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

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jenna Domeischel. Jesse Tune. Christine Gilbertson. Heather L. Smith.

Remote sensing has dramatically changed the way we collect data at archaeological sites, and has added new and innovative methodologies to our fieldwork. It has also facilitated greater public engagement by making archaeology more accessible – this is especially true of sites that are considered remote or difficult to access because of challenging terrain. As part of the public outreach initiative of the new Blackwater Draw Museum and its associated website, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Milan Kovac.

In the beginning of the 20th Century Uaxactun was considered to be the cradle of the Maya civilization. Later, other monumental Maya centers were found and scholars lost interest for Uaxactun. The former popularity of Uaxactun was interpreted as just a coincidence because the first large excavations were carried out there. Newly identified important Maya sites were considered to be older and more interesting. The new archaeological project in Uaxactun has dealt with the Preclassic horizon of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shannon Plank. Rafael Burgos. Scott Hutson. Yoly Palomo. Miguel Covarrubias.

In the Late Preclassic and Classic periods, several sites in the center of the northern Maya lowlands constructed buildings with distinctive megaliths. Izamal was the largest of these sites by far, and connected itself to other important sites with stone causeways that stretched up to 30 km long. Ucí, located approximately 35km to the northwest of Izamal, had its own long distance causeway which linked it to three smaller sites with monumental architecture. This paper combines data from two...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Diana Zaragoza.

Definir una región tan antigua y compleja como la Huasteca, implica conocer las características de los grupos humanos que la habitaron; en ella existen diversas manifestaciones culturales a través del tiempo; en esta ocasión presento un primer acercamiento al mundo simbólico que encontramos durante el período Posclásico. Inicié el estudio utilizando cuatro indicadores arqueológicos: Vasijas de cerámica, Concha labrada, Pintura Mural y Escultura. Lo primero que hice fue reconocer los símbolos que...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chantal Huckert.

La presentación se centra sobre figuras estelares de ojos emplumados, cruces, estrellas de tres o cinco puntas, y máscaras. Están pintadas y moldeadas en bajo relieve en la vestimenta y el cuerpo de representaciones humanas en barro que pertenecen a los tipos, rojo sobre crema, mayoide, sonriente y escultórico. Se identifican las variantes, procedentes de las culturas del centro de Veracruz, a la luz de formas análogas en las artes y los registros gráficos de Mesoamérica, referidos por los...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claudia Espejel.

El avance de los estudios arqueológicos realizados hasta el momento permiten delinear ya un panorama general de la historia prehispánica en Michoacán desde aproximadamente 1500 aC hasta 1522 dC. En esta ponencia presentaré una síntesis de dicha historia, vinculando la información de Michoacán a la de otras regiones colindantes con el fin de distintguir los rasgos particulares de diversas zonas pero identificando también las tendencias generales de desarrollo que se dieron a través del tiempo.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Donald Blakeslee.

In 1601 CE, Juan de Oñate visited a large community in southern Kansas that natives described as taking two or three days to walk through. The location of the remains of the town was first clearly demonstrated in 2015. Since then, surface survey and work with collectors continues to document the scale of the community. Excavation in 2017 by Wichita State University and the University of Colorado in what was thought to be a midden mound instead encountered a dense concentration of features...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Hall.

For decades, stamped and plain clay objects recovered from post-contact Native American sites between the 1950s and 1990s in the Florida panhandle have puzzled researchers. The objects are believed to have been produced by the Apalachee Indians living in the region. However, little is known about the techniques used to manufacture them or what purpose they served. These artifacts are generally referred to as Lamar clay balls owing to some having stamped patterns similar to Lamar-like stamped...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jared Koller. Stephen Acabado.

The Spanish conquest of the Philippines redesigned the indigenous landscape to adhere to the idealized orthogonal plan outlined by King Philip II’s Ordinances of 1573, centered on the church plaza. This reconfiguration facilitated the successful political, economic, and religious control of the colonial possession. An aspect of this resettlement plan is the concept of Bajo de Campana (under the bell) that implied control through the ringing of the church bell. The plaza complex, which is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Davide Domenici.

The National Museum of the American Indian holds a lot of Mesoamerican mosaic encrusted wooden masks and shields bought in 1921 from Carl A. Purpus, who stated they were found in a cave near Acatlán, Puebla (Mexico). The presentation, besides including a brief description of the artifacts, it is aimed at reconstructing the objects’ unknown contextual information through a comparison with similar objects held in American, Mexican and European museums, some of them proceeding from scientifically...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lori Phillips. Erin Thornton. Eleanor Harrison-Buck.

Reconstructions of ancient Maya animal use often emphasize the importance of terrestrial species, such as deer, to the overall diet. While these species played an important role, much less attention has been paid to the use of aquatic resources despite the presence of resource rich perennial wetlands in the Maya lowlands. To further understand this crucial area of the Maya-environment relationship, we investigated the site of Chulub located in the Western Lagoon Wetlands of Belize. This site...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kimberly Sheets.

Lagomorphs (rabbits and hares) were a critically important dietary resource for inhabitants of the pre-contact American Southwest, where they typically dominate faunal assemblages. It is useful to examine proportions between genera of lagomorphs—specifically, cottontails (Syvilagus sp.) and jackrabbits (Lepus sp.)—to elucidate information about the past environment and how it might have changed in response to human actions. Based on habitat preferences and predator evasion strategies, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adrian Chase.

Ancient Maya cities possessed a unique urban form characterized by two factors: mixed agricultural land use within residential areas and dispersed households consisting of extended family groups. These two factors contributed to the low-density nature of Maya cities, and conditioned urban form and the structure of neighborhoods and districts. The requirements of top-down administration resulted in the creation of districts to delineate areas of provisioning for the city’s urban services....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alice Muntz.

This research entails the thorough analysis and comparison of two ceramic assemblages to understand whether and how ritual manifests in pottery of the Late Mississippian Southeast. The study focuses on ritual phenomena exhibited at two Late Mississippian Period (ca. late 1200s A.D. to A.D. 1500) settlements in southern Illinois, the Millstone Bluff site in Pope County (11Pp3) and the Dillow’s Ridge site in Union County (11U635). Millstone Bluff has been interpreted as a site of public ritual and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Walter Burgos Morakawa. Brent Woodfill.

The Candelaria Caves System, with its approximately 18 km of passageways, forms the second largest underground karstic complex in the Maya Area. As result of their location at the highland-lowland transition and close to Great Western Trade Route, it was an important pilgrimage center for people of different cultural and geographical regions. The Early Classic period (A.D. 250-500) marked the introduction of polychrome ceramics, mainly Dos Arroyos-group ceramics, which played an important role...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Zeanah. Douglas Bird. Rebecca Bliege Bird. Brian Codding. Robert Elston.

Most evidence suggests that Prearchaic hunter-gatherers were highly mobile, and equipped with a hunting oriented lithic technology that lacked milling equipment. Nonetheless, they acquired a broad spectrum of prey and tended to camp near wetlands rich in small game and plant resources. Archaeologists have questioned to what degree this evidence reflects an adaptation that fundamentally differed from ethnographically observed patterns in the Great Basin, as well as whether it was shaped primarily...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brenton Willhite.

It has been hypothesized that social ties between the Salinas Pueblo Province and the Jornada Mogollon sparked cultural change in both regions. In this study, I use Social Network Analysis to characterize these interactions from A.D. 900 to 1450 via the spread of Chupadero Black-on-white pottery. Integral to the study of social interaction and the emergence of Chupadero Black-on-white ceramics is the nature of the pithouse-to-pueblo transition in each region. Prior to the emergence of pueblo...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Danny Sosa Aguilar. Bernardo Archuleta.

This paper aims to discuss how the success of community partnership has led to an understanding of the way people moved across the landscape in the past. Situated in northern New Mexico, the Pueblo de Abiquiú contains a rich history that dates back at least into 2,800 – 4,000 BP (Before Present). Using portable x-ray fluorescence spectrometry, obsidian artifacts found at the pueblo suggests that groups are bringing obsidian from at least three known local sources. However, there is an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joanna Troufflard.

The socio-political organization of the Tapajó people living in the Lower Amazon region during late precolonial times has been studied through two main sources: contact chronicles and archaeological data coming from the Santarém site located at the mouth of the Tapajós River. Based on these sources, researchers have formulated three models to explain the socio-political organization of the Tapajó. However, recent surveys and excavations conducted in the upland Belterra plateau provide new data...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jason Paling. Marx Navarro Castillo. Justin Lowry.

The intrinsic relationship between human beings and bodies of water is unquestionable. Among the ancient Maya it has been observed that many of their agricultural cults were linked to existing bodies of water where they settled. In the Maya Northern Lowlands, multiple underwater archaeological studies of cenotes record this behavior as offerings of luxury items and human sacrifice are often recovered and noted. The Rancho Ojo de Agua archaeological project focuses on the basin of the Lacanhá...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Akatsuki Takahashi.

The waters of the Pacific Ocean contains a wealth of Underwater Cultural Heritage (UCH) encompassing the history of humanity from the Stone Age to the Atomic Age and witnessing climate change. This paper presents a summary of the outcomes of the UCH Programme in Pacific Small Island Developing States (SIDS). Notable progress includes the reference to the UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the UCH in SAMOA Pathway outcome document (2014), national and regional capacity building workshops, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Abraham Arnett. Joey LaValley. Travis Cureton.

Between November 2016 and September 2017 archaeological surveys performed by Logan Simpson on behalf of the Tonto National Forest in the Hell's Hole region of central Arizona revealed an abundance of previously undocumented Anchan and early Salado Tradition Settlements. Numerous single room habitations or field houses and large masonry structures with fully enclosing plaza or compound walls indicate a substantial population in an area traditionally considered a hinterland between the Sonoran...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Deirdre Kelleher.

In contrast to many other American cities, which developed distinctive ethnic neighborhoods during the nineteenth century, Philadelphia’s European immigrant populations were largely dispersed throughout the city during this period. Irish immigrants lived in every ward of Philadelphia as newcomers from various European countries settled along alleyways and courtyards throughout the city. Using Elfreth’s Alley National Historic Landmark as a case study, this paper argues that the dispersion,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Miller. Gregory L. Braun.

Wright’s doctoral and subsequent work brilliantly employed archaeological science to show how relatively simple technological tools (single-chamber kilns) were used by skilled craftspeople in clever ways to create surprisingly technologically complex objects (black-on-grey pottery, resulting from several different cycles of atmospheric conditions during firing), objects which also provided information about patterns of social boundaries and technological style. In homage to this work, we will...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mathew Stewart.

Work in the Nefud Desert, Saudi Arabia, has been fundamental for establishing the importance of the Arabian Peninsula for Pleistocene hominin populations and their dispersals out of Africa. Recent palaeontological and archaeological exploration in the Western Nefud Desert has uncovered numerous fossiliferous palaeolake deposits and associated archaeology. Fossil assemblages include taxa with both African and Eurasian affinities and indicate a greater diversity in large mammals than resides in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Doershuk.

As an established scholar, Larry Zimmerman spent several years around the turn of the millennium at the University of Iowa where he served as a faculty member in the Department of Anthropology and Director of the American Indian and Native Studies Program. With the encouragement and support of then State Archaeologist of Iowa William Green, Larry and I initiated a program of study in 1999 emphasizing the teaching of high quality archaeological field techniques coupled with active exploration of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stanislava Romih. Rafael A. Guerra.

The BVAR project recently renewed its investigations of peri-abandonment deposits at several sites along the Belize River in Western Belize. Also referred to as de facto refuse and problematic or sheet-like deposits, these cultural remains are predominantly recovered in palace rooms and courtyards in site cores across the Maya lowlands. The purpose of the BVAR investigations is to better understand the formation of such deposits as well as their temporal and spatial significance across sites in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Frederick. Ray Hewitt. Marilyn Walker Cunningham.

Although use of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), or what are commonly known as drones, has become popular among the general public over the years, federal land management agencies are just beginning to realize their potential for cultural resource management. The Bureau of Land Management, Las Cruces District Office (LCDO), has recently obtained UAS resources and trained staff capable of collecting data that is useful for a variety of resource management issues. In particular, the LCDO UAS team...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tamara Varney. Treena Swanston. Ian Coulthard. A. Reginald Murphy. David M. L. Cooper.

An exploration into various aspects of lead exposure in the British Royal Navy stationed in 19th Century Antigua, West Indies has contributed to some unexpected insights. This research was facilitated by study of human remains mitigated from a Naval Hospital cemetery in response to modern development. The interred at the site were lower ranking naval personnel including enslaved individuals. Other work on lead exposure in the region focused on enslaved plantation laborers revealed high levels of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Richards. Sissel Schroeder. Jarrod Burks.

Lynne Goldstein’s compilation of a GIS-based map of the Aztalan site, portraying all investigations through 1996, visually integrated almost two centuries of archaeological work at the site in southern Wisconsin. Lynne’s map made two things startlingly clear. First, decades of excavations were not all referenced to a common datum and few had left visible surface indications, making it difficult to relocate earlier excavations and avoid re-excavating disturbed contexts. Second, just 10% of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gerard Chouin.

The sudden emergence of deadly infectious diseases compels societies to improvise ways to manage the dead, explore causations, and save lives. Such overwhelming demographic events are sources of trauma but also opportunities for individual survivors and for the social fabric as a whole. Sub-Saharan Africa, like many other parts of the Old World where past mass mortalities were not documented, has been omitted from the debate about the impact of pandemics on deep historical trajectories. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eleanna Prevedorou. Jane E. Buikstra. Stella Chrysoulaki.

Ancient Athens is cited as the contentious caldron from which the western political tradition emerged. During the formative Archaic period (ca. 700-480 BC), Athenian history was marked by major political developments (e.g., early law codification, citizenship formalization), social stratification (e.g., classes), and conflict (e.g., tyrants). To date, such processes are known to us through texts, artistic representations, and elite-centered mortuary grounds. The collaborative Phaleron...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stéphen Rostain.

Sangay, Ecuador, is probably the most prestigious and impressive site in Amazonia. It is indeed an immense establishment regrouping dozens complexes of artificial earthmounds and a network of endless paths dug along the edge of a terrace of the left bank the Upano. Many archaeological sites have been found in this narrow and straight Upano Valley has been modified over tens of kilometers in length by the pre-Columbian, but few of them have been excavated. Does this multitude of interconnected...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rhiannon Stevens. Hazel Reade. Sophy Charlton. Jennifer Tripp.

Human mobility and environmental interactions at the end of the Palaeolithic were undoubtedly influenced by large-scale and rapid climate change. With the melting of ice sheets and expansion/contraction of ecosystems, new landscapes and resources became available to late and final Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers. The UP-NORTH project is examining the dispersal of people and animals into Northern Europe after the Last Glacial Maximum. Using a range of techniques, including stable isotopes,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rick Schulting. Petrus le Roux. Yee Min Gan. Gary Lock. Chris Gosden.

As in any mixed farming system, the management of animals doubtless played an important part in Iron Age societies in southern Britain. Economically, they furnished meat, milk, wool and manure, and served as draught animals for transport and tillage. Intersecting with their economic uses, they were also important socially, politically and ritually. It is relatively straightforward to determine the proportional representation and mortality profiles of the major species – cattle, sheep/goat and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chris North. Scott Courtright.

PaleoWest Archaeology recently completed two data recovery projects at the east and west ends of the seminal Hohokam village of Pueblo Grande in Phoenix, Arizona. The two projects were in the last two undeveloped parcels of Pueblo Grande, which was the largest and most influential Hohokam village in the lower Salt River Valley. Despite more than a century of historic use of these parcels, which included residential and commercial developments, substantial prehistoric archaeological deposits...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Miriam Stark. Peter Grave. Lisa Kealhofer. Darith Ea. Boun Suy Tan.

Angkor’s agro-urban capital covered more than 60 square miles, and its landscape housed farmers and artisans. Constraints of the archaeological record limit our ability to document production scale of most activities; the genealogical skew of Angkor’s epigraphic record in another reason. Yet Greater Angkor’s gardens and fields must have fed residents in the Angkorian state’s epicenter. Artisans built its temples, sculpted temple images, and cast metal goods; specialists and communities tended...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Kulick.

Transitional phases between settlement periods on Bronze Age Crete are often associated with ‘natural’ destructive events. However, it is unclear whether these ‘natural’ destructive events and subsequent shifts in material practices were influenced by anthropogenic or environmental processes. For example, the end of the Neopalatial period on Crete occurred in the LM IB period; some researchers view LM IB destructive fires as indicative of human action during a phase of social and political...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Mixter.

This paper begins with a question: What does it mean to live amongst ruins? The literature on ancient Maya urbanism focuses to a large extent on how urban spaces are arranged and what this says about social and political organization. However, the long occupations of many Maya centers resulted in urban centers that reflect a palimpsest of decision-making over centuries rather than a single grand plan. Indeed, evidence at many Maya sites suggests that urban plans were reworked as buildings were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kyle Brunner.

There has been much debate on what defines an Islamic city (madīna) and what made cities become "Islamic" after the Islamic conquest. These studies have often marginalized the Islamic period, associating street encroachment and overall shifts away from the "classical" model as signs of decline. Scholars have relied on western notions of what defines a city and have used strict urban typological models, which do not conform to the region or period. In addition, these studies have neglected to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dan Penny. Tegan Hall.

The transition from the sprawling Angkor kingdom with its vast, low-density urban forms, to a constellation of smaller cities on the Mekong River was accompanied by profound changes to urban ecology and to landscapes – both in the failing low-density cities, and in the burgeoning trade-based centres that replaced them. Here, we present a paleo record of urban ecology that responds, in part, to changing population dynamics across Cambodia during the 15th to 19th centuries C.E. Implications for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alison K. Carter. Piphal Heng. Miriam Stark. Rachna Chhay. Damian Evans.

Greater Angkor (9-15th centuries CE) was mainland Southeast Asia’s largest low-density urban area. Some of the most visible aspects of this landscape are the large stone temples constructed by Angkorian kings and elites. While many scholars have hypothesized that these temple enclosures were loci of habitation, few have documented this archaeologically. In this paper, we present the results of two field seasons of excavation at the temple site of Ta Prohm, part of a broader research program that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barry Kidder. Jacob Welch. Scott Hutson. Shannon Plank.

Often overshadowed by the splendor of massive monumentality to the south, Late Preclassic life in the Northern Maya Lowlands is a period of material and social experimentation, a balancing act between emerging social differentiation and an ideology of communal integration. During the latter half of this period, the secondary site of Ucanha in Yucatán was physically integrated into a micropolity via an 18-km long sacbe and experienced the creation of integrative civic spaces, a population apogee,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Bisson.

The Sangoan, a late Middle Pleistocene technological tradition widely distributed in Sub-Saharan Africa, follows the Acheulean and is considered by some to represent the earliest manifestation of the Middle Stone Age. It may coincide with the evolution of Homo sapiens and the initial appearance of evidence for complex cognition. Unfortunately, this archaeological construct has fallen in and out of favor and remains poorly defined. It has uncertain dates and environmental associations, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Ojeda Rodríguez. Jeffrey B. Glover.

Previous zooarcheological research has focused on knowing the patterns of wildlife exploitation in the different archaeological sites of the Maya area. In this sense, the present work intends to approach the different uses of the different species of animals in activities carried out by the pre-Hispanic Maya people located at the site of Vista Alegre, Quintana Roo, Mexico. The simple has c. 23,000 remains of fauna, coming from three architectural constructions: Structure 9 (Operation 3A),...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gilbert Tostevin. Luke Premo. William Wimsatt.

Social learning is universally believed to be critical to the hominin adaptation. Yet when this becomes evident in our oldest cultural proxy, lithic artifacts, is hotly debated. Much of the variation in how archaeologists study this question is caused by differing assumptions related to the constraints on the performance, and thus the learning, of the flintknapping process. This paper explores the consequences of the physical constraints within lithic technology on its cultural transmission,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Danielle Cannon. Carly Plesic.

As a program designed to integrate and analyze geospatial data, ArcMap has the potential for broad archaeological application. Here we employ ArcMap to create a database for research and management of the historic cemetery at Stoddartsville, a 19th century milling village built along the upper Lehigh River in northeast Pennsylvania. Specifically, we use ArcMap to integrate: (1) spatial data from a total station survey of individual grave markers and cemetery boundaries; (2) descriptive data from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julie Hoggarth. J. Britt Davis. Christophe Helmke. Jaime Awe.

A variety of functions have been proposed for ‘problematic deposits’ across the Maya lowlands. All of the explanations have archaeological and temporal implications that have rarely been operationalized together to gain better insights into the nature of these deposits. In this presentation, we describe these features as ‘peri-abandonment deposits’, as all proposed explanations imply that the events that led to the formation of the deposits occurred around the time (or after) ceremonial centers...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Snyder. Kathryn Whalen. Douglas Perrelli.

Recent CRM fieldwork in western New York by SUNY Buffalo Archaeological Survey has afforded the opportunity to address questions of how people, technology, and the environment related from newly discovered sites which span thousands of years. One of the most fruitful avenues of research is in the examination of the transition from the Late and Transitional Archaic to the Early Woodland, a period in which it is suggested there was dramatic linked cultural and environmental change, where multiple...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Whitehead.

The use of drone based photogrammetry is now well established in archaeology for surface modeling and mapping of archaeological sites. The Arizona Department of Emergency and Military Affairs (AZDEMA) is sponsoring a number of longterm projects on their properties. One project will be using traditional drone photogrammetry to create high resolution maps to assess plant communities, plant health, and canopy structure as a way of exploring links between vegetation and other survey methods. A...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew O'Brien. Todd Surovell. Randy Haas.

Domestic dogs (Canis familaris) are a common presence in nomadic cultures, but archaeology still struggles to identify them in the absence of their faunal remains. What we lack is a means to identify behaviors that manifest themselves in the archaeological record that are in clear association with domestic dogs. One avenue is carnivore modified bone. What experimental studies indicate is that we can isolate patterns of feeding associated with particular carnivores, but what has not been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Morales. Jelmer Eerkens. Jeffrey Rosenthal. Andrew Ugan.

Isotopic studies of faunal remains provide an ecological framework from which to interpret human behavior, including diet, subsistence, settlement, and mobility. In this study, we present isotopic analysis of four well-dated sites that span a 3500-year record along the Feather River, the biggest tributary of the Sacramento River located in Northern Central California. Through carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur stable isotopes we explore the effects of human population growth on the type(s) of browse...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stefani Crabtree.

Archaeological studies benefit from rich ecological data, yet linking ecological data to narratives of the past can be difficult. Here I use trophic network modeling to understand both Ancestral Pueblo and Australian Aboriginal food webs, comparing these systems for a greater understanding of human and environmental resilience. Here I show that Ancestral Pueblo people connected themselves into a greater environmental web and use network analysis to examine how the changing network properties of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nick Simpson. Christopher T. Fisher.

Recent applications of LiDAR technology at the Late Postclassic city of Angamuco, located in the heartland of the ancient Purépecha Empire in modern day Michoacan, Mexico are allowing for the identification and analysis of urban features in innovative ways. A complex system of constructed water management features consisting of reservoirs, sunken plazas, and connective canals were a vital form of infrastructure that were required for the movement of water across the dynamic landscape upon which...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Khori Newlander.

Archaeologists commonly use the geographic patterning of sourced artifacts to understand how prehistoric cultures used their landscapes, yet exactly what this patterning indicates remains unclear. The Paleoindian literature reflects a tendency to assume that toolstone conveyance reflects direct acquisition (i.e., mobility) motivated by subsistence and technological concerns, rather than acquisition (i.e., exchange) motivated by social concerns. Yet the challenge of actually distinguishing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Harley Burgis. Lara Homsey-Messer.

Microartifacts - generally considered to be artifacts measuring less than 6.35 mm (¼ inch) - have traditionally received little attention in North American archaeology. We argue that microartifacts are not simply smaller versions of larger artifacts, but rather provide different and complimentary data. This study investigates microartifacts from the archaeological site of Dust Cave (10,650-3,600 BCE), located in northwest Alabama, in order to better understand prehistoric diet and cooking...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul R. Duffy. Péter Czukor.

A variety of new groups emerged during the Bronze Age in the Carpathian Basin —some had powerful rulers holding feasts and controlling the trade in commodities, and some were egalitarian peoples leaving little evidence for social differentiation outside of age and gender. This paper uses a comparative and multi-scalar perspective to study two different social trajectories in the Carpathian Basin during the second millennium BC: the Lower Körös Basin in Eastern Hungary, and the Danube and its...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabriela Ore Menendez. Steven A. Wernke.

In recent years, the use of multispectral satellite imagery has become an increasingly viable option for archaeological site detection and classification. Nevertheless, the high costs and relatively low resolution of multispectral data present challenges for local-scale archaeological feature detection. In this presentation, we will examine the advantages and limitations of using UAV aerial multispectral imagery as a means of local-scale feature detection. We compare results of remote sensing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Margot Serra. Jakob Hanschu. Amandine Flammang. Danielle Kurin.

Previous studies of crania showing recurrent trauma suggest high rates of violence in the Andahuaylas province of Peru during the Late Intermediate Period. Through an assessment of direct blow fractures to radius and ulna bones (lower arm bones), we further examined violence in the region, anticipating a high rate of parry fractures. The skeletal remains assessed come from Sonhuayo, a fortified habitation sector of Cachi, a Chanka site in the west-central portion of the Andahuaylas province....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeremy Freeman.

As budgets grow slimmer and curricula become more rigid, teachers are often faced with the necessity to either eliminate or limit the number of school fieldtrips. With tightened budgets teachers are compelled to choose which fieldtrips to retain and which ones to eliminate. These choices are often based on cost, availability of transportation, or are based on what the teacher hopes students will gain from the experience. The goals of the fieldtrip generally align with the educational...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kim Cox. Carolyn Boyd.

Four principal rules of interpretation for Pecos River Style rock art of the Lower Pecos region of Texas are proposed. These rules were proposed based on a commonality between Pecos River Style and the iconography of historic Corachol-Aztecan speaking tribes such as the sixteenth century Mexica of central Mexico and the present-day Huichol of western Mexico. This presentation shows how the same rules can be applied to the interpretation of the rock art of other prehistoric Corachol-Aztecan...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Nicolas.

Caves are natural spaces, but like other natural settings, they can be perceived by people through highly variable cultural lenses. Caves are not generally used as utilitarian spaces, but are more often sacred spaces where rituals are performed. The material record of these subterranean features can provide insights for how past peoples connected to the symbolic landscapes of caves, thus affording opportunities to assess behaviors. Research on the ritual uses of caves is fairly new in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Murray. Jacob Harris. Simen Oestmo. Curtis Marean.

The heat treatment of stone to enhance flaking attributes was an important advancement in the adaptive toolkit of early humans. The earliest evidence for this is the heat treatment of silcrete 164 ka at the Middle Stone Age site Pinnacle Point 13B in South Africa. Heating stone prior to knapping alters the physical and chemical composition of the stone, and it has long been recognized that flaked heat-treated stone has a glossier surface. We expect this glossiness to result from a smoother...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sandra Pentney. Stephen Bourne.

The SAA has held sessions on how climate change is affecting cultural resources for several years now. We began with characterizing the impacts and concerns on how to preserve or mitigate. We have discussed ongoing studies, and strategies to engage the public and local government in conservation and recordation initiatives. This year, Atkins will be presenting a newly developed tool to help planning organizations visualize physical impacts to built environment, traditional cultural properties,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Yaquinto.

This presentation will explore the opportunity to increase scientific driven data into the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) Section 106 compliance process particularly relating to Bureau of Land Management (BLM) undertakings. The absence of empirical data available to the BLM to analyze how different activities’ development and/or management affect archaeological sites can result in unfounded assumptions and unnecessary complications during project planning and implementation. Using...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kevin Wright. Elliot H. Blair.

In partnership with Tennessee Valley Archaeological Research (TVAR), this poster presents the results of an x-ray fluorescence spectrometry (XRF) analysis of ceramics recovered from historic Choctaw (Late 17th - Early 19th century) contexts at sites (22KE630 and 22KE718) located along Chickasawhay Creek, Kemper County, MS. In the fall of 2017, a sample of ceramic sherds was selected for chemical sourcing at the University of Alabama. XRF was used to non-destructively identify ceramic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thaddeus Bissett. Martin Walker. Sean Taylor. Michael Russo.

This paper evaluates the utility of high-resolution LiDAR-derived elevation data for remotely surveying difficult-to-access coastal areas to identify possible archaeological sites, which can then be targeted for further investigation. To determine the effective limits of the elevation data to visualize low-relief structures, locations of previously-recorded Archaic and Woodland-period shell rings along the lower Atlantic coast were examined. Thirty-four rings were identified, including two...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marisol Cortes-Rincon. Jonathan Roldan. Cady Rutherford. Byron Smith. Walter Tovar Saldana.

Airborne LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) is an active remote-sensing technique which records the surface of the earth using laser scanning. The recent acquisition of LiDAR data for a portion of the Three Rivers regions in northwestern Belize offered the opportunity for a new way to analyze settlement and landscape utilization by the ancient Maya. This paper will focus on the systematic analysis of the dataset, ground verification, and post-processing methodologies. ArcGIS was used for the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Roxanne Wildenstein. Aubrey Cannon. David Burley.

Analysis of archaeological fish remains from the Hopoate site, on Tongatapu in the Pacific Island Kingdom of Tonga, identified 18 different families. Significant change in relative abundance was evident in Lethrinidae (emperors) and Acanthuridae (surgeonfish, unicornfish), two families common as food fish in Tonga. Frequencies of the families were compared between the early settlement period (~2850-2900 cal BP) and the subsequent Plainware/Aceramic period. Larger-bodied Lethrinidae, which are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniela Klokler. Fernando Almeida.

Field schools, and Methods and techniques in Archaeology classes are mandatory steps to achieve Master’s or a PhD degree in most graduate programs in Brazil. We, as instructors noticed a certain mismatch in students’ behavior in regard to decision-making in both situations: reticence during field activities, boldness during class discussions and debates. This dichotomy seemed to be related to field experiences in which the students had fewer opportunities to engage with other "more...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Sutter.

Recent bioarchaeological and archaeological research regarding the environmentally influenced demise of the Moche (AD 200 – 800) of the Jequetepeque Valley, Perú, indicates a variety of responses, including population dispersals, political fragmentation, cultural hybridization, and new political alliances with recently arrived foreigners at ceremonial centers. Biodistance analyses suggest that adjacent highland Cajamarca peoples from the adjacent highlands arrived in the Jequetepeque and likely...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Woollett. Céline Dupont-Hébert. Paul Adderley. Guðrun Alda Gísladóttir. Natasha Roy.

Recent studies have identified an important reorganization of the Svalbarð estate, north-east Iceland around AD 1300. The initial coastal-focused settlement of the region was followed by the founding of new farms in the deep interior. Most were not sustained and some farm sites on the coast were also reduced. Initially, the magnate’s farm of Svalbarð had a herding economy supplemented by fishing while Hjálmarsvík, its coastal neighbor, exploited a diversity of marine resources. Around AD 1300...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ainara Sistiaga. Sepideh Parkour. Mathilde Poyet. Roger Summons.

Fecal biomarkers have proven to be a valuable tool to identify the likely source of fecal matter and have successfully been applied in archaeology. They provide direct evidence of the digestive physiology and diet of the source, and critical data to assess the origin of fecal deposits. 5βstanols can be used as fecal biomarkers because they uniquely form in the gut of higher mammals during metabolic reduction of sterols. However, the actors of this microbial conversion still have to be elucidated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Helmer. David Chicoine.

This paper examines forms of proto-urban settlements in coastal Ancash, north-central Peru, centered on the Nepeña Valley. During the Early Horizon (800-100 BC), the region witnessed the development of culturally and economically interrelated settlements with varying degrees of architectural density and complexity. Most of these centers were organized around clusters of walled enclosures with duplicate domestic facilities interpreted as multi-functional residential complexes, or compounds....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Scharf.

This paper presents pollen data as a proxy of past vegetation at Poverty Point, a large Archaic mound site in northeast Louisiana. The paleoecological focus of this presentation revolves around the rate and nature of change over time. Patterns and changes in taxonomic diversity are presented and discussed in light of environmental productivity. The rate of vegetation change is calculated and related to ecosystem stability. Additionally, changes in individual taxonomic representation are examined...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Harper Dine. Traci Ardren. Chelsea Fisher.

It is difficult to pin down the objective definition of a weed; rather, the idea of a weed is constructed through a set of characteristics that are, for the most part, dependent on context and relative interactions. Doody et al (2014) use Judith Butler’s (1990) concept of performativity to describe this dynamic, ongoing construction as a product of the agency of both people and plants. Here we interpret studies on ancient Maya agricultural techniques through the lens of plant agency and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lucianne Lavin.

The Venture Smith homestead is an important eighteenth-century rural black archaeological site with a remarkable level of integrity, associated with a person significant to American history. Born about 1729, Broteer Furro was an African prince abducted and sold into slavery when only six years old. Thirty years a slave, he purchased his and his family’s freedom and became a prosperous mariner-merchant-farmer and benefactor to fellow blacks. At his death in 1805, he owned over 100 acres of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Derrick Marcucci. Susan Gade. Antonio Martinez Tunon.

In summer 2017 Landmark Archaeology, Inc. conducted data recovery excavations at four Late Archaic sites in southeastern New York within the Wallkill drainage near the town of Goshen. Excavations at the VerHage Site, a Late Archaic Lamoka Phase (ca. 3000-2500 BC) site and the largest of the four investigated sites, identified pit features, post-molds and house patterns, yielded a large lithic assemblage, and found glacial erratics used for food processing and tool production. The recovery of a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rob Mann. Charles Peliska. Jacob Dupre.

In August 1862 long-simmering tensions between the Dakota and Euro-American traders, settlers, soldiers, and government officials boiled over into open warfare. For nearly two months militant Dakota warriors, ostensibly under the leadership of renowned chief Little Crow, attacked Euro-American settlements and military installations. In response, settlers across southwest and central Minnesota either fled the region or attempted to fortify their settlements. These so-called "settlers’ forts" of...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Katie Leslie. Melissa Frederick.

The Saint Louis laboratory of the Veterans Curation Program processes several archival investigations throughout each five month term, but few have been to the scale of the Harry S. Truman Reservoir Project. This project produced 23 boxes worth of documentation spanning over 268 linear inches. The Harry S. Truman Reservoir is the largest man-made lake in Missouri and covers over 100,000 acres of government owned and flood easement lands. To prepare for the construction of the dam, a number of...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Jessica Mundt. Jasmine Heckman.

The Veterans Curation Program was created with the mission to rehabilitate U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) archaeological collections while providing temporary employment and vocational training to veterans. In the nine years that the VCP has been in operation, it has evolved into a dynamic public archaeology effort that engages non-archaeologists in the field of archaeology on a daily basis. This paper explores the varied approaches to public archaeology within the Program, as well as the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Marla Toyne.

Human sacrifices are frequently referred to as ‘victims’ of ritual violence, which presupposes that the sacrificed had no control over their fate or were unjustly harmed. Many examples of human sacrifice have been identified recently across the north coast of Peru involving a range of time periods and bodily treatment to suggest that there was incredible variation in practice, including in the identity of those sacrificed. Both males and females have been identified as sacrifices, but rarely are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angela Keller.

Formal plazas constitute the majority of public space in Maya centers and yet, until quite recently, plazas have not received the same investigative attention as the impressive pyramids and palaces that surround them. This neglect is largely due to the difficulty of investigating public plazas, which typically contain few artifactual or structural indications of their ancient use. Although the identification of activity in ancient plazas is technically challenging, a dedicated investigation of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only E. Christian Wells. Kara Fulton. David Mixter. Borislava Simova.

The archaeological investigation of Actuncan in western Belize included the geochemical analysis of one of the largest and most diverse sets of activity surfaces in the Maya world. Over 1200 soil, sediment, and plaster samples from four major architectural complexes representing regal, ritual, and residential locations were assayed using ICP-MS. The results allow a uniquely "atomic" perspective on the changing use of urban space over roughly 900 years, ca. AD 100-1000. This research identifies...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Connor Johnen.

This paper details the results of archaeological survey in the Wind River Range, Wyoming between elevations of 9,000 and 11,000 ft. The purpose of this survey was to test a predictive model of a specific site type (sites referred to as villages) created by Stirn (2014) and tested by Stirn in a different region of the same mountain range. Although the methods of creating the predictive model were not altered, the survey methods were significantly altered. Random survey blocks were created within...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gregory Heide. Stuart Chilvers.

The Salmo-Priest Wilderness Area is a 41,335-acre wilderness area in the Selkirk Mountains, in northeast Washington. The wilderness area is within the Colville and Kaniksu National Forests. The area is noted for providing habitat for a number of threatened or endangered species including woodland caribou, grizzly bears, and grey wolves. Access to the area is limited to a few trails and visitation to the area is low. The Colville National Forest offers an alternative way to enjoy this wilderness...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Judith Habicht-Mauche. Emma Britton.

As a student of Jimmy Griffin and Irving Rouse, much of Stephen Williams’ early archaeological research involved the typological analysis of pottery collections from the American Southeast to reconstruct regional culture history. Later, as Director of the Peabody Museum, he played an important role in facilitating the development of a new generation of archaeological and materials science approaches to pottery analysis at Harvard with the construction of the Putnam Laboratory. This paper uses...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Steinberg.

The rapid settlement of Iceland has a distinct beginning, but defining the end of the settlement turns out to be difficult. While there are anecdotal stories of earlier settlers, the beginning of large-scale migration to Iceland seems to happen in about AD 870, at the start of Harald Fairhair’s reign, and the time of a distinct volcanic ash layer. The landnám, or land-grab is an important template for our understanding of movements into new landscapes, from the Neolithic Revolution, to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Isabelle Lulewicz. Neill Wallis. Victor Thompson.

Current research at Garden Patch (8DI4), a Middle Woodland mound center with circular village construction in northern peninsular Gulf Coast Florida, provide quantitative insights into the timing and temporality of monument construction and village aggregation. Here, we combine previously modelled radiocarbon assays with new isotopic data on season of collection and habitat of exploitation. The four-phase model of site occupation when combined with the new isotopic data provide new insights into...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Deborah Nichols. Wesley Stoner.

Current research has prompted rethinking about the early development of sedentism, agricultural economies, and complex societies in Central Mexico. We discuss new evidence of significant interconnected changes ca.1000 BC that through multiple trajectories involved intensified maize production, expansion of sedentary villages, expanded interaction networks, and increased social complexity. With the establishment of the first cities, the Late Formative saw corporate political economy strategies...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Genesis Torres Morales. Celeste Gagnon. Gabriel Prieto.

The Moche of the North Coast of Peru, are well known for their ritualized culture of violence. Warriors, prisoners, weapon bundles, and sacrifice are commonly depicted in a variety of Moche media, and archaeological evidence from urban centers suggests such acts were practiced. What is not known is if the Early Intermediate Period ancestors of the Moche also engaged in such acts of violence. Pre-Moche, Gallinazo phase urban sites were often located in defensible settings and some show evidence...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Martin Gallivan.

Beyond the Mississippian frontier in Southwest Virginia, Algonquian and Siouan societies in the Chesapeake pursued their own culture histories, evidently independent of developments in the American Midcontinent and Southeast. And yet, between AD 1300 and 1500 a set of social changes cascaded from the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Chesapeake Bay which may correspond with developments highlighted in this symposium. How did the late precolonial collapse, social fragmentation, and violence of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alison Rautman.

Among Puebloan groups of the American Southwest, oral traditions record mythical-historical stories of the often-catastrophic or violent ends of some of the pueblo ruins that dot the landscape (e.g., Hopi Ruin Legends, by Michael Lomatuway’ma, et al., 1993). In other cases, archaeological evidence points to the continued importance of ruins across centuries of time as repositories of meaning across the landscape (Snead 2008). One small feature from a burned pueblo from Central New Mexico records...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Beth Scaffidi.

Artifacts from yungas and coastal zones of Arequipa, Peru show varying degrees of integration into the ideological and material networks of prominent neighboring cultures of the Early Intermediate Period (Nasca) and Middle Horizon (Wari). Ongoing research suggests these communities and towns were well-integrated into foreign trading networks, whether through direct interaction with foreign traders or down-the-line exchange. While foreign-produced goods and emulation of foreign goods or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ruth Musser-Lopez.

Though routine interaction may not have been the case, the Fremont were a part of the iconic world of the Virgin (Anasazi) Puebloan people who occupied southeastern Nevada north of Las Vegas in Evergreen Flats, 75 miles northwest the Lower Colorado River’s north end bend. Within that region is Petroglyph Corral visually demonstrating Puebloan people at a Fremont fringe area where the two cultures may have competed, collided or even collapsed into one another and the more recent Numic tribes. ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashuni Romero. Nelda Issa Marengo Camacho.

El Proyecto Costa Escondida, dirigido por Jeffrey Glover y Dominique Rissolo, ha realizado investigaciones en la costa norte de Quintana Roo, México desde el año 2005. El sitio de Vista Alegre está ubicado en una pequeña isla dentro de la laguna de Yalahau, formó parte de los asentamientos costeros que, a lo largo del litoral de la Península de Yucatán, mantuvieron una circulación de bienes durante la época prehispánica. Estos sitios presentaron y compartieron algunas características...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Agni Prijatelj.

Caves are regularly portrayed as a blank stage upon which the social – including ritual activity – is enacted. This paper, however, takes the opposite approach: in discussing a number of selected Antique and Medieval ritual cave sites in Slovenia that are associated with Roman, Christian and Slavic religious systems, it demonstrates the vibrant, hybrid, participant and continuously-changing nature of underground places in which multiple symmetric and fluid connections exist between people,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kenneth Sutherland. David Chicoine.

This contribution explores feasting practices discernible from the pottery assemblage at three Early Horizon archaeological complexes in the lower Nepeña Valley, north-central coast of Peru: Caylán (800 - 1 BCE), a large town or city interpreted as the primary center of a multi-tiered polity; Samanco (500 - 1 BCE), a small coastal town involved in production and exchange of maritime resources; and Huambacho (600 - 200 BCE), a ceremonial center associated with agricultural production. In feasting...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kandace Hollenbach.

In January 2015, we instituted a monthly "Volunteer Day" at the Archaeological Research Laboratory at the University of Tennessee. Originally conceived as a way to increase outreach to the general public as well as prepare a large number of artifacts for curation, this activity has developed into a "citizen science" opportunity, where participants help collect data. Here we reflect on the positives and negatives of the program as we have implemented it over the past two years, with feedback from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claudia Nuñez. Sofia Chacaltana Cortez.

It has been suggested that Inca colonization strengthened kin bonds between ayllu members while at the same time requested tribute by means of establishing "fictive" kin affiliations. Therefore, subjugated populations response to Inca imperialism caused the consolidation of local and regional identities. However, what occurred in the Colesuyo? Colesuyo region of southern Peru, inhabited by multi-ethnic small-scale groups –the Cochunas from the upper Moquegua Valley and the Coles and Camanchacas...