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

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristin De Lucia. Enrique Rodríguez-Alegría.

Xaltocan has a thriving community and its people have a strong connection to their long history, although this was not always the case. Elizabeth Brumfiel pioneered community archaeology at Xaltocan almost 30 years ago and initiated a long process of collaborative archaeology that continues until this day. As a consequence of the close interaction between archaeologists and the community, the past has become a vehicle for the construction of local and national identity in Xaltocan. We will...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gregory Katz.

The historic Anacostia River valley was a focal point for settlement by local Native American populations as well as European Colonial and post-Colonial populations. However, the valley floor had low-topographic relief, large marshes, and soils prone to erosion, leading to many grand efforts of dredging and land reclamation. Flooding led to further raising of the landscape in the early 20th century, and to the deeper burial of archaeological sites. Fortunately, the Anacostia River valley was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ariel Peasley. Georgia Fox.

Museums and their exhibitions are representations of archaeological research. Archaeological excavations, associated objects, and subsequent interpretations frequently end up in museums and are often the only access the general public has to this knowledge. How objects are acquired, cared for, and presented ultimately affect what people learn about them in a museum setting. It is crucial for museums and museum professionals to maintain standard practices and care for these objects to the best of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maurizio Forte.

Duke University started in 2014 a multidisciplinary archaeological research project involving the use of advanced digital technologies and focused on the Etruscan and Roman site of Vulci (Italy). Vulci, (10th–3rd c. BCE), in the Province of Viterbo, Italy, was one of the largest and most important cities of ancient Etruria and one of the biggest cities in the 1st millennium BCE in the Italian peninsula. The project integrates the use of multispectral cameras by drones/UAV, georadar, digital...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Francis McManamon. Leigh Anne Ellison.

Archaeological research both produces and uses substantial amounts of data in digital formats. Researchers undertaking comparative studies need to be able to find existing data easily, efficiently, and in formats that they will be able to access and utilize. Researchers creating or recording data need a repository where they can place the data they generate so that it will be discoverable, accessible, and preserved for long-term use. The Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR) is a broadly...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Case. William Taylor. Julia Clark.

This study presents results from data visualizations of archaeological sites in northern and western Mongolia. Unlike traditional site documentation techniques applied throughout the discipline, digitalization of data while in the field presents distinct advantages for the study and preservation of both cultural heritage and archaeological data collections. These methods include the production of digital 3D maps, from both aerial and hand-held photogrammetry, data collection with tablets using...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Howland. Thomas E. Levy.

Image-based Modeling (IBM) is an increasingly-applied technique for field archaeologists for generation of high-resolution spatial data. IBM is effectively and easily applied for generation of Orthophotographs and Digital Surface Models (DSMs). Yet raw DSMs are not suitable for analysis or mapping purposes in vegetated environments due to the fact that they contain measurements of trees, bushes, and even architecture, ancient and modern. Archaeologists often instead require Digital Terrain...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Harrison.

The recent ‘digital turn’ in archaeology has spurred methodological advances and new research directions, with wide ranging impacts at multiple scales. The proliferation of imaging, remote sensing, laser scanning and photogrammetry applications has, at times, outpaced considerations about data archiving, digital epistemologies, and accessibility. This can lead to circumstances in which the creation of digital datasets is privileged over public dissemination or scholarly output – a situation that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrea Kruse.

Archaeology is changing from the data collection and specialized publishing to gaining deeper knowledge from past collections and sharing them to the wider public. Digital archives are now easily accessible with open source tools and the internet, which allows not only for collaboration with other researchers outside their agencies but engages a larger public with cultural heritage. This poster describes a digital archaeology project that uses historical photographs to engage and inform the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marta Diaz-Guardamino.

Formal approaches to rock art traditionally focused on meaning and representation. Rock art images and panels were treated as static representations of symbolic frameworks while their materiality and active role in cultural production were overlooked. Rock art is the product of the dynamic interplay between people, tools and the rock surface. The properties of the rock panel have the capacity to shape rock art production as much as the skill and knowledge held by the engraver/painter and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Roldan. Marisol Cortes-Rincon. Abby Barrios.

Digital tools, such as photogrammetry and virtual environments have been around for decades. However, it was not until the past decade that the academic community introduced such tools into their work and have taken such discipline seriously. For this reason, the practice, management, teaching and potential of digital archaeology has remained a lagging field. As a response, this paper will provide a guide for traditional archaeologists to assist in the transition to the digital medium. An...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Douglas Gann.

Under the guidance of E. Charles Adams and Richard C. Lange, the Homol’ovi Research Program (HRP) was one of the first archaeological research programs in the southwest culture area to incorporate three-dimensional computer aided drafting (3D CAD) into their archaeological practice. By the adoption of a 3D modeling strategy, the HRP was able to foster concurrent developments in new media technologies to better share archaeological research with the general public. Through the use of 3D modeling...

DOCUMENT Citation Only German Loffler.

In this paper, I present a generalized morphological typology for all Central Coast Peruvian ceramic vessels. Today, as in the past, similarly shaped (or in some cases identically shaped) vessel forms have been given different names by different authors, obfuscating another’s researcher’s ability to cross reference ceramic forms rapidly. As publishable material becomes increasingly digitalized and online accessible, it is not hard to imagine a "patch" program that identifies differently named...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emanuel Moss. Christopher H. Roosevelt.

Digital methods in archaeology have led to new ways of recording, analyzing, and presenting archaeological sites and materials, but these new methods are adopted within the context of previously existing practices of archaeological work. Some digital recording methods in excavation build upon and sometimes displace long-standing analog methods with proven results. Digital representations of cultural materials present novel interpretive affordances compared to analog representations that, while...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Fish. Suzanne Fish.

We examine multi-ethnicity as a persistent and integral dimension within an overarching concept of Hohokam as a holistic archaeological tradition centered on O’odham peoples in central and southern Arizona. Internal and external multi-ethnic relationships of many sorts abound in the ethnography, oral history, and ethnohistory of descendant O’odham peoples in former Hohokam territory. Post-contact O’odham sources document the expansive geographic range and the multi-faceted nature of such...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Ochoa Castillo.

Dos de los sitios más relevantes en el Centro de México durante el Formativo Inferior y Medio fueron Tlatilco y Tlapacoya, los que presentan una gran riqueza cultural. Sin embargo, la relación entre ellos y la función que tuvieron en su época son grandes interrogantes que aún persisten; esta revaloración será abordada a través de la revisión y comparación de sus materiales arqueológicos (cerámica y figurillas), incluyendo los de otros sitios ubicados tanto dentro, como fuera de la Cuenca de...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lourdes Budar.

El corredor costero al este de Los Tuxtlas, delimitado por los Volcanes de Santa Marta y San Martín Pajapan, el mar del Golfo de México y las Lagunas de Sontecomapan y del Ostión, es una zona que se caracterizó por la multiculturalidad y la variedad de patrones debido a la presencia de un sistema portuario que estuvo activo desde el periodo Formativo medio hasta el Clásico tardío (1200 aC-1000 dC). Así mismo, la presencia de estos elementos naturales que lo delimitan fue y sigue siendo el...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arturo Pascual Soto.

Los gobernantes de El Tajin, aquellos pertenecientes al linaje de 13 Conejo, convirtieron al Conjunto Arquitectónico de el Edificio de las Columnas en la sede del poder político y religioso de la ciudad. Su autoridad se dejó sentir en buena parte de la llanura costera y en las montañas de Puebla y Veracruz. Tláloc se había convertido en númen de la clase política local y el culto al gobernante giraba en torno a esta deidad inmemorial. La ponencia explora el papel que tuvieron las divinidades...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan White.

Although the archaeology of marginalized groups has been increasingly discussed in recent scholarship, people with disabilities remain largely unstudied. Recent works on this topic have paved the way for a dedicated examination of people with disabilities in the archaeological record. This paper reviews published material to critically examine physical evidence for disability and accommodation in New Kingdom Egypt and Classical Greece, both areas and periods with rich material culture, extensive...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Stubbs.

While many may immediately associate Stephen Williams with his work and interest in the prehistory of the Lower Mississippi Valley, the historic period also caught his attention. His interests ranged from historic aboriginal groups of North America to a variety of topics and periods within historical archaeology. Williams had a notable enthusiasm and concern for the archaeology of the immediate Cambridge area and was often a first point of contact when it came to local discoveries. He took...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Hammerstedt. Amanda Regnier. Marc Levine.

Large-scale geophysical survey was conducted at Monte Albán’s Main Plaza during the summer of 2017. The results suggest the presence of a substantial, but previously unknown, building with associated features located in the west-central portion of the plaza near Building H. In this paper, we describe our findings and present our preliminary interpretation of the geophysical data.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jay Franklin. Frédéric Surmely. Sandrine Costamagno. Maureen Hays. Lauren Woelkers.

We present the discovery of a new Middle Magdalenian site at Enval, a rock shelter site in the Massif Central of France. Radiocarbon dates indicate a tight chronology at 17,000 years ago. The site is significant for several reasons. Faunal elements indicate the site is largely intact and not a palimpsest. Faunal studies also indicate the site was occupied during the winter. This is important because it demonstrates that late Pleistocene humans occupied the Massif Central during harsh conditions....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lucia Elgerud. Hugh Tuller. Wilfred Komakech.

A multi-subfield anthropological research team from the University of Tennessee Knoxville has been conducting fieldwork in Acholiland since 2014 in order to analyze how improper burials are affecting the cultural and geospatial reality of post-war Northern Uganda. The project has primarily involved ethnographic research; however, archaeological surveying was introduced in 2016 for the purpose of locating and documenting wartime burials. The concerned burials are related to the 1987 to 2006 war...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joseph Orozco.

This paper critically reassesses the use of subterranean features among prehistoric Native Americans of North America. A survey of the archaeological and ethnographic literature suggests that pre-historic Native Americans used subterranean features in a ritual context, although the ritual component is rarely acknowledged directly. The significance of the features becomes apparent when the context, mainly construction and artifact deposition, is considered. Many of these subterranean features...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Allison Casaly.

Archaeologists often characterize the Bronze Age by a pronounced expansion in long-distance interaction, which resulted in contact, whether direct or indirect, between disparate geographical areas. The centrality of this notion to the definition of the Bronze Age has resulted in numerous studies addressing such large-scale exchange of material culture and/or ideology. When incorporated into such studies, Britain and Ireland are often lumped together under the moniker of "the British Isles." This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jordi Rivera Prince. Gabriel Prieto. Celeste Gagnon.

While the Inca, Moche, and Chimu cultures boast grand sites along the north coast of Perú, much is to be learned about the earlier Gallinazo (50 BC/100 AD–500 AD) Salinar (200 BC–200 AD), and Cupisnique (ca. 1500–300 BC) cultures from small, coastal settlements. The 2017 field season of the Programa Arqueologico Huanchaco investigated these earlier Peruvian cultures during a five week excavation near the Iglesia de Huanchaco, approximately 15 km northeast of the Huacas de Moche. Initial ceramic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Keith Dobney. Ardern Hulme-Beaman. Carly Ameen. Allowen Evin. Thomas Cucchi.

The modern domestic dog is behaviourally and morphologically far removed from its ancient counterpart. Increasingly, research has demonstrated that using modern comparative collections for identifying domestic animals in archaeological contexts is problematic. This is likely the result of the intensive breeding that modern animals have undergone in at least the last two centuries. It is unclear how far back the current modern morphology of dogs goes, or how different ancient dogs were from their...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jason Toohey.

The organizational concept of ayllu has been central to many discussions of community generation and organization in the Andes, but the blanket application of ayllu is also problematic. In the Cajamarca region of northern Peru, the beginning of the Late Intermediate Period (A.D. 1000 – A.D. 1450) saw a demographic shift, with many settlements forming or relocating to higher elevation defensible and occasionally fortified positions indicating possible increases in competition and conflict...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Francisco Garrido. Diego Salazar.

Despite the importance of mineral and metal production for the Inca's political economy in the Collasuyu, mining infrastructure during this period encompasses a range across scale, spatial structure and labor organization. This diversity reflects both the variability of Inca state interventions and independent enterprises working outside of the imperial political economy. Generally, state mining is evidenced by Inca-style architecture, including formal public spaces or plazas; social-aggregation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charlotte Goudge.

Studies of industrial production have taken a prominent position within social theory. Social implications of factories and productive landscapes in the Caribbean have often been obscured by the socio-cultural palimpsest of plantation environments. Material culture studies of Caribbean factories, both structures and machinery, can be vital descriptors regarding enslaved and emancipated labour narratives. The connection between industrialisation, machinery, slavery, and manumission underlies...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jesse Ballenger.

In 2002 Vance won the role of Executive Director for the Argonaut Archaeological Research Fund (AARF) at the University of Arizona. The program provided immediate funding for a number of graduate students working on the archaeology and Quaternary geology of the Desert Southwest. A renewed investigation of the upper San Pedro Basin was among those projects. Vance endured every possible graduate student misstep, some of which are reviewed here, to assemble new information about long-term and hotly...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Assaad Seif.

The Salalah Doctrine regarding the management of archaeological world heritage sites seeks to recognize the differences between archaeological sites, standing monuments and landscapes. Consequently, new and adapted management approaches to the Archaeological sites that present distinct management challenges are needed. The ICAHM doctrine proposed strategies for sustainable conservation and preservation still need to be addressed critically and contextually to ascertain their applicability. ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Radoslaw Palonka.

Thirteenth century A.D. in the central Mesa Verde region was a time of socio-cultural transformations, climatic changes, and increasing conflicts and violence that took place shortly before the final depopulation of the region. Since 2011 the Sand Canyon-Castle Rock Community Archaeological Project is being conducted and it focuses on the analysis and reconstruction of the settlement and social structure in a community of forty Ancient Pueblo sites dated to the thirteenth century. The project...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Striker. Bridget Striker. Eric Jackson.

Activities related to the Underground Railroad were both ephemeral and illicit. As a result, the little direct evidence that might have existed was often destroyed or hidden. How then, can the association of a property with the Underground Railroad be established, and what does it mean for a property to have integrity? Using case studies from Boone County, Kentucky, we demonstrate how the accumulation of indirect evidence can document this association and what integrity might mean for different...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Parish. Brad Koldehoff.

Presently, no detailed distribution map of the full scope of prehistoric procurement activities in the Crescent Hills area exists. The Crescent Hills area near St. Louis, Missouri is synonymous with high-quality Burlington chert. This paper presents data gathered from a preliminary survey of procurement activity preserved in the Tyson Research Center. The spatial data within a Geographic Information System allows researchers to study the relationship between geologic context, occurrence, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Odlanyer Hernandez-de-Lara. Johanset Orihuela. Boris Rodriguez. Ricardo Viera.

The Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898 constituted not only the events leading to the start of the first modern war but also marked the beginning of the colonialist expansion of the United States throughout the world. The explosion of the USS Maine in Havana’s harbor has often been interpreted as the excuse used by the US to get involved in the Cuban War of Independence; a war that Cubans and Spaniards had been fighting since 1895, but rooted since 1868. Previous research has traditionally...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Leonard. Kendra Rodgers McGraw. Beniamino Volta.

While facility-wide cultural resource management at large DoD installations has increasingly been managed with GIS, many organizations have legacy information in the form of hard copy reports and non-searchable site files. In order to successfully fulfill legal and ethical responsibilities as long-term stewards of cultural resources on these installations, it is imperative that DoD staff make the incorporation of these legacy records into their enterprise GIS management framework a priority....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samantha Nabity. Jacopo Baggio. Jacob Freeman.

Humans, like any other organism, must continuously adapt to or modify their surrounding environment to maximize their fitness. One of the main sources of environmental variation that humans must cope with is climate variation. Adjustment to climate variation may include increasing investments in infrastructure (social, technological, cognitive), which acts as a buffer, filtering out the effects of higher frequency climate variation on the ability of individuals and populations to consume energy,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Guagnin. Angela Perri.

The UNESCO world heritage sites of Shuwaymis and Jubbah, in northwestern Saudi Arabia, are extremely rich in early Holocene rock art. Hunting scenes illustrate dog-assisted hunting strategies from the 7th and possibly the 8th millennium BC, predating the spread of pastoralism. The engravings represent the earliest evidence for dogs on the Arabian Peninsula. Though the depicted dogs are reminiscent of the modern Canaan dog, it is unclear if they were brought to the Arabian Peninsula from the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Trisha Jenz. Sarah Ledogar. Jordan Karsten.

Burials of dog skulls and full dog skeletons have been uncovered at several Eneolithic Tripolye (5100-2900 cal BC) sites suggesting that dogs held a special symbolic role for the Tripolye compared to other domestic fauna. To evaluate human-dog relationships in Tripolye culture and funerary context, we examined dogs from a single mortuary site (Site 17) located in Verteba Cave (3951-2620 cal BC), Ternopil Oblast, Western Ukraine. Symbolic representations of canids have been observed on some...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Anthony. Dorcas Brown.

At the Srubnaya-culture settlement of Krasnosamarskoe in the Russian steppes, dated 1900–1700 BCE, a ritual occurred in which the participants consumed sacrificed dogs, primarily, and a few wolves, violating normal food practices found at other sites, during the winter. At least 64 winter-killed canids, 19% MNI/37% NISP, were roasted, fileted, and apparently were eaten. More than 99% were dogs. Their heads were chopped into small standardized segments with practiced blows of an axe on multiple...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ann Danis. Ruth Tringham.

In this paper we discuss methods for what Yannis Hamilakis (2013) has called "sensorially reconstituted archaeologies." Rather than being strictly focused on single mode sensory experience in the past, such archaeologies cannot be done without a self-reflexive awareness of multisensorial elements in every experience and event of modern archaeology and the imagined past. The theoretical goals of such a large-scale shift in thinking about archaeology and the senses have already been laid out, but...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gertrude Kilgore. Claire Novotny. Alyssa Farmer.

Households represent a foundational element of any society. The everyday activities that occur within domestic spaces construct and reinforce the social, economic, and political framework upon which societies are built. The 2017 field season of the Chan Chich Archaeological Project saw the first explicit study of domesticity and everyday life at the ancient Maya site of Chan Chich with investigations of final phase domestic activity areas in Courtyard D-4. This Late Classic residential group...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary A. Davis.

The site of Harappa, Pakistan, was a major urban center of the Indus Civilization with over two thousand years of occupation (3700-1700 BCE). The site did not have an obvious civic ceremonial center but was instead multi-nodal with walled sub-divisions. As an aspect of stone tool assemblage analysis at the site, the most functionally relevant attributes of the blade tools were differentially weighted to produce a soft hierarchical clustering classification scheme. These classes are considered...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kim Richter. María Eugenia Maldonado Vite.

Pre-Columbian Huastec stone sculptures and clay figurines for the most part have been interpreted as deities and assumed to belong to the same religious cult. They also have typically been interpreted through a central Mexican lens and been identified as and associated with Late Postclassic central Mexican deities. Female figures in particular have been interpreted as Tlazolteotl, the central Mexican goddess of parturition, sexuality, and purification—a deity thought to be closely related to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lydie Dussol. Louise Purdue. Eva Lemonnier. Dominique Michelet. Philippe Nondédéo.

What can be drawn from anthracological data to infer long-term socio-environmental dynamics among ancient Mayas is a question that has received little attention. At Naachtun (Northern Peten, Guatemala), we studied charcoal remains from archaeological contexts in relation with pedological data to reconstruct forest resources and land management through time. Since the beginning of Naachtun's occupation at the end of the Preclassic period (≈ AD 150), domestic firewood economy seems to have been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ayushi Nayak. Michael Petraglia. Nicole Boivin. Patrick Roberts.

The origin of agriculture is a long-standing and pivotal point of archaeological research. The focus, however, has predominantly been on the earliest instances of crop domestication, whereas less is known about the nature of early farming. South Asia with its mosaic of environments and early farming strategies demonstrates the need for nuanced attention to aspects of early agro-ecologies such as manuring, water management strategies, and animal husbandry. Stable isotope analysis of botanical,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Neil Duncan. John Walker.

Donald Lathrap was a visionary anthropologist and archaeologist. His contributions always reflected the "big picture": an understanding that all pre-Columbian culture history was intertwined, and that these connections went back through time to origins in the lowland tropics, or the Tropical Forest. He practiced an archaeology that gave equal weight to iconography and religious thought, and rim sherds and energetics. The most significant issues for Lathrap’s version of American Archaeology, is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Walker. Neil Duncan.

Donald Lathrap was a visionary anthropologist and archaeologist. His contributions always reflected the "big picture": an understanding that all pre-Columbian culture history was intertwined, and that these connections went back through time to origins in the lowland tropics, or the Tropical Forest. He practiced an archaeology that gave equal weight to iconography and religious thought, and rim sherds and energetics. The most significant issues for Lathrap’s version of American Archaeology, is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Cercone. Zeynep Bilgen.

During the Early Bronze Age, the site of Seyitömer Höyük in Western Anatolia, served as both a center for ceramic production and trade. Through the innovative use of a mold-making technique, as well as a clay coil and wheel combination method, potters were able to produce a standardized diverse ceramic repertoire at a fast rate. Within the site assemblage, a variety of ceramic types are represented, including the depas amphikypellon, a two handled drinking vessel. Depas vessels originating from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bonnie Pitblado.

I began my graduate studies in 1990, knowing I wanted to learn about the earliest human use of the Colorado Rocky Mountains. It became immediately clear that two decades of work by Dennis Stanford, much conducted with his research- and life-partner Pegi Jodry, contributed myriad bricks to the platform upon which I would construct my own body of work. Stanford’s research at early sites in Colorado spanned the chronological spectrum, from potentially pre-Clovis (Lamb Spring, Dutton and Selby), to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katharine Kolpan.

Human remains possess an indexical quality that references once-living people. Human bone may also serve as a symbolic representation of larger ideas such as honor, vengeance or injustice. As such, human remains, as evidence of past criminal actions, have the ability to bring communities together, but also to tear them apart. In regard to the remains of soldiers who perished in the European theater during World War II (WWII), the presence of remains may serve to reinforce the perceived moral...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nancy Highcock.

Nearly seventy years of excavations at Kültepe have yielded a remarkable assemblage of material reflecting the rich and fluid daily lives of the Anatolians, Assyrians, and others who inhabited such a dynamic and cosmopolitan city. A diverse category of objects, metal dress pins, has been recovered from burials at Kültepe and other Middle Bronze Age Anatolian sites, providing tangible connections to the ancient people who wore them. Previous scholarship has focused on the style and origin of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Biwer.

Food is a unique form of material culture, representing a multiplicity of ethnic, gender, racial, political, and economic identities, that is consumed and reaffirmed through daily practice. In this way, food remains provide a nuanced perspective on a variety of archaeological issues. This paper focuses on Wari imperial expansion and how foodways enabled both Wari colonists and local peoples to negotiate the colonial experience during the Middle Horizon (AD 600-1000), Peru. Using...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jesse Casana. Austin Chad Hill. Elise Jakoby Laugier.

This paper presents results of recent research at several sites in North America and the Middle East in which aerial surveys have been undertaken using an advanced radiometric thermal camera and a multispectral sensor mounted on commercial-grade drones. While using drone-acquired color photography to produce ortho-imagery and digital surface models has become an increasingly standard practice in archaeology, thermal and near-infrared imaging offers the potential to detect both surface and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yorke Rowan. Austin Chad Hill.

In this paper we discuss preliminary results of UAV-survey in one area (c. 32 sq. km.) along the Wadi al-Qattafi, Jordan as part of the larger Eastern Badia Archaeological Project. Excavation and survey in this area of the Black Desert revealed hundreds, or possibly thousands, of unmapped and unrecorded structures that required a new approach to their accurate identification and documentation. With the exception of the large desert ‘kites’ (hunting traps), most stone structures are too small to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Anderson. Thaddeus Bissett. Stephen Yerka. Joshua J. Wells. Eric Kansa.

The impacts of past and projected climate change and specifically sea level fluctuations on heritage resources are examined across the southeastern US using site and environmental data integrated in DINAA (Digital Index of North American Archaeology). Minor changes in sea level have shaped human settlement from the late Pleistocene onward, including in recent millennia when shorelines are incorrectly assumed to have stabilized at or near present levels. In the near term, tens of thousands of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wendy Bacon.

Although scholars of Classic Maya art have described certain short-statured figures as dwarves and endowed them with mystical significance, the motif has gone undefined. This contextual analysis identifies the anatomical and cultural attributes of the dwarf motif and interprets its meaning within the ancient Maya conception of time and their ideological integration of the natural and supernatural. A spatial analysis of 45 depictions of short-statured individuals on archaeologically provenienced...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Danielle Riebe. János Dani.

The collaborative, American-Hungarian Prehistoric Interactions on the Plain Project explores the past through the reconstruction of interactions. Investigations on interactions as an active mode of social investment and social construction challenges normative concepts of "culture" by modeling socio-cultural boundaries as a dynamic and negotiated process, as opposed to a static categorically assigned social unit. Moreover, our research contextualizes regional developments as the result of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thegn Ladefoged. Dion O'Neale. Alex Jorgensen. Christopher Stevenson. Mark McCoy.

The Polynesian colonists who settled New Zealand touched off the creation of a type of society not found in remote Oceania. Over the span of several centuries relatively autonomous village-based groups transformed into larger territorial hapū lineages, which later formed even larger geo-political iwi associations. A social network analysis of the spatial and temporal distribution of obsidian artefacts, an important stone resource that was used for a variety of tools, evaluates where and when new...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristin Landau.

In the early 2000s, Mesoamerican archaeologists adopted the "dynamic" model of state organization, positing that political centralization strengthened and diminished over time. Such fluctuations are due primarily to the inherent tension between the institutions of kinship and kingship, and consequent struggle for power in political, economic, and religious spheres. I argue that the intermediate scale of the neighborhood is best suited for analyzing how local- and state-level power structures...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Cajigas.

La Playa (SON F:10:3), in Sonora, Mexico, has the remains of an irrigation canal system associated with the Early Agricultural period (2100 B.C.-A.D. 50), a period characterized by the development of agriculture in the southwest United States and northwest Mexico. Satellite imagery analysis and magnetic gradiometry surveys covering over 53,000 m2 of the site, document almost 8,700 m2 of agricultural fields, 15 km of irrigation canals, and over a dozen circular structures. Irrigation canals were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Ankele.

In comparison to the Late Paleoindian Period (10,000-8,000 rcybp), the Early Archaic (8,000-6,500 rcybp) in the Gunnison Basin, Colorado is a poorly understood time because of its relatively light archaeological signature. Not only is the archaeological record more ephemeral, but we also see a change in technologies, such as projectile points types, in this transitional period. Some archaeologists explain these observations as a result of changing environments and shifting settlement processes...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kellam J. Throgmorton.

In the late summer of 2017, I conducted dissertation research at two Chacoan communities: Morris 40, on the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation, and Padilla Well, in Chaco Culture National Historic Park. I was assisted by a team comprised of Binghamton University graduate students and independent researchers from New Mexico and Colorado. We used remote sensing, geophysical survey, and material culture analysis to map and document these two communities. We evaluated the idea that migration from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only WengCheong Lam.

Even though the framework of early globalization has been proved as effective in illuminating ancient interregional interaction in many regions, its value and contribution to the archaeological study of ancient China has been overlooked in the literature. Focusing on the Han Empire, we employed statistical methods to exam variations in assemblages and frequencies of iron objects, one type of critical state finance in the Han political economies, from burials in the southern frontier of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Keith M. Prufer. Mark Robinson. Douglas J. Kennett.

Renewed focus on Paleoamerican and archaic peoples across Mesoamerica have broadened our understanding of those time periods.  However, few stratified sites have been documented.  We present new data from two multi-component rockshelters located in the Bladen Nature Reserve in the Maya Mountains of Belize.  We document persistent use of these rockshelters from the late Pleistocene through the Maya collapse and suggest these spaces were used for animal processing, tool reduction, and as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nathaniel Erb-Satullo.

In the study of technological transformations, there is often much discussion of how innovations are conditioned by earlier systems of technical knowledge. Identification of transitional features is often challenging, however, particularly for questions about the origins of iron smelting and its relationship with copper-base metallurgy. This paper discusses some unusual technological features in iron metallurgical debris (circa 8th-6th c. BC) from a fortified hilltop site in the Caucasus,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Estelle Praet.

We hereby focus on a feature of monumental architecture in north and central Peru from the Late Archaic (5000-2600 B.C.) to the Final Formative (400-200 B.C.) respectively illustrated by the sites of Sechín Bajo and Pallka both located in the Casma Valley. This specific feature is the sunken circular plaza (SCP), a public-oriented sunken space whose circular shape runs from 1,5 m to 80 m, as the most extreme examples. Through the record and description of 64 sites –some of them contained several...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Jeske. Katherine Sterner.

Since 1998, archaeologists from UW-Milwaukee have conducted long-term, systematic excavations at the 12th-15th century Crescent Bay Hunt Club site (47JE0904). The Crescent Bay Hunt Club site is unique among early Oneota sites because of the three distinct forms of structures discovered there. This paper focuses on longhouses: portions of at least three longhouses have been recovered from the site. Evidence suggests that these longhouses are at least two hundred years older than previously dated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anneke Janzen. Mary Prendergast. Katherine Grillo.

First developing around 8,000 years ago, pastoralism in Africa has continued as a flexible and dynamic mode of subsistence. One key feature of this dynamism is mobility, which is crucial for many East African pastoralists today to access seasonally available pasture and water. In areas of unpredictable rainfall, mobile pastoralism permits more people to live in dry lands than do other subsistence strategies. How the earliest herders in Tanzania used the landscape is still relatively unknown....

DOCUMENT Citation Only José Bustamante.

Over the past decade, the La Corona Archeological Project has been investigating the site’s palace complex, focusing primarily on its final construction phases. The focus is common in lowland Maya archaeology because of the relative ease of conducting extensive excavations on terminal phase architecture. However, at La Corona, major tunneling efforts have also explored the earlier architectural phases of the palace. As a result, the project has identified three construction phases that date to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Vernon Scarborough. Christian Isendahl.

The landscapes and natural environments within the tropics and their wet-dry forests were the seat for understanding modern ecological principles. Initiated by Alexander von Humboldt and fundamentally altered theoretically by Charles Darwin, contemporary views of the couple human-nature dynamic were "discovered" in the New World first. Unlike the prominent worldview identifiable in the Near East and subsequently in early colonizing Europe in which "man must have dominion over the fish of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John G. Jones.

Evidence of Archaic age settlement with possible rodent harvesting is apparent in two well-dated sediment cores collected in northeastern Grenada. At around 3600 BC, large scale burning on the island coincides with severe forest modification including the total elimination of at least two species of palms. The selective, though possibly unintentional, removal of economically valuable palms suggests the influence of a non-human variable into the equation. I propose that the removal of a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Deal.

The early French settlers at the Port Royal Habitation relied heavily on the local Mi’kmaq to survive the cold Nova Scotia winters. In the winter of 1606-07 Samuel de Champlain initiated a social club, commonly referred to as "The Order of Good Cheer", primarily to battle against scurvy, but also to create camaraderie among the colonists and to strengthen their relationship with the local Mi’kmaq. The French developed elaborate rituals for the feasts, partly based on those of their homeland....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily McClung De Tapia. Guillermo Acosta-Ochoa.

The race to stay ahead of modern human impact on preceramic and early ceramic sites in the Basin of Mexico is particularly dramatic. Recent investigations at sites located in three sectors of the Basin of Mexico, all of which are threatened to some degree, contribute to a broader understanding of the kinds of communities that anticipated increased complexity in social, economic and political spheres that ultimately developed into early urban centers such as Cuicuilco and Teotihuacan. ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kurt F. Anschuetz. Richard I. Ford.

Agriculture among the northern Southwest’s Pueblo communities traditionally and historically was more than merely an economic activity through which the people "made their living." Steeped in ritual and informed by principles of stewardship, spiritual ecology, and ensoulment that explicate their orientation within the Natural World and their obligations to the Supernatural World, indigenous agricultural practice was literally and figuratively a key element in each individual’s everyday...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jordan Pickett.

Recent studies of the sociology of contemporary earthquakes have emphasized the generative physical spaces of potentiality created by these disasters: the destruction of earthquakes, while traumatic for survivors, also clears the way for large-scale infrastructural and architectural development programs that can re-shape aged urban environments to better reflect changing societal values and priorities. This paper offers a survey of earthquakes as non-human change agents in the Roman and Late...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lilian Rebellato. Denise Paul Schann. Wenceslau Geraldes Teixeira. Antônia Damasceno Barbosa. William Woods.

In this paper, we will bring a geoarchaeological perspective in order to identify settlement patterns in two geometric earthworks (geoglyphs) located in the eastern region of the state of Acre in the Brazilian Amazon. Physical and chemical soil analysis suggests how the past inhabitants on those sites affected the soils. The results show that the settlement pattern and the most important differences from the other regions we have looked at, for instance, in the várzea (floodplain) area. In...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Naomi Sykes. Greger Larson. Carly Ameen. Philip Shaw. Tom Fowler.

Human immigration and biological invasions are high-profile topics in modern politics but neither are modern phenomena. Migrations of people, animals and ideas were widespread in antiquity and these are frequently incorporated into expressions of cultural identity. However, the more recent the migrations, the more negative modern attitudes are towards them. In general, native is perceived as positive and 'natural', whereas the term 'alien' is attached negatively to cultural and environmental...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shannon Koerner. Eric Skov. Brett Giles.

The cultural resource program at Fort Riley manages 100k acres in the Flint Hills province of northeastern Kansas. Variations in the Flint Hills landscape influence the use of different archaeological site discovery methods. While floodplain settings with deep soil deposits necessitate regular subsurface testing, higher elevation settings with low soil accumulation require less intensive survey methods. Many prehistoric sites in higher elevation, upland landscapes are expressed largely by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Philip Mink.

Margaret Lyneis, in her 1995 description of the Virgin Branch region, notes that three of the boundaries are quite distinct as they adjoin "non-Anasazi" societies. The eastern boundary is more diffuse, as the Virgin and Kayenta Puebloan traditions intersect in an area that is now part of Grand Canyon National Park. In this paper I will argue that Virgin settlement patterns in the western half of the Grand Canyon are distinct from the Kayenta and follow the upland/lowland pattern described for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Davide Zori. Colleen Zori. Veronica Ikeshoji-Orlati. Deirdre Fulton.

The medieval Italian settlement pattern was transformed from the 8th - 12th centuries as people moved to inhabit defensible hilltops. The precise timing and reasons for this historical process, known as incastellamento, are not well understood. We initiated the San Giuliano Archaeological Research Project to provide high-resolution archaeological data for understanding this phenomenon. Two seasons of survey and excavation atop the San Giuliano plateau have identified walls and structures...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sara Morrisset. David Beresford-Jones. George Chauca.

This paper examines what happened to cultural connectivity on the south coast in the wake of Wari’s collapse based on our ongoing investigations at the site of H-8 in the lower Ica Valley. We investigate in particular how the echoes of the Middle Horizon resonate in the genesis of the Late Intermediate Ica culture that emerged here thereafter. We present evidence that H-8 was first founded at this time (c. 1000CE), and operated as a caravanserai within an intensifying network of trade and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kenneth Young.

People have altered the naturally forested areas of the tropical Andes for natural resources and as places for settlements. The forests collectively represent a global biodiversity hotspot, with many unique species. Environmental gradients are abrupt, with dramatic changes in temperature regimes with altitude, but also with switches in humidity from dry to pluvial depending on exposure to prevailing winds. The steep environmental gradients create dispersal barriers to plants and animals,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kenneth Cannon.

Bringing the geologically historic record to bear on questions of ecosystem evolution is a goal emphasized in recent National Research Council reports. Within this context one species has become significant, the bison of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Recent expansion of the population, and its subsequent migration outside federal lands, has created concern among federal managers, local ranchers, and conservation groups. However, much of what is known about pre-management herds is based...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kate Magargal.

Cooking food conferred an energetic advantage to our pre-human ancestors and became one of the hallmark characteristics of the human strategy set. Accessing fuel remains a common problem for many human societies. Yet anthropologists do not often take the costs of gathering fuel into account when modeling subsistence and settlement. This paper presents a model that incorporates firewood tradeoffs into human choices about what to eat and where to live, and examines a hypothetical case for the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Escee Lopez. Santos Cisceneros. Shelby Medina. Jessica Morales. Rene Vellanoweth.

Native peoples of Southern California developed complex systems of trades through non-monetary exchanges of items such as beads. Through these exchanges and interactions, socioeconomic structures within intra-local and extra-local communities evolved to fit individual governing societies. The Tule Creek Village was the epicenter of cultural and social development during the Late Holocene on San Nicolas Island. It harbored a myriad bead types distributed among the residential and ceremonial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Kowalewski.

New studies have led to a deeper comprehension of economic variation and change in Late Postclassic Mesoamerica and the Archaic and Classical Greek world. Archaeological data on city-state settlement patterns, specialized production, trade, and household consumption, and new archival material and re-analysis of texts, have replaced primitivism, substantivism, and ideal-types. In urbanization and demographic scale the two areas are comparable. Mesoamerican and Greek agricultural production was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Max Seidita. Charles Golden.

More than half a century of archaeological and epigraphic research at Piedras Negras has produced one of the best understood epigraphic corpus in the Maya region and provided archaeologists with a plethora of information related to the nature of rulership, courtly life, and the regional political landscape of the Classic Period. Despite this work, questions persist about the economic structure of Piedras Negras households. Here we present the results of recent investigations undertaken at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth De Marigny.

Through a comparative analysis of ceramic materials from several archaeological sites including the Cividade de Bagunte, this paper explores the effects of Romanization on the fields of production and consumption belonging to the Castro Culture of northwest Iberia. These sites were chosen because the archaeological materials uncovered reflect differences in social, political, and economic organization from the Iron Age to the Roman period. Further, the proximity of these sites to one another...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Fennelly.

In the nineteenth century, the northern city of Sheffield in England developed significantly as the city’s traditional manufacturing output – metal and metalworking – was industrialised on a mass scale. To support this rapidly growing industrial city, services like railways and gasworks were constructed around the city perimeter, along with housing, shops, and other services and institutions. Neighbourhoods like the industrial colony of Parkwood Springs were home to long term residents, and a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Diana Barg. Nathan Thomas.

Looting of archaeological resources on public lands has been an issue throughout the United States for over a century, and Bureau of Land Management (BLM)-administered lands are no exception. Looting can take many forms, ranging from a visitor looking for a souvenir to intense, large-scale, and intentional desecration of sites for personal profit. Looting issues can be exacerbated by the limited on-the-ground resources of federal agencies that manage millions of acres. The proactive actions the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelsey Sullivan. Britton L. Shepardson. Mario Tuki. Paula Valenzuela Contreras. Francisco Torres Hochstetter.

For fifteen years, Terevaka Archaeological Outreach (TAO) has provided local students from Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile) with hands-on experience to: (1) offer experiential learning opportunities about the local cultural and natural resources; (2) promote awareness and expertise in conservation measures and sustainable development; and (3) document and study the modern and ancient natural and cultural resources of the island. Three-dimensional ortho-corrected photogrammetry (3D OCP) is a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alisa Pettitt. Sven Fuhrmann.

Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) applications can influence the user's perception of the world. In regards to archaeological sites these technologies can be used as educational tools to recreate past environments and offer interpretive perspectives on history. This research examines several archaeological sites in the Northern Virginia region and investigates how educational VR and AR applications developed through accessible, user-friendly platforms can aid in reconstructing and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacob Freeman. Gideon Maughan. Erick Robinson. David Byers. Robert L. Kelly.

Increases in energy consumption correlate with social and political development in human societies, as well as increasing human impacts on ecosystems. Thus, understanding the underlying drivers of energy consumption in human societies may provide insights into the processes of social evolution and rapid social change (collapse). In this paper, we develop a model of energy consumption in human societies based on population size, economic complexity and temperature. We demonstrate the usefulness...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caitlin Wichlacz.

The human labor involved in physically carrying goods across the landscape underpins all artifact provenance studies in the prehispanic American Southwest, yet this labor is all too often left unacknowledged and unconsidered, even as detailed and sometimes remarkable patterns of artifact production and distribution are brought to light. This is especially true for the Phoenix Basin Hohokam, where ceramic provenance studies have revolutionized archaeologists’ abilities to understand the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Luke Auld-Thomas.

This paper presents research carried out by members of the Proyecto Regional Arqueologico La Corona at the site of El Achiotal since 2009, with emphasis on new findings since 2015. Occupation at the site spans the Late Preclassic and Early Classic periods (roughly the 1st to 5th Centuries AD, with the possibility of some earlier occupation). An inscribed stela discovered in 2015 provides critical insight into the geopolitics of the Early Classic period and establishes greater time-depth for some...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alejandro Valdes. Lissandra González.

La llamada Tierra Caliente, se ubica al sur del estado de Michoacán y abarca un extensa región que estuvo continuamente habitada desde hace miles de años. A pesar de las condiciones climáticas donde llegan a registrarse algunas de las temperaturas más altas del país, es una tierra llena de recursos naturales y fértiles tierras dentro de un paisaje de valles y sierras que han sido aprovechadas por los grupos humanos. Las fuertes condiciones y contrastes de la Tierra Caliente han llevado a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Geraldine Huertas Sánchez.

En el valle bajo de Cañete, la élite Huarco compartía una tradición cultural similar con las élites vecinas a lo largo de la costa centro-sur; a la llegada de los incas, esta tradición se mantuvo pero reconfiguraron sus estrategias políticas y económicas. De esta manera lograron proteger sus relaciones interregionales en este territorio, con el fin de aprovechar los beneficios de la presencia inca en el valle. El Huarco, de acuerdo a los relatos etnohistóricos fue un señorío fuerte e...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pedro Espinoza.

Los cientos de sitios arqueológicos en plena ciudad de Lima así como la usual inexistencia de una valoración positiva de estos por parte de la comunidad vecina, son un reto para la investigación y gestión del patrimonio arqueológico monumental. Como una alternativa a ello, el proyecto encargado del complejo arqueológico Mateo Salado (en el distrito de Lima), ha venido aplicando desde el 2011 un plan de gestión en cuyo marco se creó la estrategia del Continuum Cultural. Esta es una perspectiva...