIS are utilized to collect high-resolution...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claudia Martínez Cadena.

El estudio enfocado en la arqueología de la infancia nace con la necesidad de conocer el papel desempeñado por los infantes en la sociedad. Es a partir de este enfoque que se han ido perfeccionando los diferentes métodos y técnicas para investigar la infancia en el pasado. Los niños pertenecen a uno de los sectores de población más vulnerable social y biológicamente, es por ello que en los trabajos arqueológicos se comienzan a considerar como objeto de estudio, sobre todo cuando se busca conocer...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adrian Badilla.

El Delta del Diquís en el sureste de Costa Rica se ha postulado como un centro diferenciado en la producción de bienes (cerámica, oro, esculturas de piedra) durante el Periodo Chiriquí (800 – 1550 d.C.) como parte de una sociedad jerárquica. La arquitectura y la configuración interna que presentan los sitios reflejan manifestaciones particulares donde destaca la construcción de montículos de tierra compactada con mampostería de cantos rodados y ornamentación de rocas calizas. Las estructuras...

DOCUMENT Citation Only María Andrea Celis Ng Teajan.

Desde el descubrimiento de una ofrenda masiva de objetos rituales hallada fortuitamente en un arroyo, el sitio Arqueológico de Arroyo Pesquero enclavado en el área nuclear olmeca ha generado una serie de discusiones acerca de la autenticidad de piezas dispersas en museos y colecciones privadas. Las piezas más representativas son máscaras y hachas de piedra verde con una iconografía propia de la cultura olmeca. Sin embargo, una parte del material del sitio se ha subestimado. Por Medellín Zenil...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Melissa Frederick. Grace Gronniger.

The St. Louis Veterans Curation Program has close to 50 investigations currently being processed in our lab. One of these investigations is from the Smithville Lake Project area in the Kansas City District. This investigation alone contains materials from 27 different sites including the Yeo Site (23CL199) and dates from the late 6th to 7th century A.D. The site was excavated by Kansas State University archaeologists ca. July 1976 and this past year, veteran technicians began processing the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wade Tidwell.

The Actuncan Archaeological Project has conducted ten field seasons of research at this ancient lowland Maya site in Belize, Central America and inventoried all artifact classes including ceramics, lithics, marine shell, jade, daub, etc. from excavation contexts. One of my research goals was to consolidate this information into a relational Access database so that project members could more easily analyze artifacts across contexts and time periods. The database allowed me to construct...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mia Carey.

Have you recovered thousands of artifacts, but none from the time period of interest? Have you spent weeks or months in the field, with absolutely nothing to address your research questions so you keep digging? This is the phenomenon of negative data. While this can be a scary thing, it is okay. Archaeologists suffering from artifact addiction have developed an unhealthy obsession with the recovery, analysis, and interpretation of material culture. This addiction can result in delayed reports,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kenneth Sassaman. Asa R. Randall. Neill J. Wallis.

Archaeological contexts of the American Southeast are rife with ash deposits that go beyond the residues of mundane burning activities. Burials and other pits at Stallings Island have layers of wood ash sandwiched between charcoal and shell; some rockshelters of the Cumberland Plateau contain successive layers of ash, each capped with earth; freshwater shell was mixed with ash to fill a massive pit on Silver Glen Run; and in north-central Florida, a dried sink filled with peat was burned to...