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

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Burns. Luisa Aebersold. Fred Valdez. Samantha Krause. Anastasia Kotsoglou.

Colha, an ancient Maya site located in northern Belize, has undergone archaeological research interests since the 1970s. Previous investigations demonstrate a long occupational history at the site that spans from the Late Archaic (ca. 3400 BC) to the Early Postclassic (AD 1200). Building upon previous research, a primary goal of the 2017 season was to explore the transition between the Archaic (3400 BC) and Preclassic (1000 BC) periods while focusing on technological and social continuity. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Lesure.

Across much of Mesoamerica, the transition from Archaic to Formative occurred essentially simultaneously at 1800±100 BC. The earliest sedentary, ceramic-using villages occurred in clusters, but the clusters themselves were widely dispersed. They appeared in a variety of environmental settings, and they were surrounded by lands that were either empty or still inhabited by low-visibility/low-density populations. Given such patterns, it is far from obvious what factors would explain the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sheila Goff.

Decisions regarding the use of museum collections in exhibits that interpret the history and culture of American Indians have often been made by non-natives, without the input of the people the exhibits are about. History Colorado was recently presented with a situation that allowed the museum to do the opposite. The Ute Indian Museum is one of History Colorado’s community properties and is one, if not the only, state-owned museum dedicated to an American Indian group-the Ute people. In 2013,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Madison Grant. Jacqueline Pittman.

The use of stone weapons is prevalent throughout the history of the Chanka (C.E. 1050-1400), a civilization that inhabited the Apurímac region in Peru and once rivaled the great Incan Empire. Accordingly, the impact fractures such weapons create provide direct evidence to deciphering the deaths of these Andean warriors and their violent past. This project seeks to provide experimental evidence of fracture variation attributed to differences in weapon morphology, which can be compared to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elise Widmayer.

Bipolar lithic artifacts can be challenging for researchers to understand in the archaeological record. Although these artifacts were first noted in North American literature half a century ago, archaeologists continue to debate over terminology and considerations of morphological and functional distinctions of bipolar objects. This experimental approach aims to shed light on these disparities whilst re-examining morphological and functional characteristics attributed to manufacture and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anthony Graesch. Annette Davis. Sarah Harris. Andrew Prunk. Hector Salazar.

Despite longstanding anthropological concerns with the origins of intensive delayed-return subsistence economies on the Northwest Coast, the use and production of slate fishing knives has received little attention. Owing to specific design attributes, thin slate fishing knives were critical to the necessarily efficient and rapid processing of tens of thousands of salmon in a span of only three or four months. Although anthropologists have a reasonably good understanding of how slate knives were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aidan O'Sullivan.

Experimental archaeology can be defined as the reconstruction of past buildings, technologies, objects and environmental contexts, their testing and use, so as to gain a better understanding of the role of material culture in people’s lives in the past. We explore ideas of craft, materiality, knowledge, skills and the use of different materials to practically test how people made, used and discarded things in the past. This paper will investigate how early medieval houses in Europe can be...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Calla McNamee. Sofia Laparidou. Georgia Tsartsidou. Maria Bofill. Soultana-Maria Valamoti.

Microbotanical residue analysis, particularly starch grain and phytolith analysis, of ground stone artifacts has become a well-established method for investigating subsistence practices, plant processing patterns, and tool use at prehistoric sites around the world. Within the Aegean, however, where wheat and barley are the primary staple grains, microbotanical analysis of stone tools has only recently been incorporated into on-going research. A collaboration between PlantCult, a European...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Stull.

Central to anthropology is the concept of participant observation, where a researcher engages in immersive learning through ethnographic fieldwork. This concept is also important for archaeologists as immersive learning provides an avenue for more robust interpretation and the development of better research questions. Participant observation is not directly possible in the study of medieval archaeology, but replication studies of food culture can serve as one avenue toward immersive learning in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sharon Hankins. Megan Skillern.

We have been very fortunate this year to have Dr. Fred Valdez, Luisa Aebersold and their team graciously contribute to our research program in ceramic technology. They took time during their extremely busy field season to bring clay for our team to prepare and attempt to build pottery at Programme for Belize Archaeological Field School. We have two different types of clay to research. The first clay is yellow clay CH4444. The second clay is iron-rich, red clay CH2222. Our first task was to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Mlyniec. Roger Doonan. Duško Šljivar. Yvette Marks. Sarah MacKinnon.

Recent dating projects have determined the oldest known date for copper smelting to appear around, 5000 BCE, associated with Vinča (Gradac phase) sites in the Morava Valley, Serbia. Recent Studies of Vinča metallurgy (Radivojevic 2010) were directed towards the characterisation of slags and associated minerals, and their provenance. This body of work has had important implications for theories relating to the beginnings of metal-using communities. Despite this important research, few studies...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emma Behling. L. Adrien Hannus.

Over the years of excavation at the Prehistoric Indian Village at Mitchell, several similar shell artifacts were discovered. Excavators came to the hypothesis that the shell items had been fishing lures, and set out to test it. The shell artifacts were replicated and used as lures on several fishing expeditions. These shell items functioned as lures, and we are led to believe that the artifacts found at Mitchell could indeed have been fishing lures.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Moore.

Social learning by modern humans led to the repetition and persistence of stone tool forms we see in the recent archaeological record. The emergence of similar patterning in early hominin assemblages is often assumed to track the beginnings of social learning. Less clear is what was being socially transmitted during this early period. One possibility is that hominins learned how to make objects according to a shared ‘mental template’. A second possibility is that specific sequences were learned,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Snetsinger. Maxime Lamoureux-St-Hilaire.

Settlement abandonment studies are crucial for understanding the archaeological record, as they yield the key to decipher the context of on-floor deposits, or assemblages. We advocate the use of a behavioral-contextual method for studying on-floor assemblages for ascribing them to one of several categories of abandonment. This behavioral-contextual approach examines the vertical and horizontal architectural contexts of artifacts, the relative completeness of vessels, and the represented vessel...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Schauer. Kevan Edinborough. Stephen Shennan. Andrew Bevan. Mike Parker Pearson.

In recent years new methods have been developed for using summed radiocarbon probabilities as a population proxy and for comparing radiocarbon datasets to establish whether they are significantly different from one another, while taking into account sampling variation and the patterns in the calibration curve. On the basis of newly collected and updated radiocarbon data on the dating of Neolithic mines and quarries in in Britain, Ireland and continental Northwest Europe, the paper will present...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Levent Atici.

Zooarchaeologists have often employed binary oppositions such as "urban consumers" and "rural producers" and distinguished between centralized/regulated and decentralized/unregulated animal economies with direct/indirect food provisioning systems to elucidate pastoral economies of early complex societies. As zooarchaeologists, we are tasked with bridging more abstract and ideational anthropological variables with the archaeological hard evidence as well as with a narrower set of more explicit...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Munkittrick. Vaughan Grimes.

Lead was ubiquitous throughout the cultural environments of the Atlantic World during the 18th and 19th centuries and can be toxic to humans, particularly children. There is a long history of examining human lead exposure using trace element and isotope data in archaeological remains, but most studies have sampled bone tissue, which is prone to diagenetic alteration. More recently, researchers are sampling tooth enamel, which is more likely to retain a biogenic record of lead exposure. Since...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stacy Drake. Marla MacKinnon. America Guerra.

In 2016, The Field Museum was awarded a National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). The overall mission of this project is to "research, explore, develop, and implement thoughtful, practical, and forward-thinking practices for the ethical care of human remains." The project is working to bring together stakeholders from collections-holding institutions, scientific research institutions, and Native American and First Nations communities to move beyond...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jordan Dalton. Paula Patricia Moreno Zapata.

Inca archaeologists have regarded the Chincha Valley as a special case of imperial expansion due to the privileged position that the Chincha held within Tawantinsuyu. From the ethnohistoric documents we learn that the Chincha Kingdom was powerful, controlling long-distance maritime trade to Ecuador. The Chincha also relied on a highly specialized economy composed of fishermen, merchants, and agriculturalists. Previous studies of the Chincha Valley have emphasized coastal centers of fishermen and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Haden Kingrey. Matthew Napolitano. Geoffrey Clark. Scott Fitzpatrick.

The oldest identified sites on Yap are identified by presence calcareous sand tempered (CST) pottery from deeply stratified deposits. With few exceptions, CST pottery, made from locally produced clay, has been recovered from Rungluw and Pemrang, two sites in southern Yap, western Micronesia (northwest tropical Pacific). Although poor preservation conditions and small sample sizes make it difficult to reconstruct vessel size, detailed analysis of sherds demonstrates at least two sub-types. Recent...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Frederick Lange.

To paraphrase the symposium organizers, for decades changes in the pre-Columbian material culture of Central America were attributed to either migration or conquest. When I began archaeological research in Costa Rica in 1969 the endless debate was about Mesoamerican influence. Technological and iconographic linkages were frequently cited, but rarely were the mechanisms of the proposed linkages adequately defined or demonstrated archaeologically. In 2008, perhaps unduly influenced by having moved...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jordan Pratt. Ted Goebel.

First American archaeologists are increasingly interested in the relationship between Western stemmed point technology (WST) and other Paleoindian lithic technologies, including Clovis. While there is some evidence of WST dating as early as 14,000 14C years before present, most sites lack reliable geoarchaeological and geochronological evidence. In the late 1990s and early 2000s the University of Nevada Reno excavated several stratified open-air WST sites in Oregon along the southern shoreline...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Briana Doering.

Linguistic and archaeological evidence suggests that Athabaskan-speaking peoples rapidly spread south from present-day Central Alaska and Northwest Canada into the Great Plains region around 1000 years ago. Historically, explanations of this important event have centered on relatively small geographic regions and traditional methodologies. This paper offers an alternative view at both a much larger scale and using distinct methods. I argue that this significant migration event was driven by the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Fedick. Gerald Islebe. Louis Santiago.

A review of 28 ethnographic, ethnobotanical, and botanical studies published since the 1930s identified 497 species of indigenous food plants used by the Maya in the lowlands of southeastern Mexico and upper Central America. This consideration of the Maya cornucopia focuses on the relative food values of the plants and the visibility of the species in the archaeological record. The diversity of food plants has significant implications for the reconstruction of ancient foodways, agricultural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Liston.

The excavation of an early and middle Byzantine cemetery, located in the former Sanctuary of Ismenion Apollo in Thebes, Greece, has provided an opportunity to examine the impact of infectious diseases in post-Classical Greece. The cemetery appears to be associated with a previously undocumented hospital, probably connected with the nearby church of St. Luke the Evangelist. The skeletons were found in rectangular rock-cut graves, all of which contained multiple burials. Two non-standard graves...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Hill.

The Acoma Culture Province is the geographic expanse of the ancestral homeland of the Pueblo of Acoma documented for adjudication through the Indian Claims Commission and through archaeological research. Pottery made during both the prehistoric and historic periods found within the Acoma Culture Province was made using crushed potsherds as an addition to the pottery clay. The practice of adding crushed potsherds represents a cultural choice for Acoma potters, a choice that has considerable...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kirsten Vacca. Lisa Maher.

Ethnoarchaeology provides a useful tool for understanding material patterns in the archaeological record. However, caution must be exercised in the application of this method to avoid projecting data onto times and places that are no longer represented by contemporary practices. In this paper, the authors argue that ethnoarchaeology is most useful for projects that focus on the longue durée when used in conjunction with a combination of micro and macro archaeological methods. Specifically, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelly Goldberg.

As the British Navy patrolled the West African coast in an effort to enforce the cessation of the Atlantic Slave Trade beginning in the early nineteenth century, several American and European traders shifted their focus a slightly inland, establishing trading sites on the more visibly protected tidal branches of the Rio Pongo of coastal Guinea. This paper explores the material culture used and maintained by one of these establishments at the site of Gambia, considering how material consumption...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Heilen. Monica Murrell. Phillip Leckman. Robert Heckman.

Analysis of previous cultural resource management investigations conducted in the Permian Basin of southeastern New Mexico indicate that many data are of poor quality, unstandardized, and of limited utility for comparative purposes or regional planning. Part of the problem is the limited understanding of which methods are best suited for site recording and testing and, more specifically, how observations made at the site surface correspond to subsurface content. This poster presents an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Phillip Ashlock. Dawn Ashlock.

With the increasing issues surrounding access to remote sites, record low attendance of traditional museum settings, and trends involving greater interaction with social media platforms among upcoming generations, this poster presentation attempts to explore the use of 3D technologies, virtual reality (VR), and immersive media in Public Archaeology to advance awareness of material culture across social media platforms. These methods provide the ability to disseminate content to the public en...

DOCUMENT Citation Only C. L. Kieffer.

Multispectral imaging cameras are frequently used in art conservation for identifying pigments as well as monitoring change in pigments over time. Multispectral cameras take multiple images at 370nm 448nm, 476nm, 499nm, 519nm, 598nm, 636nm, 700nm, 735nm, 780nm, 870, and 940nm wavelengths with UV bandpass, visible bandpass, and long pass filters to increase the range of captured information to include UV reflectance and florescence emission images. This poster explores the ability to utilize this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Piscitelli.

The Late Preceramic Period was a time of dramatic cultural transformations in the Central Andes. At the beginning of the 3rd millennium B.C., at least 30 large, sedentary agricultural settlements with monumental architecture appeared between the Huaura and Fortaleza river valleys in a region known locally as the "Norte Chico" ("Little North"). Since the publication of Moseley’s The Foundations of Maritime Civilizations (1975), the north central coast of Peru has been viewed as an exceptional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shadab Tabatabaeian.

A plethora of ethnographic and archaeological evidence indicates a cross-cultural association of dark zones of caves with supernatural phenomena. In various geographic locations and time periods, human beings have been frequenting dark zones for ritual purposes. Regarding the unsuitable living conditions of dark zones, the following question arises: what drives humans to choose such places for practicing rituals? The answer to this question lies in the way human beings interact with dark cave...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sara Ladron De Guevara.

The deities of El Tajin seem to share a characteristic scroll eyebrow in bas reliefs as well as in mural paintings. I will follow the representation of such an icon, trying to recognize posible origins, the outreach of the element and the symbolic associations in Mesoamerican time and space.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Analise Hollingshead. Morgan Smith.

The Ryan-Harley site (8JE1004) is a Suwannee point site located in North Florida along the Wacissa River. Ryan-Harley is significant because it is the only archaeological site in the Southeast United States where diagnostic Suwannee material has been recovered in-situ within a discrete geological layer through extensive excavations. A broad faunal assemblage interpreted as dietary remains was also recovered from the same stratigraphic layer as the Suwannee material. Taxa identified include...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Grace Erny.

In this paper, I address the challenges faced by Classical archaeologists who wish to practice engaged archaeology in Greece. Two aspects of Classical archaeology’s disciplinary history are particularly important for understanding the relationship between Greek archaeology (as practiced by American archaeologists) and modern Greece: first, Greek archaeology’s early and close relationship with the ideology of Hellenism and, second, the ways in which archaeological work in Greece has intersected...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Bellorado.

The introduction of cotton tapestry weaving traditions transformed Ancestral Pueblo ritual costuming traditions in the San Juan Basin ever after. After its introduction, documenting developments and changes of cotton-weaving technologies and ceremonial garment fashions is difficult because most of the associated materials are perishable. Arid conditions at the numerous cliff dwellings occupied in the Pueblo III period (A.D. 1150-1300) have fostered the preservation of abundant evidence of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Florence.

The Central Mexican city of Teotihuacan rose to prominence in the last century BC and lasted for six centuries The civic plan was arranged around two main perpendicular avenues lined with temples and public monuments. By the third century AD, the population was housed in apartment compounds. On the walls were murals depicting ornately dressed administrators, armor-clad warriors, and fantastic creatures. These murals were the birthplace of the Feathered Serpent. My research proposes that the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Hoopes.

The history of archaeology is replete with assertions about lost tribes, sunken continents, and ancient aliens in the context of failed hypotheses, deliberate hoaxes, and intentional frauds. Williams chronicled these, in the process helping others hone skills in critical thinking. New technologies proliferate spurious explanations of the past that archaeologists must continually address. As the Talmud says, "It is not your responsibility to finish the work of perfecting the world, but you are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paula Molloy.

In his 1991 classic, Fantastic Archaeology: The Wild Side of North American Archaeology, Stephen Williams set out to document the ways in which fraud has masqueraded as truth in North American prehistory. More than just a catalog of the improbable and unfalsifiable, Fantastic Archaeology also served as gateway to scientific archaeology for many in the general public. Smitten with a "weird tale," many in the Cambridge, MA area found their way to Prof. Williams’ Harvard University course upon...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Juliet Wiersema.

Throughout the late Spanish colonial period, the Dagua River in Colombia’s Cauca Valley was a multi-cultural backwater. Its shores were inhabited by mestizos, mulattos, slaves, and free slaves, with a minority of Indians and Spaniards. While this area was mined for gold and offered one of few routes to the Pacific from Colombia’s interior, the Dagua River region was largely cut off from global trade and colonial currents due to its geographical remoteness. 50 days distant from Cartagena and 14...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Rondeau.

The CalFLUTED project has studied hundreds of Far Western fluted points allowing for a wide ranging recognition of the variability and trends in fluted point morphology, manufacturing technology, use breakage, repair and hafting techniques in the region. Conclusions are supported by study data. Discussion of the implications of those conclusions is provided.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Veronica Williams.

For Northwestern Argentina (NWA) the period between AD 1000 and 1400 represented a state of political fragmentation, conflict situations, and the emergence of hierarchies materialized in the presence of defensive settlements, iconography, war paraphernalia, and evidence of trauma on human remains. Climatic change that occurred in the Andes starting in the 13th century is one of the main causes of this regional disruption. The archaeological data from the high quebradas (ravines) of the Valle...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amber VanDerwarker. Mallory Melton. Greg Wilson.

We report on carbon and nitrogen isotope results from a total of 60 maize kernels from five sequentially-occupied sites in the Central Illinois River Valley that span the Mississippian period (AD 1100-1300). The sites span: (1) the onset of and intensification of warfare in the region; and (2) a long period of drought that eventually gave way to wetter conditions during the last 50 years of the sequence. C13 and N15 isotope values from these maize kernels provide independent support for the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Petr Kvetina. Jiri Unger.

The aim of the paper is to discuss current possibilities of complex approach to 3D virtual presentation of archaeological information, both to public and professional archaeologists. Virtual archaeology including 3D objects, reconstruction of building structures and even past landscape scenes has been for several years a standard and specific way of documentation and interpretation. However, what is currently changing is the general availability of the necessary technologies. A common feature of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Dean.

The Marana Platform Mound Site is an Early Classic period (1150-1350AD) Hohokam site in the northern Tucson basin, Arizona. It was one of many sites in the basin, part of an entire landscape that was shaped by the Hohokam people, reflecting their activities and values as a community. Faunal remains from Marana and surrounding Early Classic period communities are an excellent source of information on labor constraints, social organization, diet, microenvironments, and the cultural meaning of prey...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hannah Keller. Naomi E. Cleghorn.

Knysna Eastern Heads Cave 1 (KEH-1) demonstrates an intense occupation sequence at a site overlooking the now sub-merged Agulhas Bank during multiple ocean progressions and regressions in the late Middle Stone Age and early Later Stone Age (46,000 to 18,000 Cal BP). The site contains numerous hearth features, densely stacked within the stratigraphic section, and has yielded large amounts of fauna. Here we report for the first time on the preliminary taphonomic analysis of the fauna, based on a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Britney Elsbury-Orris.

The Kirshner Site (36WM213) is a multi-component site in South Huntington township, Westmoreland county, Pennsylvania that contains two Middle Monongahela villages. Relatively little is known about Monongahela use of animals. Fortunately, good faunal preservation has made zooarchaeological analyses of materials from this site possible. Identifying and analyzing these faunal remains with respect to taxa and skeletal elements, as well as human and animal modifications, provides important new...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Virginia Lucas. Levent Atici.

To date, there has been little research conducted concerning the faunal exploitation practices of the Lowland Virgin Branch Puebloans in Southern Nevada. This project examines faunal remains from the multi-component Steve Perkins site, which was occupied from the Basketmaker II period (A.D. 400-800) to the Pueblo II period (A.D. 1000-1150). This project aims to provide insight into the subsistence strategies and exchange economies of the Lowland Virgin Branch Puebloans. By identifying the faunal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bruce Manzano. Thomas Royster. Bernard Means. George Crothers. Robert Selden Jr..

Recent developments in 3D scanning and printing are increasingly being used in zooarchaeology. Our research takes the use of 3D technology further by attempting to develop a method that will enable the identification of bones based on 3D scans. This exploratory approach uses a series of standardized measurements on 3D scans of key skeletal elements to determine the statistical probability for the best fit of an unknown bone to known comparative materials. An example of this approach is shown in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacqueline Meier.

During the transition to agriculture in southwest Asia, patterns of settlement site use reflect a major shift in the use of space by the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period. Diverse types of sites were utilized by this time, including locales primarily for ritual activities. More studies of ritual site use are needed to clarify how space was organized and used during the Neolithic Transition. This paper presents evidence of animal selection and refuse management to investigate the intensity of site...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kasey Cole. Kelsie Hart.

The analysis of butchered archaeofaunal specimens from historic sites can lend important insight into diet, food preparation, discard practices, and socioeconomic status. In this study, we examine faunal specimens found commingled with human remains from a pit associated with a 19th century historic army hospital located in Point San Jose, California. The specific aim of this study is to relate observed butchery patterns on the faunal remains to diet and socioeconomic status at the site....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tiffany Earley-Spadoni.

This paper presents a Landscapes of Warfare case study, combining textual documentation, archeological data and GIS analysis to elucidate the effects of pervasive warfare on the development of Urartu, a highland empire that existed in the ancient Near East in the 1st Millennium BCE. Specifically, I argue that forts, fortresses and fortified settlements were strategically placed for both defensive communication as well as the systematic surveillance of roads. The paper contributes to scholarly...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jerod Roberts. Victoria Roberts. Amanda M. Castañeda. Carolyn Boyd.

The Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas is home to over 350 identified rock art sites depicting multiple styles, complexity, and intricacy. In 2017, Shumla Archaeological Research and Education Center launched the Alexandria Project, a three year mission to revisit each known rock art site in Val Verde County and perform baseline documentation, with the aim to answer overarching questions requiring a large and consistent dataset. Our documentation methods utilize Structure from Motion 3D...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Oas.

To examine relationships between social transformations and household and communal foodways, this paper draws on detailed vessel form, surface treatment, size, and deposition data from multiple settlements over a period of rapid aggregation, migration, and social change in the Cibola/Zuni region in the 13-14th centuries A.D. Foodways-the ways we produce, prepare, and consume foods-are an important part of human society and culture, and play a vital role in making and maintaining social...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sean Coughlin. Kelly Sellers Wittie.

In 2014 R. Christopher Goodwin& Associates, Inc., completed the analysis of the faunal remains from archaeological data recovery at the Colton School site (16OR562), Orleans Parish, Louisiana. Analysis of faunal remains from the site revealed a propensity for beef rather than pork, a finding that contrasts Sam Bowers Hilliard’s statement on eating trends in the American South ca. 1860 as presented in his 1972 book Hog Meat and Hoecake. This article presents the result of this analysis and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa-Marie Shillito. Helen Mackay. Ian Bull. Mike Parker-Pearson.

The Feeding Stonehenge project combined zooarchaeology with pottery residue analysis to explore the diets and provisioning of the inhabitants of Neolithic Durrington Walls, the settlement associated with the construction of the iconic Stonehenge monument in southern Britain. A lack of preserved plant remains at the site, and an overwhelming dominance of porcine and ruminant lipids in the pottery, suggests that animal products were the major source of nutrition. This research tests this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Roderick B. Salisbury. Katharina Rebay-Salisbury. Doris Pany-Kucera. Julie Dunne.

Small vessels with spouts, from which liquid can be poured, are known from settlements and graves of the European Bronze and Iron Ages. Sizes, shapes and decorations are highly variable, and although they generally fit the period-specific style, they represent a functional type. One explanation for this vessel form is libation – the act of pouring a liquid as a sacrifice to a deity. Recent discoveries, however, reinforce an association with children’s graves and suggest a function as feeding...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sean Dunham.

The practice of archaeological site reconnaissance falls within the western scientific tradition and relies on consistent methodology, precise measurement, and sampling strategies. However, there is also an experiential element to archaeological survey in which practitioners consciously and unconsciously observe patterns in the field that lead them to hunches or gut feelings that drift beyond quantifiable, empirical observation. While such hunches are occasionally crafted into hypotheses, they...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julia Guernsey. Andrew D. Turner. Michael Love.

Pedestal sculptures featuring supernatural felines with cacao drupes projecting from their foreheads dotted the Late Formative landscape of the Pacific slope and adjacent Guatemalan Highlands. In this paper we consider the implications of the replication of this sculptural form, its role in articulating an elite agenda linked to the production of cacao, and its pertinence to sites of varying scale and relative regional authority. A similar suite of meanings engaged with cacao and supernatural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Philip Arnold.

Great is the conflation of Ehecatl Quetzalcoatl and Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl: a mythical player in the world creation of Mesoamerican groups vs. a semi-historical personage who presaged the arrival of Hernán Cortés. Veracruz, a region implicated via the activities of both avatars, is particularly enmeshed in this duality. The Postclassic narrative whereby Quetzalcoatl journeyed to the Gulf lowlands appears to be foreshadowed in the desacralization of Teotihuacan’s Feathered Serpent Pyramid at the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Guy Duke. Sarah Rowe. Brandi Reger.

During excavations at the Valdivia site of Buen Suceso, Ecuador, in 2017 we recovered a number of figurines. Using in-field photogrammetry and post-field processing, we have created digital 3D models of these figurines. For us, the purpose of photogrammetric models is: 1) to facilitate comparisons across assemblages by a variety of scholars, and 2) for use in public education and outreach. While the creation of 3D images via photogrammetry is becoming more common in archaeological practice, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kaila Akina.

In this paper, I investigate the intersections between ritual, belief, and practice at Iosepa, Utah, a historic townsite built by diasporic Polynesian members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). In 1889, the LDS Church assisted approximately 50 Polynesian LDS to establish and relocate to Iosepa for 28 years before disbanding the settlement in 1917. I explore how the Church leadership and the Polynesian LDS created and actively negotiated the landscape of Iosepa into a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dylan Davis.

As a resource, the archaeological record is finite and remains largely incomplete. Within the context of Southeastern American archaeology, the incompleteness of the record can be seen in the study of shell rings. Many unidentified shell rings exist in the archaeological record, and their detection remains difficult – even with remote sensing techniques – due to the fact that many are located under heavily forested canopies. However, with the use of object-based image analysis (OBIA), such...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Grant Coffey. Mark Varien.

The expansion of the Chacoan regional system into Southwestern Colorado was relatively late compared to other areas, occurring for the most part from A.D. 1080 to 1140. This poster examines this late expansion by focusing on Chaco-style great houses located in the Great Sage Plain of southwestern Colorado. Information on these Chacoan sites has been compiled during a series of projects that began in the late 1980s and continued with 2017 fieldwork during the Community Center Reassessment...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arlen Chase. Diane Chase.

Excavations within various locales at Caracol, Belize have recovered artifactual materials on the floors of epicentral stone buildings that were associated with the latest occupation of the site epicenter. These deposits are the result of both "de facto" refuse and rapid short-term abandonment processes. In many cases, complete vessels and other artefactual remains were recovered from the floors of Caracol’s epicentral buildings. Other terminal deposits comprise thin sheet-like layers of broken...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John K. Millhauser.

Studies of technological change often leave unasked how people finance their adoption of new technologies, focusing instead on concepts of risk and uncertainty. The means of finance—whether by surplus production, saving, assuming debt, sharing costs, or other mechanisms—depends on the particulars of the economy in question and can have systemic and long-term consequences for adopters. To show why finance matters in explanations of technological change and how archaeologists can study it, this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sara L. Gonzalez.

In the language of self-determination, an indigenous archaeology is an expression of the sovereignty of a tribal nation to determine how its heritage will be cared for, now and into the future. Tribes, however, encounter several capacity-related challenges in developing tribally-specific heritage management plans. These challenges include the lack of funding for tribal historic preservation and repatriation, shortage of qualified staff, and, most significantly, operating within a heritage...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patrick Roberts.

Archaeology provides a truly long-term record of anthropogenic landscape interactions and human responses to environmental change. Such a record is particularly important in tropical settings that contain some of the most threatened terrestrial ecosystems in the world today. However, poor preservation and assumed human avoidance have meant that past records of human behaviour have been patchy for these biomes. Here, I review how new methodologies and archaeological interest has enriched datasets...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lewis Borck. Corinne L. Hofman. Manfred Schäfer. Angus A. A. Mol. Daniel Weidele.

This paper uses the Nexus 1492 database, built over approximately 30 years of fieldwork, to examine ceramic attribute variability throughout the Antillean Islands. Regional ceramic analyses often focus on the construction of ceramic typologies that are then used to compare typological proportions, differences, and similarities at various spatial resolutions across temporal periods. Long-standing critiques of the use of typologies and taxonomies in archaeology (sensu Brew 1946; Gnecco and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dianna Doucette. Elizabeth Chilton. David Foster. Deena Duranleau. Evan Taylor.

The concept that Native Americans were using fire for wide spread vegetation control and subsistence procurement during the pre-contact period in Southern New England has long been excepted as common practice, leading to changes in the landscape and then settlement patterns. However, save for the accounts of early explorers and colonists, whose goal was to solicit the "new land" as a familiar landscape and not an unknown wilderness, there is little supporting scientific evidence. This paper...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Hlubik. Russell Cutts. David R. Braun. Francesco Berna. Craig Feibel.

The Cooking Hypothesis contends that fire use became common in the Early Pleistocene and was part of a suite of characters that were associated with the appearance of Homo erectus. The morphological changes associated with H. erectus support this hypothesis. Archaeological evidence for the control of fire in this time period is generally sparse, and arguments for controlled fire at early sites have been controversial. Here we present evidence for fire use by early hominins at the open-air site...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Danielle Dozier.

In the 1840s, Florida was a large part of the trade and shipping networks of the Southeast United States. The Gulf coastal town of Apalachicola became the third largest port in Florida. This poster presents the archaeological evidence of a storefront located along Water Street in Apalachicola, Florida, built in 1837 and burned in 1844. The entire market place comprised of stores, clerk offices, and cotton warehouses, with this particular property (8FR1318) being B.S. Hawley’s store. Nineteenth-...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Adler.

Ash deposits are commonly associated with site disuse and termination deposits across the Ancestral Pueblo region of the American Southwest. This paper contextualizes the use of fire, and fire-related products, as part of a larger suite of practices employed to protect past, present and future occupants of villages from malevolent "others" across the pre-colonial northern Rio Grande region.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kimberlee Moran. Anna Dhody. Ani Hatza. George Leader. Ann Marie Mires.

In November of 2016, the Philadelphia Inquirer published an article about bones found at a construction site at 218 Arch Street. As a private project, no city office would take charge of the human remains despite the fact that construction equipment was exposing and damaging them. The Mutter Institute, as a collaborative research organization associated with the study of historic human remains, approached the property developer with an interest to learn more about the bones found at the site....

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Clinnick.

Hallam Movius proposed that the Lower Palaeolithic cultures of East Asia and SE Asia were derived from a different cultural trajectory than that of Europe and Africa. The chopper-chopping tool complex of East and SE Asia was argued to be more primitive in many aspects. The type-site assemblages of the Pacitanian and Tampanian cultures are two out of only five assemblages that Movius initially used to define the chopper-chopping tool complex. The Pacitanian was first discovered by Michael Tweedie...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lauren Woelkers. Jay D. Franklin.

We analyze lithic flaking debris from transitional terminal Pleistocene and early Holocene layers at Rock Creek Mortar Shelter, a multicomponent site on the Upper Cumberland Plateau (UCP), Pickett County, Tennessee. Blades, blade-like flakes, and two blade core fragments are among the lithics recovered from these contexts. Because these transitional-looking assemblages were recovered from early Holocene contexts, we believe they potentially represent groups of early Archaic peoples who were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mercedes Okumura. Rafael Suárez.

The early occupation of Southeastern South America (including Uruguay and Southern Brazil) is an issue that has generated interest in American archaeology. Recent research in Uruguay indicates to the presence of two different designs of projectile points manufactured during the early settlement: Tigre (ca. 12,000-11,100 cal BP) and Pay Paso (ca 11,080-10,200 cal BP), recovered in archaeological sites with chronological and stratigraphic control in the Uruguay River. Given the potential use of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeremy Wilson. Elizabeth Kryder-Reid. Fiona McDonald. Paul Mullins.

Arriving in 2004, Larry Zimmerman made an immediate impact on our department, university, and the surrounding community, serving as one of the first public scholars of civic engagement at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis. In this talk we reflect on his influence on our research programs and students, the fostering of collaborations with the community and local organizations, and the establishment of our institution’s Native American Studies Program. Over 14 years, Larry...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel McTavish.

Globally, fish are recovered from archaeological contexts, but often a thorough analysis for how fish were processed is often overlooked due to time constraints or a lack of attention paid when examining a faunal assemblage. While the butchering of medium to large mammals is often undertaken as part of a zooarchaeological analysis, fish bones are often ignored or cut marks missed. This can be due to a variety of factors, including limited time and varying levels of expertise. This project...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Moore.

Excavations conducted in 2015-2016 at the Great Neck site (44VB7) in Virginia Beach yielded evidence of a Middle Woodland occupation dating to AD 400. Located on Wolfsnare Creek approximately one mile from the Chesapeake Bay, the site contained a postmold pattern from a small structure, many small and shallow basin-shaped features, and several large pit features. Two of the larger pit features exhibited excellent bone preservation and were densely filled with a mix of aquatic and terrestrial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peiyu Chen. Ali Altamirano-Sierra. Carlos Osores Mendives. Jhon Cruz Quiñones.

By studying fauna and botanic remains unearthed from Huaca Negra Archaeological Project, this presentation seeks to understand subsistence system and daily life in Late Preceramic Period, and how it might have changed in later Initial Period. Huaca Negra is a fishing village located in the northwest of the Virú Valley and is 1.2 kilometers from the current shoreline. The site was occupied between 5,000-3,200 CalBP, from Late Preceramic Period to Initial Period, which witnessed the transitions...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Liz Southard.

Fishing economies are often described as a principal form of subsistence for prehistoric Florida communities. However, seasonality analyses on fish remains, which have the potential to reveal patterns pertaining to population aggregations and the pace of construction projects, are generally underutilized. This research uses marginal increment analysis of otoliths (fish ear-stones) to investigate whether seasonal deposition events were taking place at two Woodland period sites: the Crystal River...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine A. Hastorf.

Archaeobotanists find herbaceous plants in their collected macrobotanical collections regularly. Usually they are associated with animal fodder and fuel. But what if they were condiments? Recently there has been more information on wild herbaceous plants and insects as part of rural people’s cuisines. These oft-hidden ingredients should be recalled when taxa lists are studied, as some could have been important if rarely used spices and flavoring ingredients. We see, for example, that some...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Evin Grody. Darryl Wilkinson.

Investigating how the presence and use of herded domesticates shaped life and the landscape in the Rio Grande gorge, this paper draws on a particular case study to explore the interactions between the endemic and the introduced within colonial herding practices. One strand of analysis will involve zooarchaeological and taphonomic data from colonial domestic contexts—predominantly based upon excavated midden deposits from selected sites in the Embudo Valley. This will be coupled with a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Coutros.

The first millennium BC was a period of dramatic social and environmental change throughout West Africa. Along the Middle Senegal Valley (MSV), communities experienced rapid and dramatic changes to biospheric conditions accompanied by largescale technological, social, and economic reorganizations. On the western edge of the MSV, the inhabitants of the Diallowali site system developed a network of flexible institutions capable of maintaining a thriving community throughout this turbulent period....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Bradbury. Philip Carr.

The manufacture of stone tools in the present and careful recording of resulting flake debris over the past thirty years typified middle range theory building and allowed new insights into past human behavior, especially regarding mobility systems. Walter Klippel, best known for contributions to zooarchaeology, encouraged our going down a rocky path of middle-range theory building. Flintknapping experimentation has generated a great deal of individual data sets but the promise of "big data"...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Clark Erickson. Shimon Wdowinski. Jonathan Thayn. Rex Rowley. Jedidiah Dale.

Exploitation and control of wetland resources was a major strategy of early sedentary peoples in many areas of the world. In some cases, indigenous knowledge about flood pluses and water dynamics and anthropogenic transformation of waterscapes increased to the point where some wetlands were transformed into domesticated landscapes. Analysis and interpretations of relevant radar (TerraSAR-X, ALOS SAR-X, Sentinel-1), multispectral (Landsat ETM and ETM+, ASTER), DEMs (SRTM, ASTER) satellite and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hilda Lozano Bravo. Jose Luis Ruvalcaba. Ana Maria Soler. Luis Alberto Barba.

Human beings have modified surfaces to make them habitable, with time they made other floors to give it a better finish. The process was recorded in the floors interiors; we can observe the materials used in its elaboration and how they changed through time. Additionally, we can conduct other studies which help us understand the time-frame between structures. Floors are a complex material and their study helps us identify social aspects seen in past studies of other materials such as ceramics,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Thulman.

Paleoindian points from Florida are different from the rest of the Southeast. Instrument-assisted fluting was never adopted, and Florida produced some apparently post-Clovis forms that are unlike any elsewhere. Several attempts have been made to sort out the myriad forms. This attempt uses landmark-based geometric morphometrics to more objectively distinguish fluted point forms.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charles Golden. Alejandra Roche Recinos. Andrew Scherer.

Scholars considering Classic period Maya economies have long viewed acquisition, production, and trade primarily through the dual lenses of tribute to royal courts and barter among the populace. Recent archaeological discoveries and theoretical models have broadened our perspective to allow the Classic Maya the marketplaces and market economies that were once believed to be innovations of Postclassic Mesoamerica. Yet, we still know little about notions of currency, value, and debt – well...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Natalia Eguez. Carolina Mallol.

Traditionally, coprolite identification in archaeology has been limited to hyenids, the most well-preserved and recognizable fossilized faeces, although non-hyena carnivore coprolites are also present in some Pleistocene deposits displaying a wide range of morphological variation (e.g., elongate, spherical, globular, sub-cylindrical, oval, tubular). Common micromorphological characteristics of these different excrements are the appearance of an amorphous phosphatic, optically isotropic and, a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Lothrop. Christopher Ellis.

Recent syntheses for the adjacent glaciated regions of the eastern Great Lakes (EGL) and New England-Maritimes (NEM) document similar fluted point sequences associated with early and middle Paleoindian populations. Current consensus holds that these fluted biface sequences fall within a time range of 13,000-11,600 calendar years before present, and probably derive from Clovis populations (or their immediate descendants) that colonized the glaciated landscapes of the Northeast from west and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Vibeke Vandrup Martens. Michel Vorenhout.

In conjunction with a large urban infrastructure project, renewing the Norwegian railroad through the listed monument of the Medieval town of Oslo, an environmental monitoring programme was established. The Medieval town consists of extensive archaeological remains preserved in situ. The monitoring programme focusses on the following questions: What is the influence of building an encased railroad next to a medieval monument? How are the unsaturated conditions influenced next to the new...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine Halling. Ryan Seidemann.

Louisiana is known for its historic and iconic cemeteries which feature above ground monuments, vaults, and tombs. However, equal numbers of cemeteries are in-ground, and are often lost or forgotten. Due to the accessibility of the above-ground cemeteries, these spaces make for easy targets of vandalism, are used for religious worship, impede construction efforts, and become impacted by natural disasters. The in-ground cemeteries are often encountered in urban development and during disaster...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Brown.

Wilderness areas are generally managed as unpeopled landscapes, in the words of the Wilderness Act, "an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain." However, wilderness areas do have human histories, and these historical narratives and the archaeological record they left behind can greatly enrich the visitor experience. In the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northeastern Minnesota, visitors portage canoes...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Adams. Susan Smith.

Field schools run by Chuck Adams and Rich Lange introduced students to many archaeological disciplines. Together an archaeobotanist and a palynologist pulled students into the world of plants via introductory lectures on plant macrofossils and microfossils. Hands-on activities then focused on learning the important plant resources currently available. Student pairs were sent into three different plant communities to collect samples of all the different plants they encountered. When re-assembled...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lindi Masur.

This paper presents the results of a paleoethnobotanical analysis of the early Late Woodland (A.D. 1000–1300) Western Basin Tradition (WBT) sites informally known as the Arkona Cluster. Relatively little is known about WBT human-plant interaction as compared to their maize-bean-squash cultivating Iroquoian neighbors. Culture-historical models of the WBT are proving to be outdated, overemphasizing the supposed difference between WBT ‘hunter-gatherer’ subsistence strategies and Iroquoian farming....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Logan. Dela Kuma.

Food is an integral part of how people interact with landscape, and tasks associated with food production, preparation, and consumption are often strongly gendered. Using gendered taskscapes (Logan and Cruz 2014) as a starting point, we forward the notion of foodscape as a lens through which to see the varied and multi-scalar forms that gender may take on a landscape. Using case studies from both ancient and modern West Africa, we examine how tracing food production, preparation, and consumption...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Kooiman.

A novel combination of analytic methods is used to address the decades-long debate about diachronic subsistence pattern change during the Woodland period (AD 1 – 1600) in the Upper Great Lakes of North America. While some have argued for dietary continuity throughout the regional Woodland, others maintain that certain specific resources—including fish, wild starchy plants, and/or maize—were more intensively exploited over time. The Cloudman site (20CH6), located on an island off Michigan’s...