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

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jon Lohse. Aleksander Borejsza. Arthur Joyce.

Yuzanu 50 was discovered during a reconnaissance of the headwaters of the Yuzanu River as a scatter of debitage eroding from a barranca cutbank, from a palaeosol formed under wet meadows that lined the stream from the Terminal Pleistocene into the Holocene. Excavations exposed 15m2 of an occupation surface buried 13.5m below modern ground surface. An excavated assemblage consisting almost exclusively of biface reduction debris made of materials that crop out further upstream indicates that this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alina Karapandzich. Paul Nick Kardulias.

Adulation of heroes, including the flawed, militaristic, authoritative men of Homeric epic was an important feature of ancient Hellenic culture. This phenomenon is reflected in cults and shrines built in the Archaic period. How did these so-called "hero cults" form, and can Early Iron Age (EIA) elite burials form a connection between the tomb cults of the Late Bronze Age (LBA) and the hero cults of the Archaic and later Classical periods? The purpose of this study is to examine EIA burials whose...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claire Smith.

This presentation focusses on Larry Zimmerman’s contributions to world archaeology through his leadership roles within the World Archaeological Congress. This includes his various roles on the WAC Executive and Council and his convening of the first Indigenous Inter-Congress, held at Vermillion, South Dakota in 1989 and the subsequent development of the Vermillion Accord on Human Remains.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alice Diaz.

The Zooanthropomorphic beings present on some artifacts of the cultural areas Tairona (Colombia), Gran Coclé (Panama) and Gran Chiriqui (Costa Rica) dating back to pre-Columbian times have often been identified as shamans. But what are the iconographic elements that are in favor of such a precise interpretation? To begin with, we did a thorough iconographical analysis aiming to determine taxonomically the animal component, the ratio between human and animal, and the precise anatomical elements...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Breeanna Charolla. Jamie Hodgkins.

Italy serves as a critically important region for better understanding the late Pleistocene as it was home to Neandertals and other hominins. Archaeological excavation in northwestern Italy at the cave site of Arma Veirana, with layers dating back to 44 ka, intends to provide insight into this ambiguous period in prehistory. Preliminary data from zooarchaeological analysis of 1,414 specimens indicate that Neandertals primarily hunted medium-sized bovid/cervids, including Capra ibex, Cervus...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Simeonoff. Curtis Marean. Jamie Hodgkins.

Understanding if and to what extent early anatomically modern humans adapted to dramatic climatic events is essential to human origins research. Pinnacle Point — a complex of cave sites and rockshelters along the southern coast of South Africa — offers a unique opportunity to study human adaptability through time. The long sequence at Pinnacle Point Site 5-6 (PP5-6) spans 164 - 44 thousand years ago and encompasses two Interglacial to Glacial Marine Isotope Stage transitions (Stages 5-4-3)....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Klemmer.

The Rio Chico site was occupied almost continuously for 5000 years (ca. 3500 B.C.E. to 1532 C.E.) in a region of coastal South America that is heavily influenced by climatic events such as El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Evidence suggests that occupants of Rio Chico were heavily dependent on marine resources. The fishing strategies utilized at Rio Chico sustained the community over time, which allowed for the long-term development of an economy based on the Spondylus trade. This combination...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Genevieve Pothier Bouchard. Fabio Negrino. Julien Riel-Salvatore. Pascale Tremblay.

Human-environmental interactions can be discussed on different scales, and from diverse perspectives and specializations in archaeology. We propose to examine human mobility on the local scale of Riparo Bombrini, a key site in Northwest Italy to understand Anatomically Modern Human dispersals along the Mediterranean coast during the early Upper Paleolithic. Previous studies including spatial, lithic, and raw material data revealed distinct mobility signatures from the site’s two Protoaurignacian...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jesse Wolfhagen.

Archaeologists investigate past hunting and herding strategies using models of animal survivorship derived from long bone fusion and/or mandibular tooth wear patterns. As biological and behavioral variation makes estimating precise biological ages problematic, researchers typically assign "age stages" that describe ranked age groups. Ordered logistic regression models take advantage of the information in these rankings to estimate and analyze patterns in ranked/ordered data based on other...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Teresa Hsu. Nawa Sugiyama. Leila Martinez-Bentley. Mónica Gómez Peña.

Preliminary analyses of the zooarchaeological assemblage from the Plaza of the Columns Complex illustrate a snapshot into past human activities such as specialized ceremonial events and faunal acquisition strategies for food consumption. The fauna from this complex, located just northwest of the Sun Pyramid, add to the database of forty years of archaeofaunal exploration throughout Teotihuacan. Here, we focus upon animal species distributed among four areas to understand the economic and ritual...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Polly Burnette-Egan.

This poster presentation presents a reanalysis of legacy faunal material, collected by Henry Wright and the zooarchaeological analysis conducted by Richard Redding, during the 1968 excavation on the Deh Luran Plains in southeastern Iran at the 4th-millennium site Tepe Farukhabad. It behooves all researchers to give more attention to the existing data sets already collected and available for research. In that vein, this study re-evaluates the faunal data sets at Tepe Farkuhabad and looks for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Taylor. Tumurbaatar Tuvshinjargal. Jamsranjav Bayarsaikhan. Julia Clark.

Identifying the timing and nature of the emergence of pastoral societies in eastern Central Asia is hampered by many key logistical challenges, including the scarcity of early nomadic habitation sites and the small and fragmented nature of related archaeofaunal assemblages. This study presents faunal identifications of animal bones from two recently discovered Bronze Age habitation sites in northern and western Mongolia using ZooMS (Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry)- a technique that uses...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan Merrick. Tanya Peres.

The purpose of this research is to examine different domestic activities at the Mound Field site (8Wa8), a Weeden Island shell ring in Wakulla County, Florida. Zooarchaeological analysis was conducted on the faunal remains recovered in 2016 from six excavation units at Mound Field. These units represent different hypothesized areas of domestic activities from across the site. The differential deposition of food remains may reveal more about the patterns of activities in which people...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ana Opishinski.

Identity is a complex entity that is constantly being remade and altered, so to understand the development of the New Mexican identity in the 17th century, one must understand the various parts that make up an identity. This poster examines one of these parts: the foodways of New Mexico. Specifically, this project is examining the faunal deposits from LA 20,000, the largest Spanish estancia in early colonial New Mexico (1598-1680). The meat-component of the diet from a 17th century Spanish...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Diana Fridberg.

The tropical lowland surroundings of La Corona support a wide range of indigenous fauna. Zooarchaeological analysis demonstrates that the site’s ancient inhabitants made use of this diversity, exploiting many terrestrial and aquatic taxa in subsistence and ritual activity. This paper summarizes major zooarchaeological findings from the duration of the La Corona Regional Archaeological Project. Excavations at La Corona have not targeted areas expected to be "fauna rich" and have produced...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Grace Cesario.

The settlement of Iceland, a previously uninhabited landscape, began a series of human-induced environmental changes that have had lasting effects on not just the land but on social organization as well. As land claims were made for household farms, hierarchy developed and some were pushed to settle on the margins. In Hegranes, a region in Skagafjörður, northern Iceland, the sites that are on the margins are often much smaller than the others and may not have been farms at all but rather...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gavin Wisner. Katie K. Tappan. Aimee I. Alvarado. Chrissina C. Burke.

Zooarchaeological data provides details on the social processes related to ritual artifact deposits in the Maya area. This poster provides the results of faunal analysis on materials collected during the 2016 and 2017 Belize Valley Archaeological Reconnaissance project excavations of Group B at the site of Xunantunich. Our excavations focused on structures B1, B2, and B4, where multiple, and often layered, deposits of artifacts were located outside of the structures. Data collected includes,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only George Hambrecht.

Anthropogenic climate change will both aggravate existing and create new situations in which local communities encounter the power of larger networks looking to either exploit or manage resources in their area. This paper will discuss a variety of ways in which zooarchaeological data investigated in a historical ecological mode might be useful in such circumstances. Zooarchaeology creates a deep context for human and animal dynamics. It investigates anthropogenic as well as environmental...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jarod Hutson. Anna K. Behrensmeyer. Diane Gifford-Gonzalez. Gary Haynes. Amanda Millhouse.

Taphonomy, the study of how organisms fossilize and information that is lost and gained along the way, has emerged as pivotal to reconstructing the paleoecology of animal communities and ancient human lifeways. Through taphonomic analysis, we can decipher the sources of bone accumulations at paleontological and archaeological sites and the processes involved in bone modification and preservation. Such inquiries rely upon well-documented reference collections that link certain bone modifications...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Rapes. Jesse Wolfhagen. Max Price. Erik R. Otárola-Castillo.

Zooarchaeologists contribute valuable data to the exploration of archaeology’s grand challenges. The scale and complexity of these problems requires zooarchaeologists to aggregate and analyze data using rigorous statistical methods while ensuring reproducibility and validity. Because assemblages can contain thousands of data points, conducting statistical analyses on all of the available data in a standardized fashion is difficult. ZooaRchGUI provides zooarchaeologists a free, user-friendly...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kitty Emery. Rob Guralnick. Michelle LeFebvre. Laura Brenskelle. Sarah Whitcher Kansa.

Re-use of large zooarchaeological datasets offers new ways of tackling the grand challenges of archaeological science. But big-data research requires integrating multiple zooarchaeological datasets while maintaining the biological and archaeological details needed to contextualize the faunal information. Accessing and combining these data remains difficult despite the increasing use of open-access archaeological data publishers and archiving services, and the open-access, interoperable...