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

DOCUMENT Citation Only Branden Rizzuto. Justin Jennings.

This poster highlights emerging results of our ongoing study to further characterize the procurement networks and use strategies of obsidian sources in the south-central Andes during the Middle Horizon (600 CE – 1000 CE) and Late Intermediate Periods (1000 CE – 1476 CE). We present archaeometric analyses and provenience studies of excavated obsidian objects from the Middle Horizon – Late Intermediate site of Quilcapampa, located in the Valle de Siguas, Arequipa, Peru. In total, 70 objects were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only María Inés Velarde. Pamela Castro de la Mata.

Las sociedades de Paracas y Nasca que habitaban el actual territorio de Ica, desarrollaron una tradición metalúrgica con características locales particulares dentro de los Andes Centrales. Los orígenes de la producción metalúrgica en esta zona se relacionan con la presencia de Chavín durante el Horizonte Temprano, y se caracteriza por el predominante uso de oro laminado y trabajado en formas y diseños simples. Esta tradición metalúrgica se mantuvo durante varios siglos en el sur, casi a espaldas...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeffrey Brzezinski.

Recent research in the lower Río Verde Valley of Pacific coastal Oaxaca, Mexico has indicated that, during the Terminal Formative Period (150 BC - AD 250), public buildings were loci of communal practices such as feasting, collective labor, cemetery burial, and object caching. Idiosyncrasies in these practices among Terminal Formative sites in the valley suggest that political authority and community identity was constituted on the local level. While the best evidence for these practices comes...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Taylor Zaneri.

From 900 to 1300 AD, Italy underwent sweeping cultural changes – the rise of market economies, increased trade and commerce, and new forms of governance. Typically, the elite are cast as the drivers of these shifts, yet it was rural labor that produced the goods (particularly foodstuffs) traded in the cities, collected in the form of rent and taxes, and transformed into capital. This paper examines the impact of rural landscape strategies during the development of the medieval city-state of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan Leight. Brent Woodfill. Alexander Rivas.

Investigations at Cancuen, Sebol, Salinas de los Nueve Cerros, and other sites at the base of the Guatemalan highlands since the late 1990s have shown the importance of the region for importing and refining a variety of highland goods for the lowland market. While most of the emphasis has been placed on the goods for which there is direct evidence of production and exchange—obsidian, jade, iron pyrite, and other lithic commodities present in abundance at these and other sites—Demarest, Dillon,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wesley Stoner. Deborah Nichols.

Compositional studies in central Mexico have largely focused on serving wares of the later Teotihuacan and Postclassic periods. Studies of the region’s earliest ceramics of the Formative period have been almost completely ignored. The earliest ceramics made in the region tend to be much coarser than the later serving wares, so we cannot use the existing reference databases to source them. Here we build the Formative reference database with a large sample of chemical and petrographic data...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Freeman. Jeanne Moe.

Project Archaeology is a comprehensive national archaeology education program, jointly sponsored by the Bureau of Land Management and Montana State University, which uses archaeological inquiry to foster understanding of past and present cultures; improve social studies and science education; and enhance citizenship education to help preserve our archaeological legacy. To date it has reached more than 15,000 educators with curriculum guides, activity guides, and professional development. These...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Walker. Axel Nielsen.

How do prophecy and new religious movements impact life histories of artifacts and architecture? Ethnographic evidence indicates that prophets realize their visions, in part, by transforming relationships between people and material objects. They shun, embrace, or reorient technologies, artifacts, and architecture. Not surprisingly, in cultures where spiritual forces already animate artifacts and architecture, such reorganizations can produce dramatic changes in material culture. Much of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Polly Schaafsma.

The Tablita Dance, commonly known as the Corn Dance, is a well-known event among the Rio Grande Pueblos where, in connection with saint’s days, it is performed during the growing season. The corn dance may occur at other times as well, but without a linkage to the village patron saint. A number of diverse factors, however, indicate that this dance as known today is a post-Hispanic aspect of Pueblo ceremonialism. In addition to the dance’s obvious link to the Catholic patron saint of each...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shawn Lambert.

Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis is used to determine whether Formative Caddo finewares (A.D. 850 -1150) were made locally in the Arkansas River Basin or produced by their Gulf Coastal Plain neighbors to the south. The preliminary INAA results, in concert with a stylistic study that indicates very few potters had the knowledge and skill to produce them, show that Formative Caddo finewares were made in the southern Caddo region and exported north to Arkansas River Basin mound centers for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yann Ardagna. Emeline Sperandio. Bruno Bizot.

Following an evaluation between 2004-2006, it appeared that more than 200 anthropological series had been assembled following excavations led in Provence Alpes Côtes d’Azur (PACA) region. These extremely scattered series had not all been subjected to a precise inventory, were disparately curated or even lost. Therefore, most of these collections were not or no longer accessible to scientists. Faced with this question concerning the heritage preservation, different regional actors invested in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Judith Sichler.

Historic records indicate that during the late 18th and into the 19th century preserved North Atlantic fishes were shipped to the West Indies as a relatively cheap source of protein to feed enslaved persons and also the planter class. However, in historic zooarchaeological analyses of faunal assemblages from the Caribbean, the presence of these food remains is often not identified. Using two sites from the Danish West Indies, a case will be made for the use of fine-screen techniques to ensure...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Nicole Boudreaux. Laura Levi. Christian Sheumaker.

It is now well recognized that Late Classic Maya communities varied politically, economically, and environmentally. The corollary, however, that community and household variation went hand-in-hand in the Maya area often goes unrecognized or under problematized. Research that explores differences in household provisioning practices across a range of communities should help to rectify this situation. Referencing data from two large prehispanic Maya sites in northwestern Belize, this paper asks the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Axel Andrade Pérez. Karla Itzel López Carranco.

Se muestra el trabajo realizado por el Proyecto Arqueológico Cuenca del Río el Maíz en coparticipación con las autoridades municipales y la comunidad de Santos Reyes Nopala, la Fundación Mexicana para la Educación Ambiental y el Departamento de Mecatrónica de la Universidad Tecnológica de los Valles Centrales de Oaxaca, como una contribución al estudio científico de la arqueología de la región, cuyo objetivo principal consistió en la investigación, salvaguarda, rescate y difusión consciente...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pedro Ramon Celis.

El proyecto arqueológico "Cerro del Gallo", se desprende de los trabajos de investigación realizados en el Conjunto Monumental de Atzompa, dentro del sitio arqueológico de Monte Albán. La participación de diversos actores de la población civil, gubernamentales y de la iniciativa privada ha podido concatenarse de tal forma que, se ha podido construir de manera satisfactoria un ambicioso proyecto de investigación, que involucra además de un objetivo académico como lo es el discernir los procesos...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Crowell.

The current paper will address the history of public archaeology and outreach in the Middle Atlantic region. It will focus on programs that engage the interested public to participate in archaeology. It will also look at the contributions of local and state jurisdictions and organizations to establish avocational archaeology certification programs.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stacey Camp.

Public outreach and engagement has long been perceived as a cornerstone of historical archaeology. Many of the earliest public archaeological projects in the discipline concerned sites that had a significant preexisting audience, such as an urban environment. This paper looks at what it means to do public archaeology in remote settings, and it will explore how archaeologists engage the public when their sites are places of intentional displacement. How do public archaeology strategies and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Jamison. David Mixter.

Monumental architecture and public spaces provide primary contexts for community ritual and social action. The process of construction of public architecture involves community cooperation and collective action, with the latter contributing to significant changes in the form and use of structures through time. The public architecture of Actuncan developed from the Preclassic period to constitute a nearly complete set of architectural forms devoted to ritual, administrative and community...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ben Ford.

The future of American Archaeology lies in its ability to engage the public and demonstrate the field’s relevance to a broad range of communities. One way that maritime archaeology can contribute to this future is through identifying and interpreting maritime landscapes. A maritime landscape approach draws on the "lure of the sea" that attracts many people to shipwreck studies, but engages larger constituencies through place-based history. Geographic space is one of the things that all people...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicole Burt.

The history of physical anthropology contains figures and movements that improperly used science to hurt or diminish other groups or was utilized by such movements after publication. This haunted past can manifest as a bumpy future for modern practitioners working under a shadow of racial typology, eugenics, and other horrific applications of their science. Anthropologists continue to be haunted where our peers in anatomy or biology are not, due in part, to our theoretical approach as a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jorge Rios Allier. Ma. del Pilar Casado Lopez.

This paper aims to present an overview of the public policies applied to rock art in Mexico in the last years. This cultural resource is perhaps little known in its entirety, yet presents an invaluable variety for its study. Its registration, conservation, and study have allowed in recent years to know more about the vast heritage which the country has it. One of the goals is also to comment on the public steps that have been implemented in this area in different regions.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeffrey Blomster. Victor Salazar.

The Early Formative evinces the emergence of public space, and more complex communities, in Mesoamerica. Previous archaeological research at the site of Etlatongo, Oaxaca, Mexico, identified a large village during the late Early Formative/Cruz B phase (1200/1150 – 850 BC), including an area tentatively identified as early public space. The Formative Etlatongo Project has concluded three seasons, from 2015 – 2017, of large-scale excavations, confirming the identification of public space in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victoria Ingalls. Jason Yaeger.

Public structures in the Maya region materialize ideologies and define centers of power as they create politically charged sacred landscapes. These locations are nexus points for community and polity making processes, embedding social hierarchies, ideologies, and social memories into the physical landscape. However, archaeologists have historically focused attention on monumental public spaces within large civic-ceremonial centers, and relatively little attention has been given to public spaces...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Stapleton. Charles Stapleton.

In the years immediately following the conquest of the Aztec empire by the Spanish crown, there was a period of transition in which acculturation, adaptation, and/or adoption of new configurations of political powers, religion, and social structures ushered in the Colonial period in Mexico. One of the results of the encounter between indigenous and Spanish cultures is the syncretism that developed in the art and religious architecture of this region. Studies of syncretic art in colonial Mexico...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sadie Weber.

Andean camelid pastoralism – with its origins in the puna of the South-Central Andes – plays a key role in risk management and transformation of low-energy, high-abundance resources. Camelids not only help pastoralists mitigate risk by acting as literal "wealth on the hoof," but they also maintain cohesion of intergroup relationships across vast distances by facilitating mobility within and among diverse environmental zones. Here, I examine intensified camelid pastoral systems as an adaptation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Josefina Vasquez.

The Inka incorporated the territory of today's Ecuador to the Tawantinsuyu around 1420. This conquest is well documented from South to North by recording the expansion of monumental features such as pukaras, tambos, bridges, terraces, collkas, wakas, patios and plazas, built in traditional Inka style. The political transformation of northern Andes landscape by the Inka was very profound in the Loja and Azuay provinces of southern Ecuador. While it was a milder transformative factor around Quito...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laure Dussubieux. Thomas Fenn. Shinu Abraham. Alok Kanungo.

Scientific investigation of archaeological glass has advanced, beginning in the early 2000’s, with studies relying more heavily on determination of trace element concentrations to differentiate production recipes depending on distinct ingredient sources and the use of larger corpuses of artifacts to more easily and reliably reveal production patterns. At the same time, isotope analyses (e.g., Pb, Sr and Nd) attempting to source raw materials used to manufacture glass in antiquity grew in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Bubp.

Holly Bend, a prolific and successful early 19th century plantation owned by Robert Davidson in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina has seen multiple excavations and research over the past several years. In particular, a collection of ceramic tobacco pipe fragments that have been excavated are analyzed to better understand the local smoking culture. Several methods are used, including X-ray fluorescence spectrometer analysis to determine local sourcing of the ceramic elements, residue analysis...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Ordoñez. Tamara Landivar. Lourdes Torres.

There are many collections of Tsantsas around the world. These shrunken heads were created by the Shuar and Achuar peoples of the Ecuadorian and Peruvian amazon until the mid-20th century. Though most of these museum collections have a known provenience, the individual histories and the authenticity of some of the heads has been contested. Similar questions have risen for Tsantsas held at the Pumapungo Ethnographic museum in the city of Cuenca, Ecuador. Using the approach of museum...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Russell Skowronek. Brandi Reger. James Hinthorne. Juan Gonzalez.

The U.S.-Mexico border region along the Rio Grande River, separating the southernmost Texas counties (Cameron, Hidalgo, Starr and Zapata) from the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, is a strategic corridor for prehistoric human travel connecting the Gulf of Mexico with the interior of the continent. The area contains a history of human presence extending over 11,000 years, evidenced by a wealth of projectile points that have attracted collectors for decades. To understand prehistoric people’s...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Zimmer-Dauphinee. Arlen Talaverano. Kevin Jara. Steven Wernke.

The choice of clay and pigment sources for ceramic production in the Andes has the potential to convey complex information about the resilience and persistence of Inca social structure in the Colca Valley throughout the imposition of Spanish imperialism. Prior to the Spanish invasion, ceramics in the Colca Valley were likely primarily produced by a handful of specialized communities which would have widely distributed their products. It is therefore expected that there would be a standardization...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Lévy.

Pyro-engraved gourds discovered by the "Nasca Project" (CEAP) in Cahuachi, Nasca ceremonial center located in the basin of Río Grande, can provide new data about their manufacture and decoration. From a comparative perspective, we study artifact characteristics and archaeological records to understand an unusually large and complex pyro-engraved found during 1994 excavations as an offering associated with ceramics from the last phase of the Early Horizon (Ocucaje 8-9) and the beginning of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Linda Stine.

During archaeological field work at a North Carolina central Piedmont farmstead (~1870-1940) researchers collected information on numerous landscape features, a standing structure, and remnants of other log buildings. The site contained unusually well-preserved leather goods, metal artifacts, and metal trash piles; however very few ceramic or glass artifacts were discovered in spite of the volume of earth moved and sifted. Oral history, documents, and archaeological evidence will be explored to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Munson. Jonathan Scholnick. Lorena Paiz Aragon.

Inequality is a prominent and persistent feature of all large-scale human societies that has significant impacts on everyday life. Variation in material wealth and social capital as well as differential access to specialized knowledge and other resources directly impacts household quality of life (QOL) within ancient and contemporary communities. For the ancient Maya, the establishment of political institutions centered on divine rulership significantly contributed to QOL changes during the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angelina Curley. Sylvia Wemanya. Emmanuel Ndiema. Jonathan Reeves. David R. Braun.

Stone artifact weathering is important for understanding the formational history of surface and in situ assemblages. While much of this work has focused on chert and other crypto-crystalline sillicas, the weathering of basalt is under-studied. As a large proportion of the Early Stone Age record consists of basalt, it is necessary to explore the weathering process of this material. Characterizing basalt weathering currently relies on the subjective characterization of both mechanical and chemical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert J. DiNapoli. Terry L. Hunt. Carl P. Lipo.

Pre-European contact Rapa Nui (Easter Island) society is well-known for its substantial investment in monumental architecture, including over 300 platforms (ahu) and almost 1000 statues (moai). Recent theoretical and empirical research on the island suggests that ahu and moai were focal points for competitive and cooperative signaling by relatively small-scale communities dispersed across on the island. Evaluation of this hypothesis, however, requires the measurement of the amount of energy...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Ellyson. Tim A. Kohler. Catherine Cameron.

Recent studies of household inequality in the central Mesa Verde region (CMV) and Chaco Canyon indicate that the degree of wealth inequality among ancestral Pueblo households remained relatively low in the CMV even as it increased dramatically in Chaco from the mid-800s through the early 1000s, based on Gini coefficients calculated on household floor area as a proxy for wealth. Beginning in the late A.D. 1000s, however, Gini coefficients increased among CMV households as well, reaching values as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Asia Alsgaard. Carolyn Freiwald. Stephanie Orsini. Douglas J. Kennett. Keith M. Prufer.

Beyond occasional reports of Pleistocene megafauna, there is a paucity of faunal data from the Mesoamerican Paleoindian and Archaic periods. This poster presents faunal data from three rockshelters in southern Belize located in two distinct environmental regions. Tzib’te Yux, is located in the Rio Blanco Valley in the foothills of the Maya Mountains and has an intact deposits from Cal. 14,000 to 6,000 BP. In contrast, Maya Hak Cab Pek and Saki Tzul, are both located in the interior of the Maya...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jakob Hanschu.

Scattered through parts of northeastern and north-central Kansas are prehistoric burial sites in the form of low rock and earthen mounds located atop bluffs overlooking stream valleys. In Kansas, the Unmarked Burial Sites Preservation Act exists to protect these sites, but this law is only effective if the location of these features is known. Most prehistoric mounds in this region are subtle in appearance, making them difficult to recognize. If sites are not recorded and protected, they may be...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jason Laffoon. William Pestle.

Stable isotope analysis is one of the most effective tools for paleodietary reconstruction and has been widely applied to a vast array of archaeological contexts including the Caribbean region. This region, however, possesses a particularly complex isotopic ecology, including both a large number of isotopically variable food sources and a high degree of isotopic overlap between different food groups. As such, to date, most regional paleodietary studies have been limited to descriptive and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan Springate.

Using a queer lens, this research looks at respectability and resistance at a resort landscape on Lake George in New York State’s Adirondack Mountains. In the late nineteenth century, this vacation resort served a mixed gender, middle-class clientele; beginning in the very early twentieth century, it has served a mixed-class, all female clientele. Respectability played a crucial role in how people navigated both of these landscapes. The flip side of respectability is resistance. Looking at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stefanie Bautista. Justin Jennings. Willy Yépez.

In the ninth century AD, Wari settlers founded the site of Quilcapampa in the Sihuas Valley of southern Peru. The first definitive Wari settlement in Arequipa, the site was founded astride an inter-valley trade route that had been used for at least a millennium. This paper will discuss both the site's clear link to Wari, as evidenced by its architecture, ceramics, and foodways, as well as the possible links to the Nazca region where Wari control was likely fractured due to conflict and possible...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mandy Ranslow.

The Connecticut Department of Transportation is the steward of two Connecticut State Archaeological Preserves. This paper will highlight the Preserves and give an overview of how an agency, generally in the business of building roads and bridges, has contributed to the preservation of two significant archaeological districts. The Quinebaug River Prehistoric Archaeological District in Canterbury was listed as a Preserve in 2003. The 22 acre preserve includes five National Register-eligible...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katie K. Tappan. Kelsey A. Gruntorad. G. Tucker Austin. Samantha N. Butler. Chrissina C. Burke.

Wupatki National Monument is a Puebloan site located in the Sinagua region of Northern Arizona, featuring an array of wildlife available to past populations for subsistence and technological purposes. Analyzing faunal remains from Colorado Plateau sites is an important part of developing a holistic understanding of the lifeways of agricultural communities in the Southwest. This poster focuses on the zooarchaeological analysis of materials from Wupatki National Monument housed at the Museum of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chelsea Blackmore.

We volunteer and engage with the public because we believe that history matters; that visibility of the everyday, of peoples and pasts marginalized and made invisible should be central to what we do. We can use our work, pre- and post-contact, as a means for public engagement and to dismantle political discussions rooted in ahistorical notions of human behavior and morality. But in serving the public interest, how do we also serve our membership, both in protecting their rights as human beings...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chris Hunt. Evan Hill. Paula Reimer. Graeme Barker.

Land snails have a radiocarbon ecology which leads to offsets in shell radiocarbon age, relative to contemporary biogenic carbon. We describe new methods for evaluating and calculating this offset. We radiocarbon date and apply the new methods to land snail food debris, from the deep MSA to Neolithic sequence in the Haua Fteah cave, NE Libya. Oxcal modelling of the resulting 136 dates over ~45000 years shows the site was used for short episodes separated by long periods of abandonment. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Martha Wendel. David Lentz. Susan E. Allen. Timothy Beach. Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach.

Up until the late 1990s, researchers believed the Maya were solely reliant on slash and burn agricultural practices. However, discoveries of rectangular canal patterns in the margins of wetlands in the Maya lowlands of Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico shined light on a new agricultural practice: raised wetland fields. One example of wetland fields is found at the site Birds of Paradise (BOP) in the Rio Bravo region of northwestern Belize. The macrobotanicals recovered from the raised fields and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Burger. Ian Jorgeson. Michael Aiuvalasit.

Zooarchaeological research in the Northern Rio Grande shows that turkey husbandry became increasingly important to the Ancestral Pueblo during the Classic Period (AD 1350-1600). During this time, immigrant and local communities coalesced into increasingly larger villages and towns, with abundant evidence for turkey husbandry. Turkeys served as a critical resource for both subsistence and ritual uses. Yet, it remains uncertain at what scale (household, sub-community, or community) turkey...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Lapham. Gary M. Feinman. Linda M. Nicholas.

The domestic dog (Canis familiaris) became a staple in the meat diet of Zapotec peoples during the Formative period (1500 BC – AD 200) in the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico, and continued to be increasingly important in subsistence and ritual into the Classic and Postclassic periods. Recent zooarchaeological research has identified low-intensity household management/production of animals and animal by-products at sites throughout the valley, with each settlement marked by its own unique signature of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Lozada. Kristie Sanchez. Rex Haydon. Hans Barnard. Augusto Cardona.

In this paper, we discuss the mortuary tradition affiliated with the Ramada communities that inhabited the Vitor Valley of Southern Peru around 550 CE. Our field excavations in 2012 and 2015 revealed a long-standing tradition of mortuary treatment that persisted even after the arrival of the Wari in the area.  While many components of this tradition appear to have originated locally, other components closely parallel Nazca populations, including patterns of trauma, funerary ritual and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Ahlrichs.

Great Lakes Archaic copper artifacts have been well documented and typed for many decades. However, there is a lingering tendency to think of copper as primarily a social signifier and to shy away from development of economically oriented copper theory. One component of the problem is rooted in copper’s innately malleable nature. Copper was made into a wide range of tools and non-utilitarian items during prehistory. While most of these types have been enumerated, there are no published...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicole Mathwich.

In North America, the introduction of livestock as part of the Columbian Exchange had profound social and ecological consequences for indigenous communities. Historical ecology offers a holistic landscape approach to a phenomenon that archaeologically has often been viewed through shifts in diet and butchering practices. This study examines the creation of range practices at Spanish colonial Mission Lost Santos Angeles de Guevavi, near what is today Nogales, Arizona. Using multiple lines of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Reitz.

The Irene site (ca. AD 1150 - 1450) was a small, prestigious community occupied by a chief and his lineage. It was located on the Savannah River, a few kilometers inland from the Atlantic Ocean. The presence of animals rare in the region and animals rare or absent in other coastal assemblages distinguishes the Irene collection from other tidewater collections. Many of these animals exhibit atypical, even dangerous, behavior. Rare animals, and other attributes, provide a standard for assessing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Darcy Bird. Jacob Freeman.

Recent analyses of large samples of radiocarbon dates shows a change in radiocarbon date frequencies between 3000 BP and 800 BP. There is either an exponential or super-exponential increase in radiocarbon date frequencies followed by a sudden decline. The goal of this poster is to test a population ecology model as to whether or not the degree of population overshoot can predict the degree of population collapse. We want to analyze if the rate of increase in radiocarbon date frequencies over...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ted Goebel. Bryan Hockett.

During the decade-long excavations at Bonneville Estates Rockshelter, eastern Nevada, a well-stratified sequence of cultural components spanning from Paleoindian times to the late Archaic was documented. In this poster we present the results of a comprehensive analysis of the biface and bifacial point assemblage from the shelter, exploring temporal variability in raw-material procurement and selection, production, and use of this artifact class from 13,000 years ago to the late prehistoric...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Abigail Gancz.

The Shawnee-Minisink Site is one of the most spatially intact Paleoindian sites in eastern North America. Located in the Upper Delaware Valley of Pennsylvania, the site includes an occupation area spanning 60 x 95m which dates to circa 12,900 CalBP. Over 18,000 point-provenienced lithics have been excavated from a 360 meter-squared area. The lithic artifacts consist primarily of the local black flint as well as of various exotic cherts. Because it is well dated, spatially intact, and likely...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aylar Abdolahzadeh. George Leader. Tamara Dogandzic. Li Li. Harold Dibble.

Archaeologists have long studied the effects of raw material variation on different aspects of lithic technology, primarily focusing on raw material availability and nodule size and shape. This paper presents the results of a controlled experiment designed to compare different rock types (obsidian, flint, basalt, quartzite, and silcrete) and assess their effects on flake production. The experiment utilizes a mechanical robot that applies force to pre-shaped cores, controlling for known...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jaye Smith. Kelley Hays-Gilpin. Linda Pierce. Chris Downum.

In 1957, Arizona State Museum director Emil Haury, ranch owner Ray Claridge and geologist/avocational Ray Robinson visited the Bonito Creek site in Arizona’s Safford Basin as reported by Wasley in 1962. Robinson returned to the site after that initial visit to "save" many objects that Haury did not take with him that day, along with "prospecting" other sites during the 1960s in the Safford Basin being threatened by development. For 59 years, Robinson preserved these objects along with limited...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan-Alette Dublin.

This study employs archaeological and documentary evidence to examine adaptive reuse and social memory at the site of the medieval monastery of Psalmodi in Gard, France. During the late twelfth century, the abbey church was partially rebuilt, enclosing the footprint of an earlier church and maintaining early public space while transforming and enlarging monastic space. The reconstruction occurred shortly after a century of turmoil that saw the takeover of the monastery by a rival and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ainslie Harrison. Harriet "Rae" Beaubien. Kimberly Cullen Cobb. Emily Kaplan. Jennifer Giaccai.

Until recent years the study of Pre-Columbian gold and resin objects from Panama was slow to progress due to the relative scarcity of archaeological projects excavating these materials. While the original contexts of many museum objects have been lost, the collection of Panamanian gold and resin in the National Museum of the American Indian was re-evaluated for its potential to answer key questions about the ancient craftspeople of this region. To ensure accurate provenience information was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisbeth Louderback. Nicole Herzog. Bruce Pavlik. Tom Dillehay.

The earliest evidence of wild potato use anywhere in the world comes from Monte Verde (southern Chile), where tuber fragments were recovered from hearths that directly date to 14,500 cal B.P. Those tubers were tentatively assigned to a wild potato species (Solanum maglia) based on their starch granule morphology, which, according to Ugent et al., could be distinguished from the granule morphology of the domesticated potato (S. tuberosum). Recently, that identification has been called into...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathleen Bragdon.

For more than fifty years, scholars have been debating the role of the shell "currency" known as wampum (wampampeag), which began to circulate among the Native societies of New England in the seventeenth century, stimulated by the Dutch and English fur trade in the region. Following an assessment of current scholarship on the Dutch in New England in the early contact era, this paper further explores the role that wampum played within Native societies as a symbol of wealth, as well as its...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erik Porth.

The disruption of social traditions in ancient societies is often described as the collapse of complexity, but persisting or resilient practices are often ignored, limiting archaeological interpretations of social continuity and change. This paper addresses these historical processes during the terminal occupation of Moundville, a multiple mound Mississippian civic-ceremonial complex occupied from A.D. 1200-1550 and located in west-central Alabama. The collapse of ancient complex societies has...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Betsy Kohut. George J. Bey III. Tomás Gallareta Negrón.

In 1958, Brainerd first described "the earliest deposits yet to come from Yucatan"—composed primarily of narrow-mouthed jar fragments recovered from the lowest strata of excavations at the Mani cenote. This type, classified as Yotholin Pattern-Burnished, has a medium-fine paste and unslipped surfaces that had been smoothed or burnished in decorative patterns. Since then, similar wares have been recovered from Preclassic contexts at a number of other sites. Although Brainerd originally described...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pam Crabtree.

The later 3rd and early 2nd millennium site of Rojdi in Gujarat, India was excavated under the direction of the Professor Gregory Possehl d over eight field seasons between 1982 and 1995. Rojdi is an agricultural village with substantial stone architecture, most of which dates to the early second millennium (1900-1700 BCE). Significant progress has been made in our understanding of the Sorath Harappan culture, including detailed ceramic studies, analyses of archaeobotanical materials, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kurt E. Dongoske. Giorgio Hadi Curti.

What is mitigation? By definition, it is reducing the severity, seriousness, or painfulness of an event, development, procedure, or situation. As part of CRM mitigation processes, direct, indirect, and cumulative effects must all be identified in order to address any competent approach to and for mitigation. A key question must then also arise within any mitigation process – by whom is mitigation developed and implemented and for what and whose interests, concerns, benefits, and well-being? The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cynthia Radding.

This paper discusses the historical construction of landscapes in the borderlands of northwestern Mexico, with a particular focus on the colonial Province of Ostimuri, bounded by the Yaqui, Mayo, and Fuerte rivers. In honor of Carroll Riley, the paper presents original research in historical archives, analyzed in the context of archaeological, ecological, and ethnographic literatures, to explain the formation of this space as a region and to explore both the vulnerabilities and the resilience of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tiago Miguel Fraga. Jorge Freire. Tiago Dores.

Lagoa de Obidos is an example of a decaying sea body that has influenced human occupation since, at least, the Mesolithic period. In fact, in historical times, humankind has been fighting, and losing, against the natural disappearance of this body. This has led to the continuous adaptation of the local populations, and in fact reinventing innovative ways of cooperation with the environment. Starting from harvesting resources in pre-historical times, to building maritime infrastructures in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fraser Sturt. Duncan Garrow.

Researchers across the breadth of academia, from oceanographers to political scientists and archaeologists, have all begun to redress the critique of ‘sea-blindness’ leveled at modern society in recent years. The result has been a re-positioning of activity on the water within our accounts of human lives and thought processes – add water and stir. The results have been inspirational, controversial, and at times utterly inoperable beyond the broadest of heuristic devices, when it comes to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wade Campbell. Matthew Magnani. Alex Wesson.

In 2003, a master’s thesis project examined a multicomponent Navajo habitation site dating to the 17th-18th centuries in the Dinétah region of northwest New Mexico. The initial survey program carried out a number of activities, including site mapping, surface collection, and artifact analyses; however, certain questions were left unanswered. A new phase of research initiated in the summer of 2017 aims to better characterize the site and explore the possibility of a pastoral adaptation on the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amilcar Vargas. Álvaro Brizuela Absalón.

The Pre-Hispanic city of El Tajin (Mexico) was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1992. Late on in the same decade UNESCO encouraged State Parties to foster "informed awareness on the part of the population… whose active participation [in conservation]…is essential". Using the Rapid Ethnographic Assessment Procedures method (REAP) on fieldwork in Mexico, this paper aims to contrast global and local policies to improve participation of local communities generally and in particular of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aaron Glass. Judith Berman.

Franz Boas's 1897 report, The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians, was a landmark in anthropology for its integrative approach to museum collections, photographs, and sound recordings as well as text. However, both Boas and his Indigenous collaborator George Hunt remained dissatisfied with the published text, laboring for decades to correct and supplement it. They left behind a vast archive of materials related to the book’s creation and afterlife that are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Huntley. Jon-Paul McCool. Nicholas Dunning. Samantha Fladd. Vernon Scarborough.

Determining the soil salinity of a site can aid in the assessment of the agricultural potential of a particular area, thus enabling researchers to draw conclusions about the potential for cultivation and subsistence intensification. Studies pertaining to soil salinity in Chaco Canyon often argue that the electrical conductivity (EC) levels within the area—a standard proxy measure of soil salinity—were too high for maize farming in many areas of the canyon, drastically limiting the potential...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeb Card.

Certain classes of material culture found in Honduras and El Salvador have long been recognized as being related to "Maya style" artwork and artifacts from Copan and Classic Maya cities to the north and west. These objects have been framed through questions of "influence", ethnicity, and boundaries. The recent re-analysis of a ceramic flask from Tazumal, with an unusual inscription tying the object to a Copan king and imagery of tribute, suggests a more distinct political lens through which to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bryan Hanks. Miroslav Kocic.

This paper details the results of recent large scale pedestrian, geophysical and geochemical surveys on Late Neolithic Vinca culture sites in Central Serbia. New data relating to settlement patterning, household organization, and diachronic developments will be discussed through combining surface survey and analysis and remote sensing. Results from these studies are adding a new perspective to conventional models for the Neolithic transition and the emergence of early village societies in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Véronique Bélisle.

The Wari state of the Central Andes has traditionally been interpreted as an expansive polity that incorporated numerous provinces during the Middle Horizon (A.D. 600-1000). Most research has focused on the large Wari installations built in several regions of Peru, leading many scholars to conclude that Wari administrators established direct imperial control over these areas. More recently, scholars have started to adopt a complementary bottom-up approach to study changes experienced at the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only George Schwarz. Benjamin Ford.

The 70-ton schooner Royal Savage played a pivotal role as the flagship of Benedict Arnold’s squadron in the American Continental Army’s defense of Lake Champlain during the first year of the American Revolution. Misfortune led to her sinking during the Battle of Valcour Island in 1776, and the wreck was left largely undisturbed in shallow waters for over a century and a half until, in 1935, her remains were rediscovered and salvaged for exhibit in a museum that never materialized. Instead, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wei Huo.

In the past, the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau region has been vacant in Silk Road route studies. The northern part of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau can be directly connected to the western region, with the Tarim Basin, Hexi Corridor, and the Loess Plateau together forming a very smooth ring. There are a number of oases connecting the desert and the Gobi, which has been considered by some as a direct connection of a Silk Road branch to the northern region of Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. The southern part of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mike Whitehead. Matt Bjorkman. Ben Ford.

A series of archaeological projects have recently been conducted at Fort Necessity National Battlefield through a Cooperative Agreement between the National Park Service and Indiana University of Pennsylvania. These projects have incorporated geophysical survey, metal detection, systematic shovel testing, and test unit excavation, as well as artifact curation and reporting. Through this partnership, the National Park Service has received an avenue for cost-effective cultural resource...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Pierce. Mike Lawrence.

Adjacent to Plaza B at Pacbitun is a Classic Period "palace" complex consisting of three conjoined courtyards each ringed by elevated range structures, likely serving elite-residential and administrative functions. Previous excavations indicated initial construction in the Early Classic period with numerous modifications made in the Late Classic, and preliminary evidence of occupation or use into the Terminal Classic period. The Pacbitun Regional Archaeological Project has begun to explore this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Patton. Susan Blair. Ramona Nicholas.

Despite more than a century of archaeological research in the Quoddy Region of southwestern New Brunswick, in the Canadian Maritime Provinces, the protohistoric and early contact periods in this area have remained obscure. However, recent research at several sites has begun to illuminate this period, and like many of the precedent Woodland period sites (prior to 500 BP), many of these newly studied protohistoric sites have produced shell-bearing components, and contain a wealth of information on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Falicia Gordon. A. Brooke Persons.

In 2010, a tropical storm disturbed human remains and archaeological deposits at the Fort Frederik Archaeological Site, a multicomponent site consisting of dense 18th-19th century midden deposits associated with Fort Frederik, a two-story fortification (est. 1760) dating to the colonial development of St. Croix, then a part of the Danish West Indies. Subsequent investigations, including a geophysical survey, subsurface testing, and osteological analysis, have identified a cemetery within the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wetherbee Dorshow. Michael Heckenberger.

In the southern Amazon, two decades of rapid agro-pastoral development, extreme drought, and forest fires in the "arc of deforestation" threaten to precipitate an ecological oscillation of southern transitional forests from an eco-region dominated by closed tropical forest to one of open savanna and woodlands. Collaborative research conducted with the Kuikuro indigenous community in the Xingu River headwaters, involving archaeology, soil science, paleoecology, remote sensing, geospatial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Scherer. Charles Golden. Mónica Uriquizú. Griselda Pérez Robles.

This paper presents a synthesis of current results from the 2016 - 2017 research seasons at Piedras Negras, Guatemala with implications for understanding warfare, economy, politics, and population dynamics throughout the ancient kingdom. First, while project members had identified a series of fortified centers and palisades in the region’s hinterlands, the recent identification of fortifications in the near periphery of Piedras Negras makes it one of the rare polity capitals in the southern...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tamara Bray. Leah Minc. Sergio Chavez.

Copacabana has been a pilgrimage destination and a site of extraordinary reverence from Formative times to the present. Together with the Islands of the Sun and Moon, it formerly comprised one the most sacred ceremonial complexes in the Inca Empire. Recent archaeological research in Copacabana has focused on the Intinkala sector located just east of the modern basilica. The principal aim of the first season was to ascertain the nature of Inca engagement with this powerful locale as evidenced...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melissa Galvan. William M. Ringle. Betsy Kohut.

Previous investigations by the Bolonchen Regional Archaeological Project demonstrated that the Valle de Yaxhom, in the Puuc region of Yucatan, was a significant locus of monumental construction during the latter Middle Formative and early Late Formative. Two large acropoli, the Acropolis Yaxhom and the Acropolis Lakin, were previously mapped and tested, but the nature of accompanying residential construction remained unknown. Two other sites with megalithic architecture, Nucuchtunich and Nohoch...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anabel Ford. Linda Howie. Josh Inga. Cristina Gonzalez Esteban.

Daub is characterized as a mixture of a plastic substance, like natural clay or plaster, and an organic, fibrous binder, which is applied and smoothed against a stick or wood structure to construct a wall. This building strategy is used extensively throughout the world, past and present, yet studies have tended to focus exclusively on identification of component ingredients, rather than compositional and provenance characteristics that offer insights related to resource procurement patterns,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Ionico.

European contact with Northern Iroquoian communities brought about a series of direct and indirect consequences. These involved European-disease epidemics and a series of migrations that moved people across the landscape as refugees, captives, or conquerors. Ceramic petrography offers a way for archaeologists to understand the impacts such demographic upheavals can have on technological systems. Iroquoian potters often use a recurrent set of rock and sand types that homogenize the paste-type...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelli Barnes.

What is so fascinating about heritage resources? What is it that sparks the imagination and instills a sense of place and wonder? What great lessons can we take away from the past? The most important roles of a federal archaeologist are to try to encourage public interest in questions like those, while preserving select sites with the greatest potential to provide the answers. However, compliance work for federal undertakings often focuses our attention and limited resources on the least...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Schubert. Maureen Meyers.

The late Mississippian Pisgah culture, dating from 1200- 1500 CE, is found across a wide geographic area including western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, and southwestern Virginia. Pisgah sherds are often recognized by the presence of distinct rectilinear and later curvilinear stamped decoration with sand, grit, and/or mica temper. Excavations by Dickens (1976), Keel (1976), and Moore (1981; 2002) better defined changes over time in Pisgah ceramics while simultaneously showing the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Guillermo De Anda Alaniz.

During the summer of 2017, the Gran Aquífero Maya (GAM) project initiated an investigation at Chichen Itza designed to define the site around its aquatic resources. The project is based on my previous work at Cenote Holtun, located 1.6 miles west of Chichen Itza, which found that a line drawn between Holtun and Cenote Kanjuyum on the east pasted through the center of El Castillo. It has long been known that El Castillo is bisected by a line drawn between the Sacred Cenote on the north and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ladislav Smejda. Anna Pankowska.

Mortuary variability in European prehistory has long been perceived through the lens of Christian worldview from which the discipline of archaeology originally developed. Expectations rooted in this conceptual perspective inevitably shaped the ways that the archaeological record was approached and interpreted. As a case study we consider the Central European Bronze Age, on which we can deconstruct the traditional ‘textbook’ understanding of ancient funerary traditions. During this period,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Swantek.

Despite the lack of cities, the Prehistoric Bronze Age on Cyprus (2400-1700 cal BC), an island in the Eastern Mediterranean, witnesses high wealth inequality and spatiotemporal variation in the emergence of social complexity or hierarchical social networks. Previous research has shown that social networks are malleable and cycle between egalitarian and hierarchical in different facets of complexity (control of labor, access to resources, participation in trade networks) through the Prehistoric...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jenna Battillo.

This work integrates multi-proxy data from 44 human paleofeces in order to study resource use among early farmers in the northern Southwest. Macrofossils and pollen were analyzed for all specimens. Since not all foods leave pollen or macrofossils identifiable after digestion, available resources unlikely to be visually identified were targeted for PCR-analysis in 20 samples using mitochondrial and chloroplast DNA primers. Separate cluster analyses of each of these datasets showed almost no...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aurelien Tafani. Andrea Vianello. Robert H. Tykot. Emanuela Gualdi.

This contribution aims at gaining on the life history of individuals buried in northeastern Italy between the fifth and the seventh centuries AD. Elemental analysis of human and animal remains provides data on the evolution of diet and mobility at a time of significant social changes. Our research strategy, based on a preliminary histological study on teeth and bones and on serial sampling, gives us the opportunity to observe these variations at the level of the individual. Thus, this research...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elise Jakoby Laugier.

This poster presents results of the Sirwan (Upper Diyala) Regional Project's (Kurdish Region, Iraq) 2017 offsite research in the Kurdish Region of Iraq. Off-site investigations of Mesopotamian landscapes provide evidence of land-use practices and inform our understanding of strategies and structures of past agro-economic systems. Thus, the aim of the 2017 season was to employ multiple remote sensing technologies (including magnetic gradiometry and drone-based imaging) to prospect for and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sophia Maline. Melanie Miller. Jillian Swift. Christine A. Hastorf.

Charred food residues provide a unique window into ancient peoples’ culinary cultures, and chemical analyses of burnt meals can help us identify the ingredients used to create specific recipes. However, limited experimental work leaves us wondering - when we find residue in an ancient pot, are we viewing the remains of the final meal cooked in that pot or is it the product of multiple recipes? Does the chemical signature of the residue accurately reflect the meal(s) cooked in that pot? Seven...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ari Caramanica.

By Late Preceramic Perú (3000-2100 BC) lomas environments were largely abandoned in favor of riparian and littoral ecozones, and hunting and gathering subsistence strategies were increasingly replaced by agriculture. This change coincided with the emergence of several hallmarks of complexity: monumental architecture, specialization, and hierarchical organization. The role that environmental degradation or climate change played in this transition remains a subject of debate. This paper presents...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ann Rowe.

Comparatively little excavation information is available from the Chancay valley, particularly pertaining to textiles, which are abundantly preserved there. Yet, it turned out to be possible to identify in museum collections, including that of the NMAI, two distinct styles of highland tunics found at sites in the mid and lower Chillon valley and vicinity that in turn influenced mid-valley and coastal tunics, particularly Chancay-style examples. Moreover, textile designs made it possible to date...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ilaria Patania. Susan Mentzer. Xiaohong Wu. David Cohen. Paul Goldberg.

The sites of Xianrendong (Jiangxi) and Yuchanyan (Hunan), China, contain the earliest pottery yet discovered, dating respectively 20,000 cal BP and 18,600 cal BP. This pottery is found in otherwise Late Paleolithic, hunter-gatherer contexts. To understand human activities at these caves we employed micromorphology and -FTIR on the sediments. Here we present the results of analysis of the layers containing combustion episodes, which suggest low heating temperatures at both sites. and infer...