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

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Greer.

One thing for which Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley is known is its active antebellum ceramic industry. While predominantly German and Scots-Irish peoples colonized the region from the 1730’s onward, it was the Germans who brought their potting traditions to the Valley. By 1745, German potters began to fill local needs for ceramics, a trade which grew in importance over the next century and a half. These vessels took on more than just utilitarian roles, as choosing to purchase locally made ceramics...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tawnya Waggle. Laura Hronec. Jasmine Kidwell. Donald Purdon. Jenna Domeischel.

Blackwater Draw is known world-wide as the type-site for Clovis culture— the first demonstrable evidence of humans hunting mammoths in the New World. However, as a resource of Eastern New Mexico University, Blackwater Draw is also a valuable tool for creating connections between student research and community engagement. Students participate in internships, directed studies, and use the varied components of the site to write their undergraduate capstone papers and graduate theses. Through these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Attila Gyucha. William Parkinson. Richard Yerkes.

The past two decades have seen a remarkable increase in the number of joint prehistoric archaeological research programs of US and local scholars in Eastern Europe. These collaborative projects are featured by the innovative blend of profoundly different theoretical and methodological traditions. In our introductory paper to the session, with a focus on the Carpathian Basin, we illustrate similarities and differences in North American and Eastern European perspectives and approaches to explore...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephanie Halmhofer.

In May 2015, a disturbed burial was uncovered in Garden Bay, British Columbia, within close proximity to the large shíshálh village site of Sexwamin (DjSa-3). Found in association with the burial were 244 intact smooth, unadorned mold-blown (SUMB) glass beads and 40 SUMB glass bead fragments. Due to their extremely fragile nature, blown glass beads are rare in archaeological contexts and the beads from Garden Bay are from one of only five sites in North America where SUMB glass beads have been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steve Fox. Jaime Awe.

Previous archaeological investigations of terminus groups in the Maya Lowlands concluded that these architectural complexes served either cosmological, ritual, or economic purposes. In an effort to test these models, we investigated causeway terminus groups at Cahal Pech and Baking Pot. Subsequent comparisons of the Cahal Pech and Baking Pot data with that from other sites in the Belize Valley, Caracol and Tikal, strongly suggest that while there was some regional diversity in the significance...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kaitlin Stanley.

Situated in Alaska’s eastern Aleutian Islands on Unalaska Island, the Summer Bay site dates to 2,000 years BP. Over 700 osseous objects representing various manufacture and use stages have been recovered. Among these are harpoons, fish hooks, labrets, points, wedges, awls, and needles. These are primarily made from sea mammals and avifauna. Although Summer Bay represents one of the most secure dates of the Amaknak Phase (3,000 to 1,000 years BP), minimal research has been done to better...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Synstelien. Heli Maijanen.

Bone modifications by chewing insects and their larvae have been described for several families. We report extensive bone damage due to feeding of the American cockroach (Periplaneta americana), a close relative of termites. Roaches were seen feeding on thawing vertebrate remains in a processing room, in which skeletons were being prepared for entry into a comparative collection. A study of roach gnawing was initiated after a number of defleshed mammal bones were discovered extensively modified....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Merritt. Monica Avilez. Jonathan Reeves.

Fossil bone surface assemblages include differential specimen preservation (weathering stage, cortical surface exfoliation, polish, roundedness, fracture type) and identifiability (taxonomic or anatomical precision). Three 1x1 meter inventory squares placed on steep, moderate, and minimally sloping areas of a fossiliferous outcrop test whether outcrop shape is a megabias that influences assemblage attributes. A digital elevation model created from drone-captured aerial imagery describes outcrop...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Garrison.

There are bones of a bridge in Lansing exposed on the muddy banks of the Grand. In this cityscape, a "Sortatropolis", a once urban space now emaciated and exhausted. There would have been nothing special about this bridge to make its 1987 demolition, its absence, a remarkable tragedy, except that its disappearance can be directly connected to the long exhale of this once thriving capital. The Sortatropolis is haunted by the ghosts of auto industry moguls, lumber barons, and boot-strapping...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jean Hudson. Roberta Boczkiewicz. Brian Billman. Jesus Briceño.

Cerro la Virgen (CLV) is a town-sized LIP site located in the Moche Valley a few kilometers from Chan Chan, the administrative and political center of the Andean polity of Chimu. Previous studies have focused on ceramics and regional politics (Keatinge 1974, 1975), the kinds of plant and animal remains found in residential dumps (Pozorski 1976, 1979; Billman et al in press), and multiple lines of evidence for the nature of the political relationship between the residents of CLV and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Narges Bayani.

How frontiers and borders are conceptualized in archaeology is critically influenced by the approaches and perspectives in culture contact research. Absence of written documents from Bronze Age Central Asia severely limits the application of such theories. The nature of the Bronze Age civilization of Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC) in Central Asia, and its dispersion to neighboring NE Iran has been a long-lasting question in study of Prehistoric Western Asia. This paper aims to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lourdes Henebry-DeLeon.

In looking at all available population specific data for the Columbia Plateau, the Ancient One falls within the variability exhibited on the southern Columbia Plateau at the same time period and throughout time. He was not outside of the norm for the population existing during the Early Cascade period when he was alive and for the population that followed for which he has a shared group identity. The Ancient One’s biological identity, cranial morphology, stable isotope values, and DNA data...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Wagner. Ryan Campbell.

Lewis and Clark recruited 11 soldiers from the small US Army outpost of Ft. Kaskaskia (1802-1807), Illinois, in 1803 to join their expedition to explore the American west. This event traditionally has been identified as having occurred at a 1750s French fort of the same name. The 2017 SIU summer field school investigations within the fort walls including the use of LIDAR, GPR, and hand excavations revealed that the fort is primarily a single component French construction dating to the mid-1700s...

DOCUMENT Citation Only J. Gregory Smith. Alejandra Alonso Olvera. Soledad Ortiz. Atasta Flores.

Social boundaries of the past and present are usually nebulous, contested, and fluid. In this paper we examine the ancient towns and villages between the two Maya kingdoms of Chichen Itza and Ek Balam in northern Yucatam. We hypothesize that the boundary area between these two cities in the 9th century AD was based on Classic Maya concepts of ruler-centered polities but changed dramatically in the 10th century as Chichen Itza became a fundamentally different kind of Maya city the likes of which...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kyle Wright. Lawrence Todd.

In the early 21th Century, the Washakie Wilderness, which encompasses roughly 2850 km2 of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, was a virtual blank spot on the map of prehistoric archaeology with only three sites reported and no systematic inventories having been completed. By 2017 cooperative investigation between the Shoshone National Forest and Greybull River Sustainable Landscape Ecology (GRSLE) has completed 16 field seasons in the Washakie and documented 388 previously unknown prehistoric...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brittany Mistretta. Jonathan Hanna.

In a previous paper, we examined past faunal studies from Troumassoid period (AD 800-1600) sites in Grenada, concluding that an expansion of diet breadth likely occurred during this time. Our conclusion contradicted the traditional "crab-shell" dichotomy proposed by Rainey and Rouse, but confirmed findings from elsewhere in the Caribbean. Presented here is a continuation of this work, with new faunal analyses incorporated from recently excavated inland, western, and earlier (Saladoid) sites, as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Catherine Popovici.

Comalcalco displays a radical departure from traditional Maya building materials in its brick and seashell mortar construction instead of the paradigmatic Maya limestone. Incised animal, architecture, hieroglyph, and human forms adorn the brick slabs of principal buildings of Comalcalco’s ceremonial core. However, their inward-facing, or concealed, orientation rendered these markings invisible. Because monumental architecture benefited from the labor of non-elites, the purposeful placement of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mica Jones. Ruth Tibesasa.

Environmental heterogeneity and climatic instability in the mid-Holocene (~8,000-3,000 BP) are linked to increased socioeconomic diversity in East Africa. Increasing aridity ca. 6,000-5,000 BP encouraged early herders to migrate south into the region, while local hunter-gatherers intensified their reliance on ecologically-rich environments. Kansyore hunter-gatherers of the Lake Victoria basin established specialized subsistence systems that incorporated heavy pottery-use and seasonal site...

DOCUMENT Citation Only C. Margaret Scarry. W. Flint Dibble.

Excavations at the Archaic (7th-6th centuries B.C.) city of Azoria on Crete demonstrate the value of intensive environmental archaeology for understanding an historical Greek context. Texts document the important role of food and dining to ancient religion and politics; however, ancient authors presented a normative picture and excluded details they assumed were common knowledge. Studying plant and animal remains can "ground-truth" ancient sources on foodways and provide contextual nuances not...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Omar Alcover. Thomas Garrison. Stephen Houston.

In the last decade, archaeologist have successfully employed active remote sensing technologies, such as LiDAR, to identify ancient settlement in the Maya lowlands. Near the site of El Zotz in northern Guatemala, this technology has aided in the identification of fortresses, terraces, and a network of raised roads. Archaeologist who employ LiDAR focus principally on the structural data acquired from the LiDAR point clouds. Building on these methodologies, we assess the benefits of incorporating...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Israel.

I began the "Maryland Archaeology: Past Portrait Project" because I came across many undocumented terrestrial, underwater, and advocational archaeologists in Maryland, and realized they provided a large range of information on Maryland’s forgotten and unacknowledged archaeological activities and accomplishments. My goals for this paper were to document, to the extent possible, many of the forgotten contributors of the late 19th, 20th, and early 21st century archaeological surveys and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Sharpe. Kitty Emery. John Pfeiffer.

For over a century, the taxonomy of the Central American freshwater mussels (family Unionidae) has been the subject of numerous classifications and reclassifications, with naturalists identifying morphologically identical taxa as different genera or species, while at the same time classifying obviously distinct taxa under the same name. Zooarchaeologists at the mercy of these erratic classification schemes have been unable to effectively compare datasets. This study uses a combined...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marc Vander Linden.

Projecting back notions of "British", "Irish" or "European" back into prehistory does not go without problems as, explicitly or not, these concepts are closely associated with the rise of nation-states, and still echoed in yesterday's and today's turbulent politics. And yet, even advocating a simple geographic meaning for these terms does not prevent any problems, as it raises theoretical and methodological issues regarding the choice of location and scale of case-studies to be analysed. In the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jodi Jacobson.

Until recently, highly fragmented bone assemblages in Texas were almost all attributed to poor preservation. A review of assemblages, however, indicates that while there are a high percentage of heavily fragmented medium-sized and larger mammal bone at many of these sites, bones associated with small mammals, reptiles, avian, and fish have only minimal fragmentation. A review of bone from a variety of sites with deep temporal and well-stratified context and of varying degree of preservation and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Allison Cuneo.

The armed conflict in Iraq has produced a catastrophic humanitarian crisis, beginning with the take-over of Mosul by the Islamic State (ISIS) in June 2014 followed by their subsequent gains in its northern governorates. Since then millions have become internally displaced or left the country as refugees. These war-wearied Iraqis are struggling with a loss of identity and a lack of control over their lives, and these feelings are further compounded by the destruction of their as a result of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Norbert Stanchly. Jon Spenard. Terry Powis. Christophe Helmke.

The Terminal Classic period in the southern Maya Lowlands was one of great social transition, witnessing the disruption of long-standing economic systems, and the downfall of divine kingship. The manifestation of this "collapse" in the artifactual record has been well documented at many sites throughout the Belize Valley, yet how it does so at the site of Pacbitun, on the southern rim of the Belize Valley, remains poorly understood, in spite of nearly three decades of archaeological research...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Glenn Kolyer.

Excavation of large sites in the Hudson Valley is often limited to the availability of resources and labor. The Bryant Site of Ulster County, New York, is a Late Archaic site located on approximately 54,000 m2 of horizontal surface area on privately owned farmland. Scientific sampling of the site was conducted through survey using a grid-based plan. Each grid square was analyzed for debitage, fire-cracked rock, and lithic artifacts. The results of each unit were contrasted and compared. Through...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Remi Mereuze. T. Max Friesen.

Western Arctic archaeological sites hold the remains of wooden houses occupied during the second millennium AD by ancestors of the present Inuit people. Although the permafrost helps to maintain these features in excellent condition, the giant puzzle resulting from the collapse of the frame makes it hard to understand their original architecture. During the ArcticCHAR project, we excavated a house at Kuukpak (Northwest Territories, Canada) in 2014 and 2016. Facing the complexity of this feature,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kenichiro Tsukamoto. Fuyuki Tokanai. Toru Moriya.

This paper aims to refine the Maya chronology during the Classic period (A.D. 250-950) through the development of Bayesian models. In so doing, we combined radiocarbon dates with stratigraphic information, ceramic data, burials, and calendric dates from stone monuments. At the Center for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry of Yamagata University, we ran 78 radiocarbon samples recovered from the Guzmán Group, an outlying group located 1.3km north of El Palmar in southeastern Campeche, Mexico. To...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angela Jaillet-Wentling. Samantha Taylor.

Small-scale and volunteer-driven public archaeology efforts undertaken at the site of Pandenarium (36ME253) aim to bring the results and practice of archaeology to many publics with recent outreach efforts including partnerships between state agency personnel and university archaeology programs, fieldwork opportunities for volunteers, interviews with local media, and presentations at local, regional, and national conferences. With changing methods and times, our definition of hybrid...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julie Hruby.

While fingerprint impressions have been used archaeologically to approach a range of cultural questions, the methodologies developed to date tend to be labor intensive, statistically unsophisticated, or require large numbers of complete prints. Recently, numerous quantitative print attributes that correlate with sex in modern populations have been discovered, almost always from two-dimensional data. It is probable that there are additional, yet-unrecognized features that correlate with producer...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alyce De Carteret.

In the late sixteenth century, King Philip II of Spain sent out a request to the local administrators of his overseas colonies, asking that they complete a questionnaire designed to collect information about the lands he had conquered. The responses to this questionnaire, completed primarily between 1578-1586, form a set of documents now known as the Relaciones Geográficas. Question 31 asked respondents to describe the form and construction of the local houses and the materials used to build...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erika Robrahn-Gonzalez.

This paper aims to analyze the implementation of integrative project designs developed with local communities in Brazil, in a bottom-up strategy. The objective is deliver relevant outcomes and outputs to society incorporating local social values to the process. This strategy is also aligned to the development of UNESCO’s Sustainability Science goals, from which archeology cannot be isolated. It considers the development of Cultural Environment Projects, where archeology research has more...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Chirinos Ogata.

Wari expansion across the Central Andes involved the construction of colonies, serving as nodes in the state network from Cajamarca to Moquegua. Each colony, even considering local adaptations, was built following a precise sequence and setting up predetermined types of spaces. Monumental architecture exhibiting Wari features and design became an expression of power by itself, a symbol of Wari hegemony physically inscribed in the local social landscape. Large amounts of work were invested in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marcus Schulenburg.

The Fort Ancient Period (AD 1000-1700) saw the introduction of formal villages to the peoples of the Middle Ohio Valley. To help understand the transition to full time sedentary villages, this paper explores how these new villages operated as communities. This allows for an examination of the relationship between communities and villages as concepts and as organizational units. This paper uses the Guard Village site (12D29), an Early Fort Ancient village, as a case study to examine this new form...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Terry Powis. George J. Micheletti. Kaitlin Crow. Sheldon Skaggs. Peter Cherico.

Archaeological research in the Upper Belize River Valley has recently produced information that dramatically improves our knowledge of the earliest Maya. Investigations, particularly at the site of Pacbitun, has revealed evidence of radiometrically and ceramically dated cultural stratigraphic deposits for the early and late Middle Preclassic subperiods (900-300 BC). Excavations were undertaken in the site core, principally Plazas A and B, to determine the nature and extent of these communities...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Natalie Carpiaux. Alicia Boswell. Jessica Walthew. Gabriel Prieto.

The site of Pampa la Cruz, located in Peru’s northern coast in Huanchaco, is situated just north of the ancient Chimu capital of Chan Chan. A multi-component site with occupations from the Salinar, Gallinazo, and Chimu eras (400 BC – AD 1470), excavations in 2016 recovered Chimu child sacrifices. Each body was interred wearing multiple garments, including mantles, loincloths, and tunics. Environmental and soil conditions enabled the preservation of these textiles. In July 2017 students in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Ann Levine.

The multinational village of Otstonwakin was a key nexus of colonial and indigenous interaction where colonial identities were expressed as well as constituted through material remains. The sacred landscape that was used by the residents of Otstonwakin to bury their dead was disturbed by road construction projects in both the late 1800s and early 1900s. While the full extent of the cemetery associated with Otstonwakin is unknown, the burial ground is represented by four documented graves and a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Connie Ericksen. Haagen Klaus. John Clark. Zachary Chase.

Spain's invasion of the Andes initiated a social drama unprecedented in the experience of the Andean natives. Spanish and Spanish-conscripted native chroniclers wrote extensively about Inca pageantry, spectacle, and ritual, and hastily attributed pagan belief to performances they witnessed or heard about. With equal haste, the Spanish appropriated performance as means of introducing and enforcing Christianity. In this paper, I treat performance as the central feature of Andean Colonial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrea Alveshere.

The Orendorf site (11F107), located on a bluff overlooking the central Illinois River valley, comprises a mound group and a series of Late Woodland and Mississippian habitations. The occupation of the site is characterized by a gradual migration of the community to the west through successive abandonment and rebuilding. Burned structures have been found in all Orendorf settlements, and at least two of the abandonments followed complete burning of all structures. Intensive salvage excavations of...

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

Climate change impacts on archaeological sites are equated with the burning of the great library of Alexandria for the scale and rapidity of the loss of cultural and paleoenvironmental data (McGovern, 2016). A portion of that destruction is often in the form of sea-level rise exacerbated coastal erosion. While threatened historic sites, such as lighthouses, generate support for remediation and even relocation, coastal aboriginal sites holding records of thousands of years of coastal occupation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Deniz Kaya.

The importance of understanding the use of space and the distribution of places in the household in the prehistoric setting has been recognized by the anthropological community. Unfortunately the archaeological context often does not always favor such inquiries, especially in the prehistoric setting. Thus, the extraction of information needed to make claims on how different societies distributed living areas in the house and in the greater village, can not always be examined in detail. For the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tressa Munger. Caitlyn Stellmach. Laura Peck. KC Carlson. Lee Bement.

Bull Creek, located in the panhandle of Oklahoma, is a rare late Paleoindian camp on the Southern Plains. Two separate occupation levels apparent at the camp indicate two seasons of habitation. The lower camp, dominated by bison bone, is the focus of this analysis. Bone tools and distinct butcher marks provide evidence of butchering behavior 9,000 years ago on the Southern Plains of Oklahoma. This poster describes the findings of butchering processes at the site. Large sections of bison are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sheldon Skaggs. Peter Cherico.

Recent investigations in a large, enclosed courtyard on the southwest corner of the ancient Maya site of Pacbitun, Belize, revealed evidence of successive emplacements of ritually important deposits. Initial analysis of the ceramic material suggests that the entire courtyard plaza has only one or two floors, with construction and use only during the Late to Terminal Classic period (600 – 900 CE). Five caches and two cyst graves were related directly to the plaza floor. The caches consisted...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Solsiré Cusicanqui.

The Cajamarca Valley, located in the northern Andes of Peru, is a space of encounter and movement of material from different ecological areas since early times to the present. This is mainly due to its strategic location within Andean geography as an enclave of natural points of access to different ecological zones (coastal valleys, Amazon rainforest, southern highlands). Cajamarca culture (100 BC - 1400 AD) is characterized precisely by the mobility of its inhabitants, as indicated by their...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eugenia Robinson. Marlen Garnica.

Archaeological survey of Cakhay, the largest Classic site (200-800 A.D.) in the Maya Kaq’chik’el area, was carried out in 2017 by the Proyecto Arqueológico del Área Kaq’chik’el (PAAK). The goal of the survey was to determine the limits of the site and survey its periphery. Reconnaissance of 20 sq km found that populations were nucleated on the hillside surrounding the defensive and religious center with some look out sites in the periphery. Within the center and the nucleus of the site,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jorie Clark. Cathy Bickenheuser.

Region 1 of the U.S. Forest Service manages more than 25 million acres in Washington, Idaho, Montana, and North and South Dakota, with more than five million acres designated as Wilderness and Wilderness Study Areas. Because of the Wilderness Act, NHPA Section 106 surveys that would identify potential archaeological sites are generally not undertaken in Wilderness areas. However, a number of known historic structures in these areas have been restored by the Northern Region Historic Preservation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hannah Elliott.

Excavations at Huari, the urban center of the Wari state in Peru's Ayacucho Basin, have uncovered well preserved faunal remains, with the majority belonging to native camelid species. While knowledge pertaining to camelid exploitation by the Wari people has been enhanced in recent years through excavations at sites such as Conchopata, little is known about camelid usage at the site of Huari. In this paper, I use osteometric analysis to identify specimens to the species level and to examine the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kylie Quave. R. Alan Covey.

Indiscriminate invocation of the term ayllu constrains archaeological reconstructions of community organization in the pre-contact Andean highlands. Legacies of earlier generations of anthropological scholarship encourage researchers to assume particular traits of sociopolitical organization. Archaeological and ethnohistoric evidence from the Cuzco region of Peru demonstrates how such assumptions can be an obstacle to developing accurate representations of social organization. As Inca elites...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Claudia Avila Peltroche.

In this work the author presents the preliminary results of the animal bones analyzes from the archaeological site of Huayuri. This site, located in the south coast of Peru, shows evidences of ocupations since the Late Intermediate Period to the Late Horizon. The materials were recovered during the excavations that took place in 2002 and 2005 in the Compound 03, located at the south part of the site. The analysis was primarily focused on the camelid bones, taking into consideration the cultural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ian Armit.

The Iron Age in Britain has traditionally been seen as a period of hierarchical, warrior-based, Celtic societies, characterised by hillforts, defended settlements and elaborate weaponry. The dominant interpretive models have emanated from Wessex – that area of central southern England where the largest and most impressive hillforts are found. In recent decades, however, archaeologists have increasingly recognised the marked regional differences inherent in Iron Age societies across different...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marc Kissel.

Discerning what makes Homo sapiens distinctive among the rest of the species on the planet has been a difficult task. One suggestion has been our use of symbolic culture, the use and transmission of symbols intergenerationally. There is much discussion, however, about who the first ‘symbol users’ were, partly due to debates as to what actually makes something ‘symbolic.’ In this paper, I discus how anthropologists first came to use symbol as the sine qua non of modern human behavior. Then, using...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erik Whiteman. Morgan Zedalis.

The Frank Church – River of No Return Wilderness is an area that allows its visitors to experience solitude in the nation’s largest wilderness in the lower 48. Often unrealized, is that historically, this rugged landscape had quite an extensive communication network while it was managed as the Idaho Primitive Area. One related historic feature managed by the Payette National Forest is the Coyote Springs Telephone Booth. Telephone communications were developed in the area from the late 1920’s...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Watson.

This paper will outline the processes and decisions that the Louisiana Division of Archaeology made to create an efficient, comprehensive GIS system that could be utilized by both professionals and the citizenry of Louisiana to help promote both progress and preservation. I will discuss how we partnered with La Department of Transportation & Development, La Governor’s Office of Homeland Security & Emergency Preparedness, the New Orleans Corp Engineers, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samantha Krause. Timothy Beach. Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach. Thomas Harold Guderjan. Fred Valdez.

In 2016 the Northwestern Belize Lidar Consortium acquired nearly 300 square km of LiDAR imagery that covers large areas of ancient Maya agricultural systems, including ditched and raised fields, reservoirs, terraces, and sacbeob. This new imagery allows us to map beneath the canopy and shows that over nearly 20 years without LiDAR we studied only a small spatial sample of these complex systems. We have tested these systems with multiple excavations, and used multiple proxies such as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bill Sillar.

The Inca encountered the Canas and Canchis ethnic groups when they expanded out of Cuzco. Canas sites in the herding areas of Espinar show larger scale and more developed settlements than most of those in their agricultural region of the upper Vilcanota Valley. This raises questions about the scale of ‘community’ (village, kinship group, subsistence group, ethnic group). But to address this we need to consider the degree to which allegiance to leaders, ancestors and huacas as well as the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Faline Schneiderman.

Gail Borden was a man of persistence and a creative inventor. Were it not for his inquisitiveness and drive in the wake of numerous failures, canned milk and Elsie the cow would never have become irrevocably connected in the minds of millions. Failing to make functional his terraqueous prairie- schooner or to make his desiccated meat-bread palatable, he pursued methods of condensing and preserving milk in sealed containers at several locations in Connecticut. Before his success, bacterial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Inge Schjellerup.

The capac ñan from Chachapoyas to Moyobamba was used for centuries before another road was built for driving traffic and latest with the Marginal further on to Tarapoto. The capac ñan was used by the Incas in their conquest of Moyobamba and later to be used by the many Spanish campaigns in their search for Eldorado. This important highland/lowland route crossing the cordillera and continuing into the Ceja de Selva gave access to coveted resources from both sides but also facilitated war parties...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tim Spahr.

The Cape Porpoise Archaeological Partnership is an alliance between the Kennebunkport Conservation Trust and the Brick Store Museum. Its purpose is to conduct archaeological study of the islands in Cape Porpoise harbor located just off the coast of Kennebunkport, Maine. Evidence suggests that Historic and Pre-Historic Period archaeological sites are present. Sea level rise due to global climate change, however, is causing shoreline erosion damaging or potentially destroying these locations....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aurelie Manin. Camilla Speller. Gregory Pereira. Christine Lefèvre.

In Mesoamerica, the tropical colourful birds were highly valued for their feathers. Among them, the scarlet macaw (Ara macao) provided bright red, blue and yellow feathers that were traded to the Central Mexican Highlands and, beyond Mesoamerica, until the American Southwest. As suggested by ethnohistoric records, some birds may have been maintained in captivity and harvested to supply the demand in feathers. In spite of examples of large-scale macaw management in the American Southwest, there...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Pawlowicz.

From its inception in 2014, the Bantu Mobility Project has sought to recover the various mobilities that made up peoples’ experience of the Bantu Expansions, the spread of over 500 related languages across nearly half the African continent. We have sought to refocus research on the Bantu Expansions away from the macro-scale and onto the specific movements of people, animals, and material goods at various spatial and temporal scales. From an archaeological standpoint this effort necessitates...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cameron L. McNeil.

Pollen analysis of Classic-period temple and tomb spaces in Copan’s Acropolis revealed a range of plants important to ancient Maya ritual practice. Some of these species were not represented in macroremains in ritual or household contexts. Scholars have described temple spaces as thick with the odor of burned offerings and copal, but added to this would also have been the fresh and heady fragrance of blooming buds and greenery, adding a fecund perfume to the areas of ritual supplication. These...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jean Larmon. Lisa Lucero.

Cara Blanca, in central Belize, consists of 25 pools that run east to west along the base of a limestone cliff. The Pre-Colombian significance of the pools has been studied by the Valley of Peace Archaeology Project, yet little attention has been paid to their Post-Contact influence on the local and regional landscape. This paper explores the role that Pool 6, a shallow lake centrally located in the line of lakes and cenotes, played in colonial logging operations around Cara Blanca. The 2014...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Kessler.

This paper presents the results of a meta-analysis of soil organic carbon measurements associated with pre-Columbian dryland agricultural fields in the southwestern U.S. and northwestern Mexico. In aggregate, rock alignments and terraces are associated with significantly higher organic carbon concentrations, and this effect is pronounced in sandy parent material. The results support a hypothesis that resource conserving features constructed by indigenous farmers continue to influence the ecology...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marian Hamilton. Cyler N. Conrad. Patricia Crown. Wirt Wills. Emily Lena Jones.

Stable isotope analysis is a powerful tool for investigating ecological change and human impact in the past. Here, we present carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen stable isotope results from lagomorphs excavated from Room 28 alongside those from two other archeological sites within Chaco Canyon (Pueblo Bonito middens and the Bc57 site) as well as modern lagomorphs collected opportunistically during archeological survey. Oxygen isotope ratios remain consistent between time periods and locations, which is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samuel Carreon. Rita Austin. Sabrina Sholts.

Studying teeth in museum archaeological collections allows us to address questions about diet, health, and the environment. One common health indicator is the rate and frequencies of in pathological indicators such as carious lesions (cavities) within a population. Changes in the amount of caries over time in a population show the changes in diet which may reflect cultural or environmental changes. Through museum collections we are able to look at caries and asses the relationship between oral...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Deborah Blom. Kelly J. Knudson. Nicole C. Couture. Carrie Anne Berryman.

Bioarchaeological approaches can contribute much to our understanding of how children were cared for in the past. Here, we examine social, cultural, and physical care of children in the Tiwanaku polity of the South Central Andes between approximately AD 500 and 1100. Using multiple lines of evidence, we reconstruct patterns of childcare practices as well as the formation of different social identities at archaeological sites in the Moquegua Valley of southern Peru and the Bolivian Lake Titicaca...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Beau Murphy. Adesbah Foguth. Hannah Mattson.

Three-dimensional modeling has become increasingly common within the field of archaeology as relevant software has become more accessible and digital media more prevalent. Despite this increase in use, the ultimate utility of the method is often debated, even by its practitioners. This poster explores the practical applications of 3D modeling along two avenues: as a process for developing hypotheses and expectations during the excavation of architectural contexts, and as a tool for use...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hector Neff.

Tohil Plumbate, defined by distinctive technology and distinctive decorative style, is found throughout Mesoamerica, with peak frequencies in the central and western highlands of Guatemala and strong representation at Terminal Classic Maya centers like Chichen Itza. INAA-based source determination and recent fieldwork link the technology to the Pacific coastal zone of eastern Soconusco, near the Chiapas-Guatemala border. Curiously, however, key stylistic features, especially effigies and fancy,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jose Peña.

Households are the most important social unit in every society. The production and consumption of resources within the household can provide information on how resources were obtained, stored and distributed within the Household or the community. Recent archaeological research had provided significant information about the Casma polity, which occupied the northern coast of Peru between 700-1400 A.D. The Casma society is viewed as a centralized polity that controlled several coastal valleys....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Krista Eschbach.

The social structure of colonial New Spain underwent large-scale transformations following the Spanish conquest. Changes in social categories of identification evolved through an interplay between religious and civil administrators -- who attempted to control colonial populations -- and local social relationships of interpersonal interaction. I examine social relations and changing categories of identification at the colonial Port of Veracruz. Throughout the colonial period, Veracruz served as a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samuel Connell. Kathryn Maurer. Chad Gifford. Niall Brady.

[HOW CAN I REQUEST AFTER HOURS POSTER SESSION -- MYSELF ALONG WITH 2 or 3 other posters from this Ireland project would like to join] The 200 pound pig slowly turns on the spit for hours while a few feet away students from California trowel through excavations at Ballintober Castle. A marquee is set up as villagers busily prepare for Heritage Weekend, which they pushed up to mid July to accommodate the field school and 70 people staying in the village. In the next few days there will be story...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Brody. Rebekah Mills.

The archaeological and anthropological field school Castles in Communities, organized by Foothill College, completed its third field season this past summer at the site of Ballintober Castle, County Roscommon, Ireland. The construction of Ballintober Castle (early 14th century) is attributed to the Anglo-Norman Richard de Burgh, Earl of Ulster. Shortly after its Anglo-Norman occupation, the castle came under Irish control (1381) and has been the property of the O’Conor family ever since. After...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Mirro. Jon Spenard.

Since 2010, a major focus of the Pacbitun Regional Archaeological project has been a regional ritual landscape survey surrounding. In 2016, Phase II of that subproject commenced, with significant efforts geared towards experimenting with digital mapping and documentation of surface archaeological features in four poorly understood caves, Crystal Palace, Slate Cave, Tzul’s Cave, and Actun Tokbe. In this paper, we discuss our work and offer some results from our Phase II investigations. In 2016,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Helen Foxhall Forbes.

Calabria in the first millennium CE does not fit easily into many of the established narratives that are usually applied either to the western or the eastern Mediterranean, nor yet into standard categories of periodisation, which often carry implicit assumptions related to these narratives. Using material, visual, and textual evidence, this poster explores fifth- to ninth-century southern Calabrian political landscapes, particularly the area around Bova Marina, in their broader Mediterranean...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Johnson.

Two different versions of a myth, one Kitanemuk and one Kawaiisu, recount the tradition of a man taken into a cave where he was instructed in sacred knowledge by animal spirits. Neighboring Chumash and Yokuts elders passed along accounts of caves being used for shamanistic purposes, in part associated with rock paintings. These ethnographic accounts imply the private use of caves for special rituals by individuals. Nonetheless, there are particular Chumash pictograph sites that appear to have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joshuah Lockett-Harris.

Growing evidence suggests the ancient Maya conceptualized caves, as well as small crevices in the karstic bedrock (both natural and artificial), as sacred ch’een – portals of shamanic communication, which existed in a liminal realm between the physical world and the ancestral powers of the cave-riddled Underworld. Ch’een represented important ritual foci for the ancient Maya, as well as receptacles for sacred offerings. The interment of prominent ancestors and symbolically valuable materials...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jocelyn Acosta.

In 1910, A. Hooton Blackiston discovered a cave 25 miles from Naco containing a cache of 800 copper bells, a possible mosaic mask of turquoise, and other materials. Blackiston interpreted the cave as a place of worship dedicated to the bat god. Copper, however, has very rarely been reported from caves in Honduras. Metals enter Mesoamerican late in its history but quickly assume an importance equal to jade in the native value system. The only other cave known to have held copper bells is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wendy Layco. Jessica Strayer. Samantha Lorenz. Toni Gonzalez.

In June of 2017, the Contested Caves Archaeological Project (CCAP), explored what was thought to be a partially capped chultun at the site of La Milpa, Belize. On entering, however, it became clear that the feature was actually a small, natural cave with a classic chultun-style entrance carved into it. Two of the cave’s three chambers contained small pools of water, which receded into the porous limestone, within days of their discovery. The pools make any possibility of storage infeasible...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Auchter.

Cultural Resource Management investigations associated with the deployment of telecommunications infrastructure in the United States are unique. From the size of the undertaking, to the task that CRM/NEPA professionals are prescribed to accomplish, cultural resource professionals are able to see a wide breadth of cultural landscapes from across the country for short periods of time. Using examples from across the country, a critical examination will be made of this unique aspect of CRM. How has...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cristina Verdugo. Jeremy Coltman. James Brady. Guillermo De Anda Alaniz.

A truism was established very early in Maya studies that the Cenote of Sacrifice at Chichen Itza had a religious function while the nearby Cenote Xtoloc was the source for domestic drinking water. Part of the attraction of this idea was no doubt its close paralleling of the popular Western dichotomy, sacred vs. profane. The problem with truisms, statements so obviously true that they say nothing new or interesting, is that they direct attention elsewhere. This is probably why the Temple of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cameron Turley.

Postcolonial and Indigenous archaeologies have changed the theoretical, methodological, and political landscapes of our discipline’s engagement with regions and peoples once conceptualized as peripheral to the European core. However, some regions, and the subjects that move within them, still occupy the conceptual margins. This paper considers the position of archaeological praxes in Greenland, a constituent of the Kingdom of Denmark, and the late arrival of the postcolonial critique to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Francis Allard.

First incorporated into China in 214 BCE, the southern region known as Lingnan (which consists of the present-day provinces of Guangxi and Guangdong), has traditionally been regarded as one of China’s peripheral regions. Not only was Lingnan distant from imperial centers in the north, its native pre-literate ‘Yue’ inhabitants spoke non-sinitic languages and were known for their distinctive ‘uncivilized’ behaviors. Along with its location at the southern margin of modern China’s territory, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexander Benitez.

The Central American Ceramics Research Project, a student driven and collaborative research program carried out between 2009-2013, completed a scholarly survey of more than 13,000 ceramic objects in the collections of the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). The project originated as an effort to update old catalog information and bring to light important but largely forgotten collections of ceramics. However, it quickly developed into a major collaborative research effort that brought...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nuria Sugrañes. Gustavo Neme.

Hunter-Gatherers from Southern Mendoza started to use ceramic at 2000 years BP, and it starts to diversified rapidly in each environment. Such diversity shows a contrast between highlands and lowlands tipologies. According to Lagiglia, this ceramic diversity was motivated for exchange between agricultural communities from western side of Andes and northern Mendoza. In this poster, we present new ceramic information from six archaeological sites located in the Atuel river basin. This information...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Valerie Bondura.

"This landscape is animate: it moves, transposes, builds, proceeds, shifts, always going on, never coming back, and one can only retain it in vignettes, impressions caught in a flash." —Ann Zwinger, Downcanyon We might think of ceramics as landscape "caught in a flash", a bringing together of different geological places into newly combined forms. Ecological thinking in Northern Rio Grande Pueblos frames this bringing together as a fluid gathering of forces that flow in and out of one another....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelsey Willis. Destiny Crider. Clifford Brown.

The ceramic record of Pacific Nicaragua can be interpreted as showing evidence of migration in the form of both normal and anomalous diffusion. Normal diffusion is seen in the Department of Chinandega through the ceramics of the early facet of the Late Preclassic Cosigüina complex, which derive from the Providencia Sphere. This ceramic sphere originates from the southern highlands of Guatemala and western El Salvador and now extends at least to northwest Nicaragua. The evidence of superdiffusion...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jillian Galle. Lindsay Bloch. Jeffrey Ferguson. Fraser Neiman. Suzanne Francis Brown.

Archaeologists have long been intrigued by hand‐built, open‐fired coarse earthenwares found on 18th‐ and 19th‐century sites occupied by enslaved Africans in the Caribbean and United States. In Jamaica, these hand‐built coarse earthenwares, often referred to as Yabbas, were likely manufactured and marketed by enslaved specialists. Several different varieties of glazed and/or kiln‐fired coarse earthenwares, not easily assigned to a known ware-type, are also routinely found in plantation contexts....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yukiko Tonoike. Andrea Torvinen.

Founded in June 2017, the mission of the Ceramic Petrographers in the Americas (CPA) group is the promotion, discussion, and development of ceramic petrography in archaeology. Of principal interest is providing resources for those interested in employing ceramic petrography for their research and those who would like to pursue this method as a specialty. The group consists of archaeologists residing in the Americas who use optical petrography and other characterization techniques to infer the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ann Cordell. Neill Wallis. Thomas Pluckhahn.

Swift Creek Complicated Stamped pottery from the lower Southeastern U.S. is a premier material for the systematic study of Woodland period social interactions. Petrographic analysis of Swift Creek pottery was undertaken as part of a research program that integrated materials analyses of pottery, including Neutron Activation Analysis, digital imaging of paddle stamp designs, technological analysis, and absolute dating, to identify patterns of social interaction. Over 200 samples have been thin...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Allison.

At the 1988 SAA annual meeting in Phoenix, Margaret Lyneis presented a paper with the title Ceramic Production and Exchange among the Virgin Anasazi. In that paper she presented convincing evidence that, despite its abundance in the Moapa Valley of southeastern Nevada, Moapa Gray Ware was produced 70-100 km to the east, near the north rim of the western Grand Canyon. She also defined a new type of pottery, which she was calling Shivwits Brown at the time (later Shivwits Plain). Shivwits Brown...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sneh Patel.

Rita Wright’s pioneering work on the ceramic stylistic and technological traditions of the Indo-Iranian borderlands highlighted the potential of new theoretical approaches to our understanding of cultural boundaries within South Asia. This work highlighted the complex nature of technology and style boundaries within specific contexts of cultural interaction. This paper takes inspiration from Dr. Wright’s work and applies this framework to another frontier of the Indus: the northwestern state of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine Hernandez. Dan Healan.

Sourcing studies conducted over the past 45 years have identified obsidian from the outcrops around Ucareo and Zinapécuaro, Michoacán in archaeological sites located across Mesoamerica including San Lorenzo, Xochicalco, Tula, Chichén Itzá, and Tzintzuntzan. Archaeological investigations including survey and excavation conducted by Tulane University during the 1990s have provided the first detailed information on prehispanic settlement and obsidian exploitation within what is now called the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Breault.

Feasting is a well-documented phenomenon in Mesoamerica as a means of community integration and interaction. Ceramic analysis of Op. B, Pozo 20, Feature 1 from the site of Etlatongo may point to one such feasting event at the site. This Yucuita phase (500-300 BC) feature was a primary refuse deposit of ceramic, lithic, and faunal artifacts intermixed with extremely ashy sediment, probably from a specific event. An overview of the stratigraphy of the feature and an inventory of the assemblage...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Whitney Goodwin.

Prehispanic populations of northeastern Honduras were positioned at the border of Mesoamerica and Lower Central America. Previous research on ceramic style suggests local affiliation shifted over time from north to south as part of an adept strategy to navigate the complex political and social landscape of the region through the promotion of an inclusive group identity. This study explores the actual implementation of that strategy by investigating communal feasting contexts where symbolically...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charles Knight.

One result of the intensive, 5-m interval surface survey of the Zaragoza-Oyameles obsidian source area in Puebla, Mexico was the recovery of several artifact classes suggestive of prolonged habitation. Ceramic and ground stone artifacts recovered indicate that domestic activities were an important component of the obsidian procurement and production economy. Ceramics tended to concentrate in areas that also contained higher quantities of ground stone, but did not correlate with any one stage of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Smith.

The Lake Titicaca Basin in the Bolivian Andes was a dynamic place that saw the development of early religious centers like Chiripa and Khonkho Wankane, the subsequent emergence and expansion of the Tiwanaku state, and the incursion of the Inca empire. The Desaguadero River is the only river that drains Lake Titicaca, flowing south and connecting the region to the central altiplano and Lake Poopó some 250 kilometers downriver. This paper examines the ceremonial and political importance of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Donna Nash.

The Wari-affiliated community on Cerro Mejía is divided by large walls that cut the slopes into vertical strips. These segments of the site may represent divisions of the settlement that the occupants recognized, agreed with, and maintained or these groupings may have been imposed by Wari officials. In this paper, I describe the features of Cerro Mejía and consider this important question. In light of overt differences between houses with regards to form and construction techniques I suggest...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marieka Brouwer Burg.

A cornerstone of William Lovis’ career has been the investigation of human land use dynamics, with strong emphasis on methodological rigor and statistical analysis. He has led a generation of students to consider these issues in the Great Lakes and beyond. The modeling of past human decision making is useful as a heuristic for exploring goals and motivations, about which there is certainly a tremendous amount of uncertainty. Instead, modeling past behavior is inherently an exercise in balancing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nancy Peniche May. Lilia Fernandez Souza.

How does a building become architecture of power? How can this power be release or lost? There are many ways in which a building can be imbued with certain attributes that allow expressing and regulating unequal power relations. Along with the form and style of buildings, ritual is perhaps one of the most important means. Through ritual performance, actors imbue the building with the ch'ulel, ensouling and animating it; obliged the ch'ulel to leave the building, killing the animate construction,...