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

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Chadwick.

Graduate and undergraduate students from the course "Geophysical Applications in Archaeology" conduct a geophysical survey related to a potential archaeological site or cemetery each year. The survey is undertaken as a final small group project composed of two to three students. The purpose of the survey is to determine if there is geophysical evidence of potentially buried archaeological features or burials within the survey area. Each individual group surveys a single 20mX20m geophysical grid...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Renner. Ralph Hartley. William Hunt.

In 2013 an intensive archaeological survey of a portion of northern Baranof Island in southeast Alaska, focusing on the slope and crest of Cross Peak Mountain, resulted in the discovery and documentation of fifty loose rock "cairns" estimated to have been constructed 500 – 1500ypb. These prehistoric alpine features, overlooking the intersection of Hoonah Sound and Peril Strait, are often associated with stories and narrative referencing the "Flood" by Tlingit people from both Sitka and Hoonah...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paige Paulsen.

The tumulus fields – landscapes heavily modified by monumental burial mounds – of Central Anatolia provide an opening to investigate how the tumuli reflect and create places of collective memory, territorial identity, and the social order. This project takes the Iron Age tumuli of the Kanak Su Basin in Yozgat, Turkey as a case study and uses a GIS approach based on available evidence: their location from archaeological surveys, and a small number of excavated mounds. This paper investigates the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lindsey Cochran.

This project uses geospatial landscape theory to explore how enslaved people living in settlements on the Sapelo Plantation signaled their African and Caribbean roots through overt and covert materials and landscape patterns in Bush Camp Field and Behavior settlements. Enslaved people at the Sapelo Plantation were likely granted higher levels of relative independence, resulting in a different relationship with the landscape than enslaved people at contemporaneous lowcountry plantations. I...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Elliott. Michael Seibert.

Archaeologists with the LAMAR Institute and the National Park Service collaborated in an ambitious undertaking to characterize the elemental composition of round ball ammunition from early historic sites. Researchers used portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) technology to sample the elemental content of over 500 round balls from more than 17 different archaeological sites in eastern North America. These include samples from Native American and Euro-American settlements as well as French and Indian...

DOCUMENT Citation Only F. Kirk Halford.

Following the 50th anniversary of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 (NHPA), we are compelled to take both a retrospective and introspective view of the NHPA, and in particular the implementation of Section 106. Though making great strides, Section 106, the primary driver of Cultural Resource Management (CRM), is still boxed in by rote inventory and unimaginative interpretation and implementation. This paper will suggest ways we can break out of the box through better data...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jillian Swift.

Advances in zooarchaeological method and theory, increased attention to the recovery and analysis of microfaunal remains, and multidisciplinary collaborative research have generated increasingly nuanced understandings of past human-animal relationships. This paper provides a brief introduction to archaeological investigations of commensal fauna, highlighting the myriad ways that research focused on the commensal niche sheds new light on past societies and ecosystems. A case study from Makangale...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erik R. Otárola-Castillo.

The environment has a strong influence on the evolutionary ecology of hunter-gatherer foraging. Studies of prehistoric hunter-gatherers have often made hypotheses regarding the effect of climate on foraging strategies, but have rarely tested those hypotheses. The absence of explicit hypothesis testing has been partly due to a dearth of operationalized paleoenvironmental variables. Although paleoenvironmental reconstructions have been abundant, particularly those based on pollen, they have mostly...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wendy Sutton.

In 1924 the Gila Wilderness was established. Ideas of what wilderness is have changed since then, particularly with the passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964. On the Gila National Forest these changes are reflected in changing wilderness boundaries and management strategies. Wilderness boundaries were re-drawn to exclude man-made features, some constructed by the CCC after designation. Historic and prehistoric sites associated with the wilderness, both within and immediately outside of it (and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Murphy.

Desert environments pose challenging conditions to human travel in the form of exposure to intense weather and access to important water sources. Environmental constraints of the desert can explain people’s decisions to consider energy-efficient modes of travel through the framework of Human Behavioral Ecology. Culture, however, does not always follow the model of Human Behavioral Ecology, even in environments posing challenges that require efficient ways of living. Cultural knowledge, beliefs,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brendon Murray. Patrick Mullins. Brian Billman.

The site of Galindo was a major center of the Southern Moche Region during the Late Moche Period (600-900 A.D.) and represents an important temporal transition between Moche-style polities and the Chimú Empire in the Moche Valley. During Galindo’s occupation, monumental construction shifted from adobe mound complexes to walled administrative centers known as cercaduras, suggesting a possibly larger socio-political change in how political power was being negotiated by elites. Working off of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edwin Harris. Christopher T. Fisher.

The growing adoption of LiDAR for archaeological analysis makes determining how ancient peoples modified, interacted and moved through the landscape more practical. Initial analysis of the LiDAR produced imagery covering the Postclassic (1000-1520 CE) Purépecha site of Angamuco, located in the Lake Pátzcuaro Basin of Michoacán, Mexico showed a highly urbanized multi-nucleated settlement sprawled across 26km2 of an ancient lava flow, with a complex urban structure. Here I discuss the results from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Harris. Jason Toohey. Kirk Scheffler.

The Cajamarca Valley of northern Peru has seen changing settlement patterns throughout its nearly 12,000 year human occupation. Although several archaeological surveys have taken place in and around the basin over the past 70 years, this is the first project to apply the tools of Geographic Information Systems to this existing settlement data. This region-scale analysis is a significant addition to the traditional archaeological research in Cajamarca which has focused largely on the excavation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dario Guiducci. Ariane Burke.

The large-scale colonization of unfamiliar environments by Late Pleistocene humans would have required advanced navigational abilities. Archaeological signatures of spatial cognition are difficult to identify in Prehistory, although the presence of well-dated sites can help us track human mobility across the landscape. In this research, we test whether structural properties of the environment played an important role in helping humans navigate new landscapes, providing affordances for wayfinding...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Haylie Ferguson.

In this study I analyzed the pattern of settlement for known Medio period (A.D. 1200–1450) sites in the Casas Grandes region of Chihuahua, Mexico. Locational data acquired from survey projects in the Casas Grandes region were evaluated within a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) framework to reveal patterns in settlement and site distribution. Environmental and cultural variables such as elevation, topographic aspect, slope, soil, distance to nearest water, and distance to nearest known...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Bracewell.

This paper considers post-sedentism in hunter-gatherers: how the fact of having previously been sedentary affects the behaviour of societies that increase their mobility in response to changing environmental conditions. The case-study in question is the transition in Northern Finland from a sedentary Sub-Neolithic, supported by high concentrations of marine resources in the river estuaries of the region, to an increasingly mobile adaptation in the Early Metal and Iron Ages. Although village...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mesfer Alqahtani.

The theme of the poster will address archaeological phenomena in the north of Saudi Arabia. The archaeological phenomena are stone-built structures that can be seen by satellite images. These stone-built structures have various types, and one of them is the circle type. The poster will show the method of creating predictive models of stone circles by using the Geographic Information System (GIS). To create these models, two zones from the north of Saudi Arabia should be selected: study zone and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nuno Bicho. Célia Gonçalves. João Cascalheira.

The case of the Portuguese Muge shellmounds (Tagus valley, central Portugal), and specifically the case of the Cabeço da Amoreira site, is one of the most interesting regions to study the last hunter-gatherers in Western Europe. However, these sites, are very large with long and complicated sequences and, until recently, had very little excavation control and thus data were not appropriate for spatial analyses. During the last decade, our team used new and precise excavation techniques resulting...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandre Tokovinine.

This paper considers textual and visual evidence of debt among Classic Maya nobles. It begins with an overview of lexical data and summarizes specific references to payment and accounting. The argument proceeds to some less obvious contexts such as ‘just-so’ myths, which reveal a notion of primordial transactions and gifts to be repaid in perpetuity. Finally, the paper considers the movement of inscribed objects. The argument is that giving those essentially inalienable possessions marked...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Vander Heiden.

Patent medicine bottles offer a window into the popular culture of 19th Century America and highlight the ways in which otherwise isolated populations were connected into broader social and economic networks. Settlers on the Wisconsin frontier in the mid-to-late 19th century had limited access to formal health care. Physicians who did provide services to remote populations were often poorly trained and had a limited understanding of the causes of many diseases. Thus, self-medication and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joseph Tiffany. Shirley J. Schermer.

One of Larry Zimmerman’s lasting contributions to archaeology is his research on the Central Plains tradition Glenwood culture in southwest Iowa. New site seriations, AMS radiocarbon dating, and site modeling utilizing GIS, all address fundamental assumptions derived from Zimmerman’s research in the 1970s. The current model proposes a short-term occupation consisting primarily of dispersed farmsteads and possibly two or three unfortified house clusters in the Glenwood locality. Site location is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Delle.

In the late 18th century, the British colony of Jamaica entered the first of its several boom periods in coffee production. A highly addictive product that was at the time primarily a luxury good for a small domestic market, overproduction on the island resulted in attempts by the coffee industry to expand their markets in Great Britain and the European continent to the middle and working classes. Meanwhile, the rush to get coffee to the market resulted in a rapid expansion in the number and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amber Johnson. Rudolf Cesaretti. Christina Collins. Peter Turchin.

Understanding variation in the stability and productivity of subsistence strategies is fundamental to explaining patterns of variation in long-term human demography. This poster addresses under what conditions societies intensify food production at both global and regional scales using frameworks ranging from relatively abstract environmental measures to models based on detailed historical and archaeological data relating to agricultural productivity. At a global scale, the combination of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Wilcox.

The production of Gobernador Polychrome Pottery by the Navajo people, is entangled in many social and material negotiations of survivance. Its production in the Dinetah Region of New Mexico, during the late Seventeenth and early Eighteenth century place it in a time of Native resistance to Spanish colonization in Northern New Mexico. This resistance, in the form of a pan-Indian uprising, the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, sets the stage in which the production of Gobernador Polychrome emerged and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Collar.

Understanding our past needs more than the long lens of nodes, links, and centrality measures: archaeology is bound to people’s things and people’s places. Although network analysis is concerned with relationships, it has not yet been harnessed to approach the meaning, memory and emotion encoded in our relationships with things and places. We must address this by ensuring that our network analyses incorporate these aspects of lived experience and make meaningful contributions to advancing the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Galban.

The National Museum of the American Indian and its predecessor, the Museum of the American Indian, have long suffered a reputation for poorly documented collections. Assuming that documentation never existed or was at some point discarded; researchers have been largely unable to take full advantage of the scientific and research value of NMAI collections. In 2010, NMAI staff began a project to overturn this reputation. By retroactively implementing an accession lot system and creating virtual...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ismael Sánchez-Morales. Kayla Worthey. Guadalupe Sánchez.

El Fin del Mundo is a Clovis site with multiple activity areas located in the Sonoran Desert of Northwest Mexico. The site contains the only gomphothere (Cuvieronius sp.)-Clovis association yet known in North America and has produced one of the largest assemblages of diagnostic Clovis stone tools south of the US-Mexico border. Zooarchaeological and taphonomic analyses indicate that Locality 1 preserves the remains of two gomphotheres, aged to approximately 2 years and 8-19 years old, and that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maline Werness-Rude. Kaylee Spencer.

Ancient Maya architecture tends to follow predictable patterns. Many structures have a single, clear façade, for instance, conceptualized as a literal face. Northern sites, with their toothy-jawed monster buildings, express this idea with particular directness. Stairways and sculptural adjuncts, like altars and stelae, are integral elements that contribute to the idea of facing, both literally and metaphorically, and, as such, are critical to the visual identity of many Maya sites. With a few...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ralph Koziarski.

New Market is a small community in Frederick County, Maryland, whose origins and early nineteenth century economic peak are tied to travel and trade, on the National Turnpike. Following the development of the B&O railroad during the mid-nineteenth century, use of the turnpike declined, subsequently shrinking the town’s economy. Excavations sponsored by the Maryland State Highways Administration have recovered datasets from two properties in New Market. Identified components include a late...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Devlin Gandy. David Robinson.

In rock art research the stratigraphy of a rock art panel can offer great insight into the temporality of a panel, which can then inform many other aspects of analytical inquiry. Yet, making the necessary distinctions between elements is often difficult--as images fade and are worn by time, or the subjective nuances of the recorder. This paper explores novel means of identifying, defining, and separating unique rock art elements in digital space within different digital methodologies.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebekah Truhan.

A powerful function of GIS is to look at spatial distributions of different components of settlement systems. During the Woodland Period, there appears to have been fundamental changes in economic and social organization, during the transition from hunting and gathering to substantial dependence on maize agriculture. Increasing dependence on maize agriculture appears to be correlated with increases in population and number of sites in the Late Woodland. What is less clear is the relationship...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Mierswa. Crystina Friese. Meghan Howey.

The Oyster River watershed in New Hampshire was home to some of the earliest English colonial occupation outside of Boston with settlements starting in the early 1630s. This early colonial occupation as well as subsequent historic settlement of the area has left an extensive array of archaeological features in the landscape. Currently, however, this landscape is heavily forested making identification of even remnant built sites difficult. The forested setting makes it particularly hard to find...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Seikel. Rachel Feit. Jon Budd.

Ethnohistoric accounts and archaeological evidence show that North American Indigenous hunter gatherers utilized fats and oils rendered from smashing and boiling faunal bone for dietary and other uses. In the archaeological record, evidence of bone grease extraction is interpreted from fractured faunal remains recovered from midden deposits and thermal features. However, most archaeological studies of bone grease extraction tend to focus on subsistence to the exclusion of other uses. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Donna Glowacki. Kyle Bocinsky.

The Mesa Verde uplift has long been noted for its relative lack of great houses, notwithstanding its geographic position between Aztec and the Great Sage Plain. The notable exception has been Farview House, which has great house attributes, but not all regional archaeologists have agreed that it qualified as one. Yet, the Chaco period (950-1150 CE, also known as the Pueblo II period) was of the densest periods of occupation on the Mesa Verde uplift, which at that time also had a higher...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ilean Isaza. Eric Vrba.

The islands of the Coiba National Park (CNP) are located on the continental platform of Panama and the southeastern fringes of the Greater Chiriquí cultural region. During the period of the earliest human migrations to the isthmus (ca. 13,000 - 10,000 a.P.) these islands were connected to the mainland, although the current state of research cannot provide evidence of being inhabited earlier than ca. 1800 B.P. Multidisciplinary research aimed to study the long-term impacts of human on the insular...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lin Foxhall.

This paper investigates the political and economic landscapes of Greek ‘colonization’, using as a case study the upland and lowland landscapes investigated by survey and excavation by the Bova Marina Archaeological Project. The study region lies between two neighbouring ancient Greek city-states, Rhegion and Locri Epizephyrii, established in the late 8th-7th century BCE. Ancient classical texts present a picture of deep, long-term hostility between them, as well as with the indigenous...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zhuang Lina. Lin Liugen. Gan Huiyuan.

The Shunshanji and Hanjing sites are located in the northern part of the middle reaches of the Huaihe River, in Sihong county, Jiangsu Province, China. The two sites date to 8500-7700BP, the middle Neolithic period of China, and the distance between them is about 5 kilometers. Charred rice was recovered during flotation at both sites, and domesticated rice spikelet bases were found in a unit of the Hanjing site. Meanwhile, we revealed some features related to cultivation activities. All the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacquelynn Miller. Alice R. Kelley. Joseph T. Kelley. Daniel Belknap. Arthur Spiess.

The analysis of shell midden extent and thickness typically requires expensive and time-consuming excavation. Additionally, widely spaced test units provide limited and discontinuous stratigraphic information. Ground-penetrating radar (GPR) survey, in combination with stratigraphic information from limited excavation, can serve as a powerful tool for making rapid cultural resource management decisions. Although processing and correlating the data requires several days of additional time, this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Blitz. Lisa LeCount.

Understanding the political economy of ancient Maya communities requires reconstructing the forms and scales of exchange, the articulated nature of exchange modes, and the degree to which elites controlled commoner access to goods. These issues are examined at the site of Actuncan, Belize, by documenting the chronology, morphology, raw material, and social context of a large sample of groundstone manos and metates distributed across structures ranging from a palace to large houses to patio...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicaela Cartagena. Sheldon Skaggs. Mike Lawrence. Terry Powis.

The archaeological site of Pacbitun is one of the ancient sites that was inhabited by the Maya for approximately two thousand years. It is located in west central Belize near the modern Maya village of San Antonio. In 2011, investigations in the periphery of the site core revealed a small group of mounds, of which one contained evidence of groundstone production. This group, designated as the Tzib Group, was targeted because one of the mounds, labelled Mano Mound, yielded numerous mano fragments...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Bauer.

This paper examines the history of medieval (circa 500-1600 CE) agricultural infrastructure—assemblages of soils, irrigation wells, and processing facilities—in the semi-arid conditions of the Raichur Doab, Southern India. Despite some investiture from ruling elites and temples, the material evidence for agro-infrastructural development suggests that it was not merely a project of state or institutional design. Rather, its development might more productively be characterized as a process of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nerissa Russell.

Dogs often occupy a spiritually ambiguous position in human-animal relations. Domestic but not livestock, they typically share human space and diet more than most herd animals. They are more likely to be considered persons, with souls – a trait they share with wild animals. Here I examine the spiritual status of dogs in early Near Eastern herding societies, as livestock-keeping spread through the region and it became possible to situate dogs in relation to other domestic animals as well as wild...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gibránn Becerra. Lourdes Budar.

Los sitios localizados sobre la planicie costera y en el pie de monte de los volcanes de Santa Marta y San Martín Pajapan, en el sur de Veracruz, se caracterizan por la presencia de arquitectura monumental, grandes áreas domésticas, sitios acondicionados como estaciones portuarias, talleres de artefactos de basalto en formato pequeño y posiblemente áreas de cultivo. En el periodo de mayor ocupación (650-1000 dC.) los terrenos bajos estaban totalmente ocupados, por lo que el asentamiento comenzó...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jose Canziani.

La diversidad de zonas ecológicas que caracterizan a los Andes Centrales, dio lugar desde los procesos iniciales de poblamiento al despliegue de diferentes modos de vida, que se generaron en la interacción de los grupos humanos con estas distintas condiciones de existencia. El territorio es una construcción social que incorpora la historia de las transformaciones del paisaje, y las sociedades modelan su identidad cultural, memoria y cosmovisión en este profundo proceso de habitar el paisaje....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michelle Drapeau. Jesseca Paquette.

Early hominins, such as australopithecines, are characterized by bipedality and enlarged posterior teeth. Originally, these traits were thought to be adaptations to an open environment. However, discoveries of older hominins, such as Ardipithecus that were possibly only occasionally bipedal and did not have enlarged teeth, have refocused the origins of early hominins within a much more closed, wooded setting. Even the later australopithecines are currently cast as inhabitants of mosaic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lorena Medina Martínez. Raúl Barrera Rodríguez.

Entre los años 2009 y 2010 el Programa de Arqueología Urbana (PAU) del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH), llevó a cabo excavaciones en el predio de Guatemala 16 del centro histórico de la Ciudad de México. Durante dichas excavaciones se encontró parte de uno de los templos del recinto sagrado, el templo dedicado al dios del viento, Ehecatl; más tarde, entre el 2016 y 2017el PAU concluyó la excavación y restauración de dicho edificio. Como resultado de estos trabajos se han...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yong Jun Kim. Nilesh Jadhav. Eun Jin Woo. Dong Hoon Shin. Vasant Shinde.

The number of Harappan cemeteries so far systematically surveyed is far less than that of contemporary settlements. Necropolis site at Rakhigarhi (India) was reported earlier but in small scale investigation. Our investigation for the last three seasons (2013 to 2016) was thus designed for improving this lacuna. We first classified each burial and analyzed statistically. The Harappan people practiced rather humble burial custom, but few were found differently and these burials look more...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Barnes. Karen K. Swope. Carrie J. Gregory. Tiffany Arend.

Land-managing agencies have to make tough decisions about what archaeological sites are worth conserving – decisions that are getting tougher as the capacity of agencies continues to be stretched. Academics may disagree with these decisions, yet their approaches to research have long been crucial to defining what is significant. The Bureau of Land Management California (with Statistical Research, Inc.) has recently completed a comprehensive management program for hardrock mining sites on 10+...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lynne Sullivan. Kevin Smith.

By 1300 CE, the people of the Middle Cumberland region were on the move, a migration related at least in part to climatic instability including multiple drought episodes. Numerous types of evidence suggest that some of these migrants went to East Tennessee. We discuss possible material culture evidence for this migration from several East Tennessee sites, but with an emphasis on the Long Island site, now located in the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar reservoir and near the base of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Shaffer Foster.

The concept of healing—in any time period—has received relatively little attention in Irish archaeology. While bioarchaeologists have examined ailments and injuries in prehistoric and historic Irish populations, discussion and understandings of how, why, and where people sought treatment, and which treatments were deemed successful, remain elusive. This paper will draw on Gesler’s (1992) concept of therapeutic landscapes, most commonly utilized in health geography, in order to examine healing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emilie Cobb. Jess Beck. Colin Quinn. Horia Ciugudean.

Copper and gold resources from Southwestern Transylvania played a critical role in the emergence of inequality in European Late Prehistory. Communities in this metal-rich landscape, however, remain poorly understood. Though the highly visible tombs in the Apuseni Mountains where these communities buried some of their dead have been known to local archaeologists for decades, very little is known about the backdrop of health and disease in the region. Here, we present one of the first...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caitlin Holloway.

The depositional context of many high-latitude archaeological sites often inhibits preservation of hearth features and associated organic remains. When preserved, subsurface hearth features provide insight into the role of plant resources in prehistoric hunter-gatherer economies. This research addresses questions of taphonomy, paleoecology, and prehistoric plant use with archaeobotanical analysis of hearth features from sites located in Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve and Gates of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bernard Means. Elizabeth Moore.

What to do when a museum visitor asks you if your dinosaurs are dragons from the end times? At their invitation, the Virtual Curation Laboratory at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) teamed with the Virginia Museum of Natural History (VMNH) to create an exhibit entitled Exploring Virginia to use archaeology as a way of encouraging critical thinking. This exhibit drew on over 120 3D printed artifacts from archaeological sites across Virginia and the globe. VCU students in the inaugural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only LuAnn Wandsnider.

Solomon Butcher was a citizen photographer smitten with what he referred to as the "history project," to photodocument the citizens of Custer County, Nebraska as the frontier receded further west. From 1886-1892, he imaged perhaps one third of the occupants, staging them in front of occupied or recently abandoned sod houses and making them party to his commemoration of a constructed pioneer heritage. When severe droughts hit in the mid-1890s, did this shared pioneer "can-do" heritage sustain...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachael Kangas. Sarah Miller.

Heritage Monitoring Scouts (HMS) Florida, a program created by the Florida Public Archaeology Network, is designed to teach the science of climate change and pragmatic problems it poses for cultural resources. Beyond just learning about climate change science, projections, and increasing impact we can expect to see over the next 50-100 years, HMS Florida is specifically designed to give individuals a way to make a difference. Responding to threats posed by climate change, weather, and other...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kisha Supernant.

Archaeologists in the Americas rarely study their own history; rather, the bulk of archaeology in this region is done on Indigenous histories. Non-indigenous archaeologists studying Indigenous history can contribute to the erasure of Indigenous peoples from the accounting of their own past by centering the scientific study of material culture as the best or only way of knowing the truth. So what happens when an Indigenous archaeologist encounters her own ancestors in the archaeological record?...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Swain.

Historic maps provide tangible visual evidence of how cities evolve over time. Buildings are erected and demolished, roads are constructed, and streams are diverted or filled. To an untrained eye, the built environment of a typical city block may look like an unlikely place to find archaeological remains but to an archaeologist it is a time capsule waiting to be opened. To this end, urban archaeology often requires peeking beneath parking lots, which often provide temporary protection to buried...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa DeLeonardis.

The global exchange of ideas and practices in Latin American architecture during the viceregal period (ca. 1520-1825) remains one of the issues at the forefront of scholarly interest. Remarkable insights are gained about how ancient building materials were sustained and translated as architects and novices alike sought to align European design canons with local techniques and materials. Equally informative is how imported materials were incorporated into building practices. In this paper, I...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aaron Comstock. Robert Cook.

Shell tempered pottery with smoothed surfaces, widely referred to as Mississippi Plain Pottery, is a ubiquitous but understudied element of Mississippian assemblages throughout the Midwest and Southeast. Along the northeastern Mississippian periphery, shell tempered plain pots and body sherds are present but have not been formally considered. Through analysis and direct dating of early Fort Ancient (c. AD 1000-1300) ceramic assemblages, we suggest that Mississippi Plain pottery appears early at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cameron Petrie. Adam Green. Hector Orengo. Ravindra Singh.

Archaeologists cannot understand the urban process based on investigations at urban centers alone. In the Beas River Landscape and Settlement Survey, Wright contributed greatly to understanding of landscapes in South Asia’s Indus civilization (2600-1900 B.C.), revealing necessity and value of integrating settlement data into broader analyses of urbanism. Research on the Indus civilization’s settlement distributions highlights the presence of an array of archaeological sites spread across a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Ringle. Tomás Gallareta Negrón. Ken Seligson. David Vlcek.

LiDAR imagery is revolutionizing interpretations of ancient Maya demography, land use, and community organization, among other concerns. This paper provides preliminary observations on LiDAR coverage of 200 km2 of the Puuc region of northern Yucatan, Mexico, collected in 2017 by NCALM. The Bolonchen Regional Archaeological Project has been working in this area since 2000,and although we have intensively studied settlement at both the urban and intersite level, LiDAR provides the opportunity to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dana Bardolph. Brian Billman. Jesús Briceño.

Archaeologists have successfully used spatial analyses of different contexts (elite/non-elite, ritual/domestic, public/private, etc.) to examine the intersection of food-related activities with status, political economy, gender, ritual, and the public/private division. In this paper, I consider the intersections of food processing, ritual, and gendered labor through an examination of paleoethnobotanical data from Cerro León, a Gallinazo/Early Moche phase (A.D. 1-300) highland colony in the Moche...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Rachel Fernandez. Leigh Anne Ellison.

With every trowel stroke, archaeologists expose layers of the past, allowing for the preservation of material while using destructive methods. Fortunately, with the formulation of research and documentation methods over the years, our destructive behavior has been offset with the increase of data and research possibilities. In more recent years, this data has taken on a digital format which has accumulated exponentially. As the amount of data produced from archaeological investigations increase...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Theresa Emmerich Kamper.

The importance of skin processing technologies, in the history and dispersal of humankind around the planet cannot be overstated. This presentation outlines a systematic analysis methodology targeted at this specific material type, with the goal of determining the tanning technologies in use during prehistory, from extant archaeologically recovered processed skin objects. The methodology is a product of macroscopic and microscopic observations of a sample reference collection containing over 200...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Staller.

Scientists have long maintained the upper limits of maize (Zea mays L cultivation was 3,600 masl. Archaeological evidence has documented a particular maize variety called tunqu by indigenous speaking populations, generally cultivated on terraces around the Copacabana Peninsula between 3810 to 4100 masl, in the Lake Titicaca Basin, Bolivia. This is the first known maize variety cultivated above 3600 masl. There were wide-spread landscape modifications such as raised fields and terraces geared to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Morgan.

The peopling of high altitudes and altitude’s ecological analog, high latitude, are critical to understanding worldwide human dispersals and the diversity of human adaptation but are still quite poorly understood. Within this context, this paper presents a model for the initiation, establishment, and maintenance of permanent high altitude settlements, especially in middle latitudes. This model takes into account the limiting factors found in such settings, the costs and benefits of different...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Brush.

Historically, high elevations have been considered as peripheral to past human cultures. Indeed, high elevation areas are somewhat marginal given their increased energy demands and generally low productivity; yet, archaeological evidence shows that human use of high altitudes reaches far into prehistory. Here I present an analysis of human land use through time and its relationship to major environmental and climatic shifts to determine the conditions under which humans make more or less...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jose-Luis Sagripanti. Dan Wise. Ralph A. Anthenien Jr.. Elias Yoon. Christopher Kleihege.

We present an aerodynamic and thermal study of the architectonic complex including a fire pit (locally named Fogon Mayor) on top of the largest pyramid in Caral, a society that flourished between 2627 and 2020 cal B.C. near the Pacific coast of present day Peru.The air flow produced by wind on the corridor and ducts feeding the fogon was estimated by various engineering approaches that agreed (within 7-18%) with calculations obtained by fluid-dynamics-modeling of the whole pyramid. Results were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only August Costa. Jonathan Lohse. Stephanie Orsini.

Bison and pronghorn are taxa that have relatively high visibility in the archaeological record of the southern Plains. Understanding when bison and pronghorn were present in regions located in the southern Plains periphery is important for our general knowledge regarding bison/pronghorn ecology, climate, and environmental change in North America, as well as providing insights into human responses during these periods. Previous studies of the extent and timing of bison expansion into the southern...

DOCUMENT Full-Text César Méndez. Andrés Troncoso. Amalia Nuevo Delaunay. Antonio Maldonado. Daniel Pascual.

The area south of Choapa basin in Chile has long been subjected to archaeological research through scientific as well as cultural research management projects. Surveys, excavations, and sampling over these roughly 5000 km2 area has yielded over 370 radiocarbon dates plus over 120 thermoluminiscence dates (almost 0,1 dates/km2). Dates range from 30000 cal BP to modern, but the human occupation is constrained in the last 13,000 years. Such chronometric resolution allows discussing the intensity of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hilary Duke. Sonia Harmand.

The eastern African Early Pleistocene witnessed critical shifts in climate, environment, hominin anatomy and behavior. The lithic record shows change within this broader context. After 1.8 Ma, Large Cutting Tools (LCTs), such as bifaces, entered the hominin lithic repertoire. These artifacts are widely viewed as the first evidence of lithic shaping. Many archaeologists theorize both cognitive and practical differences between "flaking" and "shaping" among knapping strategies. Most of these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jon Spenard. Terry Powis.

On an isolated, steep-sided hill in the otherwise undifferentiated foothills of the northern Maya Mountains is the site of Sak Pol Pak, a secondary center of the pre-Hispanic (900 BC – AD 900/1000) Maya site, Pacbitun. Sak Pol Pak is a small site encompassing the entire hilltop, with no room for agriculture and is difficult to access, yet it contains the largest pyramid-temple outside of Pacbitun’s epicenter. At the foot of the hill is the deepest, and most complex cave system in the Pacbitun...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jason Whitaker.

This paper summarizes recent archaeological investigations at the San Lorenzo settlement cluster in the Mopan River Valley of Western Belize. Current research at this ancient hinterland settlement is concerned with better understanding household economic organization and integration during the Late and Terminal Classic (A.D. 670-890) occupations of this site. Households are fundamental units of economic organization in both past and present societies. The examination of ancient household...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Schaefer.

The most renowned stage portrayer of Sherlock Holmes, it was William Gillette who brought Conan Doyle’s detective to life for audiences as well as for every actor that followed in his footsteps. Most importantly, he originated the Holmes "look": the deerstalker hat, the curved pipe, and the Inverness cape. In his day, Gillette was the wealthiest actor in the country. He spared no expense in building his eccentric stone "Castle," perched high above the Connecticut River, and in the creation his...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cody Dalpra. Hunter Crosby.

The archaeological "wealth" in Petrified Forest National Park (PEFO) of Northeastern Arizona is not isolated to the well-known Ancestral Puebloan populations, but similarly includes Historic peoples. The westward expansion of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Northern Arizona represents a time of clashing cultures and a period of uncertainty combined with untold risks and rewards. Along the Rio Puerco in and near PEFO are five homesteads from this period that display different and unique...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emmanuel Agorsah.

The impact of "Kormantse" as a cultural entity on the interpretations of the formation and transformations of the African Diaspora remains a major challenge among academics as many questions about the origins, migration episodes of populations, events and the process(es) involved remain unanswered. While bio-anthropologists explore DNA evidence, using various techniques of sequencing for possibly identifying common African ancestral connections or relationships, the need to review various routes...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carolyn Dillian. Charles Bello.

The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), and other federally sponsored work programs, provided much needed employment during the Great Depression and have been examined extensively by scholars in a range of fields. However, few are aware that a parallel program, Indian Emergency Conservation Work, later subsumed into the CCC as the Indian Division (CCC-ID), offered similar programs for Native American young men and performed extensive conservation work on reservations. These men built roads,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Isaac Ullah. Yesenia Garcia. Paula Kay Lazrus. Nicholas Ames. Meredith S. Chesson.

Over the last several field seasons, the Bova Marina Archaeological Project has been documenting the timing of construction and the physical characteristics of the original water management infrastructure as well as documenting the changes in the natural and social systems of the San Pasquale Valley in Calabria, Italy. The Valley was recolonized in the 19th and early 20th centuries for both large scale bergamot plantations and by peasant farmers. With large scale population exodus from the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gerald Schroedl. Callie Bennett. Ann Ramsey. Todd Ahlman.

Research at Brimstone Hill Fortress (1690 to 1854) focuses on comparative studies of the eighteenth century lifeways of British soldiers and enslaved Africans. The St. Kitts colonial government and British Royal Engineers designed the fort, and enslaved and free Africans constructed and maintained it. Excavations in areas occupied by British Army officers, enlisted soldiers, and enslaved Africans have produced substantial faunal remains. Especially revealing is the use of imported and local...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandra Bybee.

In 2014, Cultural Resource Analysts, Inc., conducted the archaeological relocation of graves from the Evansville State Hospital Cemetery. At the request of Beam, Longest, and Neff, LLC, on behalf of the City of Evansville and the Indiana Department of Transportation, the graves of 31 individuals who were patients at the reform-era hospital between circa 1890 and 1928 were relocated in advance of construction of a pedestrian bridge. The population consisted primarily of young to middle adults,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only LouAnn Wurst. Stephen Mrozowski.

Much of the climate change literature focuses on whether it is an empirically verifiable process or how individual’s behavior can ameliorate the impacts. Our common approach abstracts the environment, economy, society, and individuals as external relations that posit the cause and effects of global warming as categorically separate from endemic global poverty, starvation, and income disparities. Instead, we argue that discussions need to bring together all the social and natural aspects that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hope Loiselle.

Wide-scale excavations were undertaken in the middens at Seaside, Oregon in the 1960s and 1970s. However, due to the overwhelming amount of faunal material, much of it remains unanalyzed. This project focuses on the material from the Par-Tee midden (35CLT20). The only cetaceans analyzed from this midden are whales, leaving a knowledge gap about prehistoric human interaction with smaller cetaceans, such as dolphins and porpoises. Using the cetacean comparative and reference collection at the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Abel Traslaviña. James Zimmer-Dauphinee. Steven Wernke.

Archaeologists always strive to use every available source of information when conducting research, and historic imagery and aerial photography are nothing new to the field. However, new technical developments are bringing another dimension to these old sources of information. Many historic aerial photos were taken in a series of densely overlapping photos to minimize the effects of lens distortion for use in surveillance, cartography, or other purposes where accuracy in measurement was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Klaus Hilbert.

The anthropogenic origin of the Amazonian dark earths (Terra Pretas) has been a methodologically assured fact for 70 years. Especially during the last 30 years, Terra Preta have been scientifically investigated with increasing intensity and in an ever-widening context. Currently, the dominant concept guiding research is the idea of binding atmospheric carbon which artificially produced dark earths. The large-scale production of terra preta is said to be an efficient instrument to combat global...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joseph Waller.

Hurricane Sandy impacted Rhode Island’s south coast on October 29, 2012. Storm surge and wind-driven waves eroded considerable sections of the shore damaging historical and archaeological sites located at the contact between the land and sea. Emergency response and preservation planning archaeological surveys conducted in response to Hurricane Sandy represent the first large scale, systematic attempts to identify and evaluate vulnerable archaeological sites situated along the Rhode Island coast....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Schumann.

Law works in ways to promote specific interests of those with power, often leading to racial and economic marginalization. Through an examination of 18th and early 19th century Virginia laws, I investigate the relationship between law and race. I explore how laws help shape racial categories and forms of structural racism, and promotes economic inequality. These historical economic and and racial inequalities impact how we understand archaeological landscapes and whether sites meet the criteria...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aaron Wright. John Jones. Todd Bostwick. Arleyn Simon.

Hohokam communities who resided alongside the perennial rivers in south-central Arizona are renowned for the massive canals they engineered and operated, representing some of the largest preindustrial irrigation systems in the world. In light of such achievement, dry farming technologies and practices remain a lesser known component of the Hohokam agricultural landscape. This paper takes a close look at recent fieldwork around the South Mountains, an upland setting at the confluence of the Salt...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Marie Soleski. Yiting Xu. Joseph R. Desloges. Zhou Lin.

The Qujiang drains mountainous terrain in Zhejiang Province of east-central China. Shangshan cultures have been identified on floodplain terraces and earth mounds within the Qujiang valley. The choice of settlement in the area (10,000+ years BP) is constrained by several geographical factors, including topography, climate, access to water resources and human factors. The relationship between cultural occupation sites and river dynamics over the Holocene is poorly known in this region. Lateral...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ana Gomes. Brandon Zinsious. Mussa Raja. Nuno Bicho. Jonathan Haws.

Geoarchaeological surveys were conducted in 2016 and 2017 to better understand the environmental history and landscape evolution of the Inhambane coastal area, Southeastern Mozambique, aiming to know the environmental context of human occupation of the Tofo, Praia da Rocha and Chibuene archaeological sites. To reach this aim, 4 cores were collected in a mangrove area of the Inhambane estuary, an area both influenced by sea-level and climate changes. All the boreholes were georeferenced and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fred Valdez.

The "hinterland" communities of northwest Belize are among the most diverse and complex across the Maya lowlands. The Rio Bravo Management and Conservation area of NW Belize serves as the region of interest with more than 25 seasons of Maya archaeological research. Utilizing survey and mapping strategies, material culture analyses, and theoretical concerns, the Programme for Belize Archaeological Project (PfBAP) defines new ways of looking at and interpreting ancient Maya interactions for the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Duff. Wesley Bernardini. Gregson Schachner.

It is unlikely that we will see a research effort of the scope and duration of the Homol’ovi Research Program project replicated in the Southwest. It is the successful execution of this work by Chuck Adams and Rich Lange, unfolding over more than three decades, that we will attempt to contextualize from the vantage point of that other university in Arizona, ASU. We begin by reviewing the intellectual context of Southwestern research preceding the Homol’ovi project, in particular how the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Audrey Lindsay. Timothy Murphy.

The Honda Ridge pictograph panel contains highly stratified elements painted on a smooth, reflective surface, offering a unique opportunity to explore prehistoric rock art production. We adapted non-invasive, digital microscopy methods from the Shumla Archaeological Research & Education Center to apply stratigraphic analysis within a 1m x 1m section of this superimposed, monochromatic panel. The reflective host rock preserves observable characteristics of prehistoric painting techniques, from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Perez. Karen Harry.

Considerations of chronology, chronometry, and systemic contexts of archaeological sites in the American Southwest have primarily focused among the larger prehistoric cultural centers (e.g., Hohokam) throughout the history of archaeological research in this region. Research pursuits beyond the southern and eastern regions of the American Southwest—particularly within the Virgin Branch Puebloan cultural region—have not been pursued accordingly for various reasons. Seminal work by Margaret Lyneis...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sara Mascia.

On December 2, 1859, John Brown was hanged following his conviction for murder, slave insurrection, and treason resulting from his raid on a federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia two months prior. Brown anticipated and hoped that his actions might spur a rebellion that would spread throughout the South bringing freedom to all enslaved persons. To some people he was a murderous lunatic; to others he was a martyr for the abolitionist cause; and, to many he was a hero whose actions sparked...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maxwell Forton.

This study examines the spatial patterning of shield iconography at late Pueblo III sites (A.D. 1250-1300) in the Tsegi Canyon system, as an indicator of shared group identity. In the mid-13th century, the Tsegi Canyon region of northeastern Arizona followed a greater regional trend of communities coalescing into defensive high canyon alcoves, accompanied by the adoption of shield iconography, likely influenced by Freemont traditions to the north. These images are variously interpreted to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Thompson. Jillian Jordan. Keith M. Prufer.

This paper examines processes of low-density urban development through geospatial analyses of households at two Classic Period (AD 250-800) Maya communities, Uxbenká and Ix Kuku’il. Located in the southern foothills of the Maya Mountains, Toledo District, Belize, these centers were situated are similar landscapes yet exhibited distinctly different household distributions. Wherein Uxbenká had geospatially discrete districts and neighborhoods while Ix Kuku’il’s houses were more evenly distributed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Traci Ardren.

Domestic gardens are a well-established aspect of Classic Maya residential settlement, and they are rightly considered important components of food security and even food sovereignty strategies utilized by the ninety-nine percent. Taking inspiration from the emerging field of human-plant studies, I argue daily interactions with household garden plants exerted a profound influence on not only the daily habits of ancient Maya populations, but also on their memories and sense of social identity. ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only T. Manahan.

Across the Maya Lowlands, the Terminal Classic Period (AD 800-1000) represented a time of dramatic sociopolitical transformation. Investigation of the Northern Maya lowland site of Xuenkal, shows an abrupt break in the pattern of steady demographic growth during the Terminal Classic, associated with the center of Chichen Itza 45 km away. Xuenkal presents a unique case to evaluate this transition as it contains discrete households associated with the Late Classic zenith of local political...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica MacLellan.

Recognizing that households contribute to – rather than simply reflect – broad social changes, scholars working in the Maya lowlands and Central Mexico argue that domestic ritual played a role in the emergence of complex societies in Formative (or Preclassic) Mesoamerica (c. 1000 BC - AD 300). Certain aspects of household-level, ritualized activities are shared across Mesoamerican cultures. However, major differences within and between the two regions show that a variety of social organizations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kevin Vaughn. Christina Conlee. Sarah Kerchusky. Verity Whalen.

In this paper we evaluate household spaces in the Nasca region through time. We consider household structures in domestic contexts from the Formative, the Early and Late Nasca epochs, the Middle Horizon and the Late Intermediate Period. We look at the changes that took place in the use of residential space and consider how broader regional changes in sociopolitical structure, economy and religious ideology may have contributed to the changing nature of local dwellings.