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

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eve Dewan. Ian Kretzler. Briece Edwards.

For the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon, care of tribal heritage is an expression of sovereignty, cultural creativity, and connection to place. We discuss three arenas in which the Tribe draws on information about the past to reaffirm connections in the present. First, exhibits at the Chachalu Tribal Museum & Cultural Center, language immersion programs, and artistic pieces showcase how the diverse Native peoples of western Oregon overcame dispossession and removal to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Moira Peckham. Annie Danis.

This poster presents how the Berkeley Abiquiú Collaborative Archaeology project integrates oral histories conducted with community members with spatial and material data to support a more robust dialogue between the contemporary and the historic that is thoroughly grounded in community perspectives. At Abiquiú, the community’s perspectives on water management as presented through the interviews and, subsequently, the material and spatial data are intimately connected to not only identity, but...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lawrence Coben.

Does pragmatism work in practice? More particularly, does pragmatic philosophy actually contribute to the well being of stakeholders, especially those from the local community who have historically been marginzalized and have not benefitted from archaeological practice? Can archaeological practice be expanded beyond the production of knowledge to include the needs and desires of community members as they themselves express them? This paper will explore these questions, utilizing the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Brewer.

Historical artifacts from Room 28 in Pueblo Bonito provide a unique opportunity to investigate what the Hyde Exploring Expedition, Moorehead, and National Geographic Society excavations left behind during their excavations between 1896 and 1927. Using the 2013 UNM excavations in Room 28 as a starting point, analysis of the historical artifacts found in excavation and stabilization over the last century provides an important perspective on how those early excavators discarded their own material...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine McElvaney.

This paper explores whether there is a statistical difference in rates of non-specific infection between two Maya pre-classic villages, K’axob and Cuello, and whether these findings can be correlated to social status within and between the two villages. Using representative skeletal samples from these populations, an osteological analysis is performed to determine the presence of non-specific infection markers in the form of periosteal reactions. Any signs of reaction are scored by level of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hetty Jo Brumbach. Robert Jarvenpa.

The sexual division of labor in many societies situates women and men in livelihood activities which differ markedly in their locations, facilities, and relationship to other features in both the built and non-built environment. The repeated juxtaposition of these behaviors and elements over time result in rather distinctive female and male viewsheds or vistas and, ultimately, gendered perceptions and interpretations of the landscape. Consider the perceptual field of a woman scraping hides on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tom Fitton.

The Swahili of East Africa are regarded historically as a maritime culture, whose coastal sailing networks and prosperous Indian Ocean trade connections can be dated back to at least the 7th century CE. Archaeological investigations have demonstrated that maritime elements were deliberately embedded in the architecture of the famous second millennium Swahili stonetowns, but a focus on urban areas has sometimes been at the expense of areas of potential maritime infrastructure within settlements,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristin Benson. Teresa Franco. Tom Dillehay.

This study presents the results of a comparative multi-year analysis of high and low power micro-usewear and residue patterns on 14,000-10,000 cal BP unifacial stone tools from the late Pleistocene archaeological sites of Huaca Prieta on the north coast of Peru and the Monte Verde I and II sites in south-central Chile. The archaeological stones from these sites are also compared with experimental assemblages employing various actions (e.g., scraping, cutting, gouging, perforating) to work...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tia B. Watkins. John Walden.

Ancient palatial complexes offer opportunities to understand the actors at the apex of prehistoric polities. With careful and complex design, these structures were built to represent the affluence of those who resided within their confines. While the external façade of a palace represents the defining barrier between the elite and the public, the architectural layouts of ancient palaces reveal multiple levels of exclusivity. The varying levels of privacy in different palaces may relate to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicole Bodenstein.

In this paper, I compare using latex and Sculpey molds with a NextEngine 3D scanner in creating positive copies of upper midwestern, Late-Woodland, cord-impressed pottery for analysis. Making cast positives of these impressions in casting mediums present different hazards to the sherd. A NextEngine 3D Scanner may present fewer hazards to sherds, while allowing for digital copies that are easily manipulated and measured. It is also portable and relatively inexpensive compared to other 3D scanning...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aron Crowell.

Southeast Alaskan oral narratives describe the epic migration of an Ahtna Raven clan from its interior Copper River territory over montane glaciers to the Pacific coast at Yakutat Bay, where the group founded the village of Tlákw.aan (Old Town) and intermarried with Eyak and Tlingit lineages. The multi-cultural origins of the residents are reflected in architecture and artifacts excavated at the site by Frederica de Laguna in the 1950s and during collaborative Smithsonian investigations in 2014....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacklyn Rumberger. Arthur Joyce. Sarah Barber. Stacie King. Guy David Hepp.

This poster presents a comparison of the isotopic data from male and female individuals interred in the lower Río Verde Valley of coastal Oaxaca, Mexico from the Early Formative period, beginning in 2000 BC, to the Early Postclassic period, ending in AD 1100. Our previous work in this region has focused primarily on broad dietary changes through time, focusing little attention on comparisons by sex. Our sample for the present study includes 54 individuals: 31 males and 23 females. These...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kyle Forsythe. Pierre Desrosiers. James Savelle. Arthur Dyke.

This paper presents a systematic review and update on the nature of stone tool use in the Foxe Basin region throughout the Paleo-Inuit period (2,500 BCE-1,600CE). The Foxe Basin was previously thought to have been a core area of ecological stability/predictability that supported an uninterrupted occupation throughout the Paleo-Inuit timespan. Given the untenability of the core area model and that populations fluctuated over time and space, a reevaluation of lithic technologies and their change...

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

The processes, antecedents, and outcomes associated with plant domestication have been central themes in archaeological and interdisciplinary research for the last century. While domesticates can often be readily distinguished from their wild progenitors both genetically and morphologically, the steps leading to domestication (transport, selective harvest, deliberate seed dispersal, active plant management, i.e. cultivation) can be difficult to track archaeologically. Techniques for identifying...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carlos Osores. Bradley Parker.

New insights from household archaeology on the north coast of Peru provide lines of evidence about the complex patterns of daily life. Also, few studies about the domestic life were carried out at the Zaña Valley. The first field season at Cerro la Guitarra, a fortified hill site with occupations from the Late Intermediate Period (1100-1400 AD) in the Zaña Valley, was very successful because it allows us to explore residential life using ceramics, architecture, and faunal analysis with the goal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matt Nelson.

This paper compares two new predictive models of prehistoric archaeological site locations to better understand modelling successes and complications. For my recent M.A. thesis project, I created one model for Yellowstone National Park to predict Paleoindian site locations within the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem of the northwestern Great Plains and Rocky Mountains. I created the second model for the Pinelands region of central New Jersey for the United States Air National Guard, Warren Grove...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Semon.

Complicated stamped pottery dominates Late Mississippian (AD 1300-1580) ceramic assemblages on the Georgia coast. The most prolific design is the filfot cross, which is symmetrical and comprised of four basic elements. Although the overall filfot design does not change, the basic elements can differ to create unique combinations that can be used to track filfot variation and paddles. In this poster, I present the methods and results of a complicated- stamped pottery study, which tracked filfot...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Jackson. Genevieve Mielke.

Performing mock excavations of human skeletal material is a common practice throughout undergraduate and graduate studies in Forensic and Bioarchaeological programs. These class sessions include instruction on correct excavation methods, mapping techniques, documentation methods, and chain of custody. Inevitably however, there are differences between mock excavations within a class setting and active homicide excavations where no professor is present and the real-life ramifications of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lorena Becerra-Valdivia. Thibaut Devièse. Thomas W. Stafford Jr.. Michael Waters. Tom Higham.

Found in 1968, the archaeological site of Anzick (24PA506), Montana, contains the only known Clovis burial. Here, the partial remains of a male infant (Anzick-1) were found in association with a Clovis assemblage of over 100 lithic and faunal bone artifacts—all red-stained with ochre. The incomplete, unstained cranium of a separate individual (Anzick-2), dating to ~8,600 radiocarbon years before present (BP), was also recovered. Previous chronometric work has shown an age difference between the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marcie Venter. Sean Carr. Shayna Lindquist.

Several Pre-Classic assemblages in the Mesoamerican Gulf lowlands are characterized by obsidian from the Guadalupe Victoria source. Tools produced are characterized by flake-core reduction strategies. The combined visual characteristics of the source material and technology employed are important chronological indicators. But, general similarities in the appearance of the raw material and factors such as variable thickness create the potential for overlap with other sources, such as Pico de...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Triozzi.

Models developed from principles in human behavioral ecology have long benefited archaeological research. Drawing on natural features in the modern landscape, locations of prehistoric settlements can be evaluated in terms of calculable suitability. Such models also have predictive potential, as they can rank loci in terms of any combination of environmental conditions appropriate to the archaeological context being investigated. Where available, careful examination of ethnohistoric and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ardern Hulme-Beaman. Thomas Cucchi. Jeremy Searle. Keith Dobney.

Humans have a dramatic impact on environments around them. They augment, manipulate and engineer local environments to their own benefit, often resulting in a concentration of easily available food and nest sites. These anthropogenic resources and environments are readily exploited by a myriad of other organisms. These organisms, in local and neighbouring environments, engage in a range of different relationships with humans, reflecting the level of interaction and dependence. Due to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Attarian.

This paper describes the reuse of a small structure at Late Classic (CE 600-900) Site 426 in the Naco Valley, northwest Honduras. The structure shows evidence of being converted from residential use to firing ceramic vessels. The current interpretation of the structure’s reuse is that it emerged as a center of ceramic manufacture as power waned at La Sierra, the valley’s previous political capital. In this context, Site 426’s residents, along with their immediate neighbors, sought some...

DOCUMENT Citation Only E Adams.

Excavation of a four-room pueblo in northeastern Arizona revealed complex closure practices that involved ash. A 5-cm thick layer of ash deposited on a defined, but extensive, exterior occupation surface adjacent to the pueblo, then covered with artifacts prior to the pueblo’s wall being pushed on top, suggests the essential role ash played in the life and "death" of the pueblo. By reconstructing the pueblo’s life history, the role of ash is examined and argued to be essential in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine C. Dixon. Payson Sheets.

The Loma Caldera eruption of c. AD 660 dramatically buried a sophisticated community built by craftspeople, architects, religious specialists, political leaders, and agriculturalists. As people fled for their lives, they left behind belongings and buildings. Results from decades of archaeological research at Cerén, El Salvador and in the surrounding Zapotitán Valley challenges an ethnocentric, over-simplified reconstruction of ancient socio-political organization. Cerén was not in the middle of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Siran Liu. Thilo Rehren. Wei Qian. Jianli Chen. Marcos Martinón-Torres.

The study of technology with archaeological science approaches is a powerful proxy for investigating the history of human-environment interactions and provides essential information which could not be revealed by other types of evidence. This great potential was however not fully exploited in previous works. Here we present an on-going project of archaeometallurgical investigation of 7th-15th century silver-lead production sites in China. Environmental history study agreed that during this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacinda Sinclair.

The five sites recorded in Junius Bird’s 1934 survey of the Hopedale area are both culturally important to the local Inuit community and to the history of the creation of archaeological narratives about the Labrador Inuit. Recently, the Hopedale and Nunatsiavut governments have stated a desire for additional archaeological research prompting Memorial University to revisit the Avertok and Karmakulluk sites to conduct additional excavations. In the 83 years that have passed since Bird’s work, many...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Putsavage.

Scholars acknowledge that religious and secular rituals are difficult to distinguish. This is especially true in the archaeological record, where human beliefs and worldviews must be understood through material correlates. In order to make categories simpler to use, Western scholars have tended to dichotomize religious and secular. Exploring the role of Mesa Verde style mugs in the Ancestral Puebloan world, this paper takes an object biography approach and acknowledges that boundaries between...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Benson.

The transition between early (AD 1050-1200) and late Mississippian (AD 1200-1350) in the American Bottom is recognized as a significant moment of socio-political and religious change in the historical trajectory of Cahokia. During this time, relationships between persons, places, and things transformed, resulting in different ways of engaging with both Cahokia and the non-human powers that underwrote it and the broader Mississippian world. With a goal of investigating a Moorehead phase...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claudio Cioffi-Revilla. Niloofar Bagheri-Jebelli.

Extensive archaeological field work and multidisciplinary research in recent decades shows that communities of sedentary hunter-gatherers during the tenth millenium BC built the earliest presently known monumental structures during the PPNA (ca. 9600–8800 BC) at the ceremonial site of Göbekli Tepe and nearby PPNB settlement sites in present-day Urfa province, southeastern Turkey. However, the earliest evidence of agriculture dates to a later period (early PPNB, ca. 8750 BC, terminus post quem)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Fox.

The archaeology of the Archaic Period in Northeastern North America is dominated by site-based research used as a springboard for discussing regional and pan-regional concepts and ideas. New results are often understood using paradigms created from these studies of singular origin. The present paper takes a different approach and discusses the author’s exploration of the broadspear lithic toolkit phenomenon across the Northeast. The collections-based study in question updates known datasets of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marion Shiner. Katie Hemer.

Recent excavations below the ruins of a 13th–16th AD century chapel dedicated to St Patrick, at Whitesands Bay, Pembrokeshire in southwest Wales revealed ninety well-preserved burials dating to the 7th–11th century AD. There was an unusually high concentration of non-adults buried at the site, including a number of foetuses and infants. Some of these young individuals received elaborate burial forms, including the use of quartz-topped burials and cross-inscribed grave markers. It is necessary to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Evan Mann.

The populations of southern Florida are an exemplary case of indigenous groups who organized into large political entities without the advantages of agriculture. This is due to the populations’ close proximity to vast amounts of marine resources. Among these resources, many shellfish (both gastropods and bivalves) were used not only for nutritional sustenance, but also made up an important proportion of the tool industry, and as trade goods between these local populations and those at a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carsten Paludan-Müller.

During recent years cultural heritage has moved into public awareness as part of contemporary conflicts. Destructions of sites and monuments in The Middle East and North Africa, and in the former Yugoslavia have given us blatant examples also of targeted destruction. However this is nothing new. Throughout history monuments and heritage have played their part in conflict between people. A recent conflict in the United States over monuments relating to the Civil War and its aftermath has further...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Upton.

Prior scholarship on intercultural contacts emphasizes interaction spheres, hybridization, technological transfer, or models of exchange as measures for constructing borders and defining societal membership. This presentation assesses how network relationships among complex and smaller-scale societies structured, and were restructured by, migration. Network models of social interaction and social identification are examined both prior to and following a migration process in a uniquely bellicose...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John W. Ives. Gabriel Yanicki. Courtney Lakevold. Kisha Supernant.

Widely assumed to be younger than Clovis forms, Corridor fluted points have been dated just once, at Tse’K’wa (Charlie Lake Cave). Given clear evidence of biotic habitability along the entire Corridor before 13,000 years ago, along with early hunting in its southern funnel, moderately dense fluted point clusters likely reflect both Clovis contemporaneous and later fluted point instances. These points were overwhelmingly fashioned on local toolstones, featuring a bimodal length distribution of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alice Wright. Colin Quinn.

In recent decades, ethnographers, historians, and historical archaeologists have refuted popular myths about southern Appalachia that characterize the region as an isolated geographic periphery and, by extension, a cultural backwater. However, these perceptions continue to color interpretations of Appalachia’s deeper past, despite the region’s long tradition of rigorous archaeological research. Some scholars have suggested that pre-Columbian Appalachia has remained peripheral in archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Sharp.

One goal of archaeological pedagogy is to make students question assumptions about "progress" and the relationship between modern human beings and their historical ancestors. One persistent idea is that violence has declined over time, which coupled with stereotypical illustrations of the past as particularly savage, influence how students conceptualize violence today. Developing teaching strategies that ask students to confront popular assumptions about violence can be difficult in introductory...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Catherine Labadia.

In this introduction to Connecticut’s State Archaeological Preserve program, I will talk about the legislation that created it, the process for designating sites as Archaeological Preserves, and how these properties are used or managed after designation. Although the program has the explicit goal of site preservation, in practice it has spurred many additional benefits. Foremost among these additional benefits has been the forging of partnerships with the State Historic Preservation Office and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Wegner.

Located on the Quinebaug River, the LeBeau fishing camp and weir is the oldest known weir in Connecticut. Approximately 8,700 artifacts were recovered from the site, primarily lithic tools made from locally sourced materials such as quartzite. These tools indicate the specific activity of fishing and processing. Diagnostic artifacts recovered from the site indicate that it was utilized by indigenous people over the course of thousands of years, from the Middle Archaic to the Early Woodland....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Viola Koenig.

Speakers of this session are dealing with collections and museums in the Americas as well as Europe. They are sharing knowledge on the role of collectors of Pre-Columbian and indigenous American objects that represent the Pre-Columbian era and the colonial and later periods. Many of them were collected in the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries. Ever since collections were subject to all kinds of moves and treatments. Collections were divided, and objects have been dispersed. Can we...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victoria Lyall.

Museum collections resemble the tastes and character of the donors and curators that assembled them. This subjectivity lends them an idiosyncratic character. Nevertheless, the early network of dealers and donors connects many museums across the United States. Institutions like the Saint Louis Art Museum and the Denver Art Museum, for example, are linked through such relationships. This paper examines the history of such relationships and the manner in which collection histories may shed further...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samantha Kirkley.

Project Archaeology is an educational organization dedicated to teaching scientific and historical inquiry, cultural understanding, and the importance of protecting our nation’s rich cultural resources. It is a network that makes archaeology education accessible to students and teachers nationwide through high-quality educational materials and professional development. Built on the Understanding by Design curriculum model, Project Archaeology: Investigating Shelter is a complete archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sara Zaia. Katherine Rose.

In the early 20th century, seminal Egyptologist George Reisner excavated a series of predynastic cemeteries west of the Giza plateau and farther south in modern day Sudan. While some objects from specific cemeteries were published in original manuscripts, the majority of artifacts currently housed in Harvard University’s Peabody Museum remain unstudied. Through a combination of ceramic analyses, including petrography and stylistic analysis, we situate these assemblages within a discussion of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Keitlyn Alcantara.

Narratives of Aztec grandeur dominate portrayals of Late Postclassic (AD 1325-1519) Mesoamerica. While imperial influence spread rapidly and thoroughly throughout the central valleys, Tlaxcallan appears as a rift in imperial control, resisting the encircling empire. Aztec narratives relegate Tlaxcallan to the peripheries, downplaying Tlaxcaltecas as one-dimensional barbaric enemies, unconquered by choice. In contrast, ethnohistoric accounts from within Tlaxcallan emphasize a state that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Whitcher Kansa. Anne Austin. Ixchel Faniel. Eric Kansa. Ran Boytner.

The use of digital tools for data creation and presentation is pervasive in archaeology, and data preservation and dissemination is becoming common practice. Still, few archaeologists consider the life of their data beyond their own research purposes. This lack of broader consideration of the future uses of a dataset means that many researchers do not sufficiently describe their data to make it intelligible or useful to others, which risks filling repositories with data of very limited use. We...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Courtney Nimura. Liam Brady. Joakim Goldhahn.

This paper introduces some key themes for this session, and considers how seascapes and waterscapes relate to the many and varied people, things, and places with which humans live. While many aspects of the archaeological record can be interpreted as referencing the watery realm through association (e.g. shell middens) or visual cues (e.g. rock art), our goal with this session is not to focus on simply identifying these connections, but to interrogate the nature of these relationships – to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Davis.

Among large-scale societies, esoteric knowledge is often exploited for power, prestige, or status. In such a social framework, it becomes important to guard the transmission of esoteric knowledge, restricting access by exclusive mechanisms of indoctrination or co-option. When discovered, evidence of guarded knowledge often flags the attention of the archaeologist because of its often meticulous preservation. However, if the same knowledge were conspicuous, unguarded, and socially mundane,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Schaefer. Sloan Williams. Nicola Sharratt.

Using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) to obtain segmented cortisol levels, these cortisol levels can reconstruct periods of heightened month-to-month duress leading up to death. Segmented cortisol levels provide a more nuanced understanding of stress variation through biocultural change and lived experiences in antiquity. This study aims to reconstruct periods of duress through assaying endogenous cortisol in archaeological hair (n=11) from the site of Estuquiña and investigate the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leslie Drane.

The John Chapman site is a mounded village that lies along the Apple River in northwestern Illinois. At approximately A.D. 1050, it appears that Mississippian migrants traveled to the area and interacted with the Late Woodland people already occupying the land. Previous excavations in the northern portion of the site revealed John Chapman people changing their ceramics to emulate Mississippian styles, while keeping their houses Late Woodland-like. Recent magnetometry surveys targeted central and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ancira Emily Baca Marroquin.

Narratives regarding the response from local groups to the Inca conquest of the Peruvian Central-South coast portray two confronting scenarios: resistance and acceptation. Resistance to the Inca conquest would have required a more violent Inca military campaign meanwhile acceptance would have required specific diplomatic negotiations. Written documents describe the actions taken by the Incas when a group resisted to be conquered. These actions include removing original populations and dispersing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Payson Sheets. Christine C. Dixon.

Volcanic preservation allows for detailed reconstructions of a variety of social relationships and material boundaries at Ceren. Service relationships are inferred from proximity of households associated with special-function structures, such as the religious complex, the sauna and the community governance center. These data show a social function of providing service relationships from each household to the community. Socioeconomic functions are also evident in the form of other...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sara Morrow.

How were mass-produced consumer goods incorporated into everyday expressions of local and national identity in 19th and early 20th century Ireland? While archaeologists have explored the myriad ways that mass-produced goods circulated throughout the British Empire through networks of trade and exchange, less attention has been given to the way specifically British manufactured goods were incorporated into meaningful practices of material consumption within Irish communities. This project...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher DeCorse.

This paper examines Portugal’s and Spain’s varied contacts, intersections and colonial aspirations in West and western Central Africa. Portugal and Spain share centuries of culture history, religion, and governance, and were united under the Iberian Union between 1580 and 1640. Yet within the context of European expansion into the non-Western world, they have often been considered distinct with regard to their histories and as foci of study. Pushing beyond national pasts, this paper...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elspeth Geiger.

There has been a growing recognition within studies from across the US that the dynamics of contact-period interactions are not a homogenous process. Instead, the diversity inherent in these interactions points to the need for further research on local manifestations of these European and Native contact situations. In this paper, I analyze material recovered from the Summer Island Site off the coast of Garden Peninsula in MI. The Anishinaabeg communities within Northern Michigan were connected...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Magnani.

This presentation critically evaluates both the historic and present trajectories of the field of ethnoarchaeology and its outgrowths as practiced in indigenous communities today. This paper draws on long-term fieldwork conducted amongst two distinct communities who inhabit Arctic Europe and east Africa. I reflect upon the development and current state of ethnoarchaeology— often used as a tool to interpret archaeological remains of the deep past— and suggest new potential functions and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael OBrien.

The timing of the earliest colonization of North America is debatable, but what is not at issue is the point of origin of the early colonists: Humans entered the continent from Beringia and then made their way south along or near the Pacific Coast and/or through a corridor than ran between the Cordilleran and Laurentide ice sheets in western North America. At some point they abandoned their arctic-based tool complex for one more adapted to an entirely different environment. The dispersal of that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Louise Steel.

People’s relationship with place plays a significant role in shaping, contesting and (re-)negotiating identities. This paper considers place as an active agent in the mediation of modern Cypriot identity against a backdrop of centuries of colonial occupation. The focus is Arediou, south of the Green Line. Here, I explore how experiences of the past are embedded spatially but are also experienced differently according to their relationship to current narratives of being (Greek-)Cypriot and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Monika Baumanova.

Organisation of space in preserved buildings and town layouts in sub-Saharan Africa have increasingly been in the research scope of archaeologists and architectural historians alike. The methods of space syntax and its associated theory have, especially since 2000’s, paved its way to African archaeology and used for new interpretations of architecture e.g. of Benin, Dahomey and the Swahili coast. Traditionally, space syntax is undertaken using access analysis graphs for individual buildings,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Myles Miller.

The archaeological identification of intentionally deposited layers of ash at Jornada pueblo and pithouse settlements is complicated by several factors and intentional ash deposits are seldom identified unless preserved in a sealed context or buried by a layer of impermeable natural sediment or cultural deposits. When clear evidence of intentional ash deposition is observed, it may be assumed that there was a significant meaning underlying the inclusion of ash in a special context or deposit. ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Reuven Yeshurun.

In zooarchaeology, Contextual Taphonomy means the integration of the stratigraphic and contextual data with zooarchaeological and taphonomic data, to clarify the 'life history' of a faunal sub-assemblage in a given context. The approach uses animal remains to explain variability among site features by looking into the differential taphonomic histories of the bones, most importantly in the post-discard stage. Archaeofaunal remains are normally ubiquitous in foragers’ camps and their histories are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Diane Slocum. Jaime Awe.

Xunantunich, an ancient Maya site in the Belize Valley, rose rapidly from a minor political center to a powerful regional polity during the Late Classic period (AD 600-900). Previous researchers suggested that this rapid rise was influenced by Xunantunich’s relationship with the more powerful polity of Naranjo in the nearby Petén Province of Guatemala. Their argument was based in part on a Late Classic period building program at Xunantunich resulting in a site layout that resembles that of sites...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa Young. Micah Loma’omvaya. Susan Sekaquaptewa. Gwen Setalla.

For over a century, Homol’ovi has been a place where Hopi people and archaeologists interacted and learned from each other. The creation of the Homolovi State Park and the Homol’ovi Research Project provided opportunities for collaboration. In this paper, we reflect on these changing interactions and their impact. A corn roasting pit that was built a decade ago provides important insights into ways to maintain relationships after the fieldwork component of research projects has ended.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabriel Prieto.

Traditionally, Andean archaeologists label residential settlements as "Salinar" or "Moche" and automatically assumed they "belong" to a particular society/culture. Since 2010, I have been excavating multiple sites around Huanchaco bay, located in the littoral of the Moche Valley, North Coast of Peru. One particularity of this coastline is that there is still an active group of fishermen exploiting the sea resources using traditional technology. The continuity between the earliest occupation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only R. Jeffrey Frost.

Chiriquí Period (700-1500 CE) archaeological sites have been the subject of systematic scientific research for more than 50 years. However, archaeologists are only recently beginning to define and understand regional and temporal variations in artistic styles, settlement patterns, and village organization.  In this paper, I summarize emerging patterns in village placement, cemetery organization, and the construction of public space. Continuities in the elements of constructed spaces, such as the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Summer Moore.

Archaeologists increasingly emphasize the role of social and cultural context in understanding how indigenous groups in colonial settings appropriated foreign goods. While documentary accounts of explorers, traders, and missionaries have long been used by Pacific historians to examine foreign trade in Hawaii’s early colonial period, archaeological sites from this period have rarely been identified. As a result, we know little about how foreign goods acquired through such exchanges were actually...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jo Burkholder.

Data from excavations at the site of Pisanay, a Late Intermediate Period "sanctuary" with some remains of Early Intermediate Period ceremonialism, can be used to frame a sort of "before and after" picture of Middle Horizon developments in the Sihuas Valley of Arequipa and the changing nature of cultural ties to the region. Most striking of these is the shifting pattern of materials ties impacted by the intervening influence of the Wari cultural horizon, seen in the ceramics and textiles...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Bobolinski. Ashley Hampton.

Housepit 54 at the Bridge River pithouse village in south-central British Columbia provides a glimpse into the complex cultural practices that occurred within this area in the past. This village, which includes approximately 80 semi-subterranean structures, was occupied during four time periods that together span from approximately 1800 – 45 cal. B.P., firmly placing the site within both a historic and a pre-Colonial context. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) will be used to explore the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Jackson. Joshua Wright. Linda A. Brown.

Archaeologists routinely engage with concepts of space and materiality as we inscribe meanings onto the architecture and objects left behind by past peoples. However, in doing so, we bring explicitly modern sensibilities to our interpretations. In this paper, we consider alternative interpretations of space and materiality as described by Classic Maya people (250-900 CE). We ask: In what ways do categorizations and interpretations of space at Maya archaeological sites change when traditional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adolfo Gil. Gustavo Neme. Ricardo Villalba. Jacob Freeman.

The Late Holocene archaeological record of central western Argentina shows a mosaic of human strategies, ranging from farmers to hunter-gatherers. This presentation evaluates if differences in subsistence practices among groups in a similar biophysical environmental generated different demographic and socio ecological responses to climatic change over the last 3000 years. We use radiocarbon dates as a proxy for human population size and growth rates and 13C and 15N stable isotopes on human bone...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Lagia.

The capacity of humans to contribute positively even long after death includes not only donations and institutions but also one’s own body. The human body and its parts provide the opportunity to bridge time in archaeological and forensic contexts and appreciate human history. In 1996-7 this capacity was aptly evaluated by the scientific committee of the Wiener Laboratory of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens and the foundation of the modern human skeletal reference collection...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edgar Carpio.

Archaeologist Stephan Borhegyi contributed significantly to the development of archeology in Guatemala in the late 1950s and early 1960s with his investigations both in the highlands and on the Pacific Coast. He was a pioneer in underwater archeology at Lake Amatitlán and carried out studies at other sites around the lake. He also made important entries on different archaeological sites in the Highlands and on the Pacific Coast, particularly on the Bilbao site. In Guatemala, his works were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chris Dudar.

Since the inception of the Repatriation Office at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in 1991, the documentation of Native American skeletal remains has been accomplished by the Repatriation Osteology Lab. The need for a computerized data entry system was recognized as a critical component to the success of this process along with a structured database for data access and management. The resulting software interface and SQL relational database, called Osteoware, is available to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rolfe Mandel.

Vance T. Holliday, the recipient of SAA’s 2018 Fryxell Award for Interdisciplinary Research, has devoted his career to applying geoscientific methods and theories in archaeological investigations. Vance’s scientific contributions, however, go beyond archaeology; he has played an important role in facilitating our understanding of landforms, sediments, and soils that provide the context for archaeological sites. The sites he has investigated, with a focus on their geomorphology, soils,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachael Penfil. Kelita Pérez Cubas.

The Pisco Valley was an important node for the Inka empire’s control of what is now the southern coast of Peru, as evidenced by the presence of the large Inka administrative center of Tambo Colorado. This valley additionally would have been a strategic location for sociopolitical and economic exchanges between the Inka empire and the Chincha kingdom, whose capital is located just to the north in the Chincha Valley. This preliminary research utilizes survey data and GIS analyses to examine access...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kevin Ripley. Laura Dzvonick. Tina Nupuf. Noble Eisenlauer. Ronald Faulseit.

The village of Momonga (Ca-LAn-357) is located in the San Fernando Valley of Southern California, along the pre-Columbian boundaries of multiple ethnic groups. Rock art in the area indicates ritual activities involving people from various cultural traditions, including ancestral Chumash, Tongva, Yokuts, and Tataviam peoples. Excavations in a portion of the site have produced exchange and utilitarian items, such as shell beads, stone beads, amulets, stone bowls, hammer stones, pressure flakes,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Keith Kintigh. Jeffrey Altschul.

Archaeological forays into the climate change debate have generally been through case studies that integrate archaeological, anthropological, and paleoenvironmental data into coherent, evidence-based narratives that document how cultural systems in a relatively small geographic region adapted to long-term climatic change. While these cautionary tales can play a valuable role in galvanizing public opinion, they generally have not influenced public policy. What is lacking are scalable inferences...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Ciofalo. Devon Graves.

Recent archaeobotanical research on the Palmetto Junction archaeological site located in Providenciales, Turks and Caicos Islands, provides new insights into the livelihoods and subsistence practices of the peoples who inhabited this coastal region from c. AD 1200-1500 Significantly, the plant microbotanical remains, identified as primarily seeds and tubers provide evidence for a continuation in the consumption and manipulation of plant resources. During the late precolonial period people used...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Marquardt. Victor Thompson. Karen Walker. Michael Savarese. Lee Newsom.

The Calusa of southwest Florida were the most complex and powerful society in Florida during the sixteenth century AD. They relied for protein not on agriculture, but on aquatic resources harvested from shallow-water estuaries. Our interdisciplinary team is exploring the evidence for surplus production and intensification against a background of environmental challenges and opportunities. We focus on Mound Key and Pineland, the two largest Calusa towns. We think that cooperative heterarchical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Colantoni. Gabriele Colantoni. Serena Cosentino. Maria Rosa Lucidi. Gianfranco Mieli.

Excavations at the San Martino site (Torano di Borgorose, Rieti, Italy) have uncovered the remains of a Copper Age settlement, with evidence of a daub structure and possible hearth. The present contribution reports the results of investigations here and situates these results within the broader context of the mountainous interior areas of central Italy, including parts of the Lazio region and especially neighboring Abruzzo. The quantity of data available from Copper Age sites in this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeffrey Fleisher. Stephanie Wynne-Jones.

The residents and rulers of Swahili towns along the eastern African Swahili coast fashioned cosmopolitan worlds through their participation in long-distance trade both across the Indian Ocean and into the continental interior, their conversion to Islam, and the construction of cities that incorporated styles from across the Indian Ocean world. The creation and use of a local coinage—silver from the 8th-10th centuries, and copper from the 11th century onward—is often viewed as a way that town...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yvette Marks. Roger Doonan.

Our understanding of Early Bronze Age copper smelting in the Southern Aegean has improved dramatically in the last two decades through a combination of fieldwork, laboratory analyses and experimental reconstructions (Betancourt 2006, Bassiakos, 2007, Pryce 2007). The currently accepted model for primary copper production has been largely based on the outcome of an experimental campaign (Pryce et al. 2007). While this study accepts the value of experimental archaeology it challenges the current...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Vaughn Bryant.

Volney Jones was one of the first to examine coprolites found in Eastern Kentucky caves. By today’s standards, his technique was primitive, but it did provide information about early human diets. During the mid-1950s Eric Callen pioneered the study of coprolites when he looked at coprolites from the site of Huaca Prieta de Chicama in the coastal region of Peru. Later, in the early 1960s Callen worked in Mexico with Richard MacNeish at Tehuacan. Callen worked in isolation at McGill University in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matt Edwards. Weston McCool.

Global studies of ancient imperialism are beginning to focus on the importance of communication corridors (roads, canals, waterways, etc.) in the origins, formation, and expansion of empires. As the number of such corridors increase and intertwine, a network is formed on the landscape that many past empires, including—we believe—the Wari, augmented with considerable imperial investment. By constricting the number of reasonable overland routes, mountainous terrain can concentrate such imperial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicole Rose.

Archaeological schools of thought vary between countries, with the discipline growing along disparate theoretical trajectories dependent on the historical particulars of a nation’s academic traditions. Often distance between such diverging theoretical trajectories is mitigated by communication and collaboration across borders between scholars. However, the Cold War that divided Western and Soviet nations geographically, politically, and culturally also applied to archaeological research, as the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tom Cummins.

This talk concentrates on objects from America placed in the Palacio Real in Madrid and the Escorial. They form various parts of several types of collections that in recognizing the heterodoxy of their appearance in display different contexts dispel the overarching notion of the cabinets of curiosity that predominates in histories of collections for this period.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Morehart.

Scientists debate the Anthropocene as a geological epoch. But as a cultural phenomenon, the Anthropocene is recent. And as a cultural phenomenon, the Anthropocene projects a cosmology across history. This paper specifically examines how this cosmology understands the materiality of infrastructures, the built substrate upon which networks of human and non-human worlds intersect and collide. I argue that this cosmology contrasts infrastructures of the recent past as dangerous and polluting against...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laurie Webster.

With its strong symbolic reference to moisture and clouds, cotton has long been considered a precious textile fiber in the Americas. Adopted from Mexico as a tropical crop, it was well-established in the Salt-Gila drainage by 500 A.D., and by 1000-1100 A.D. it was adapted to the wetter microenvironments of the Colorado Plateau. Because cotton could not be grown everywhere, it became a prized element of trade and craft specialization. In this paper I examine the agricultural intensification,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David McCormick.

Procurement, production, and distribution of raw materials loom large in discussions of prehistoric economies. Over the past three decades surface survey and excavations in and around the Late Classic polity of Cotzumalguapa revealed the presence of several obsidian dumps, the result of a large-scale lithic industry. These deposits contain production debitage from most phases of blade-core reduction but no nodules and relatively very little cortex, suggesting that obsidian came into...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Douglas MacDonald.

The University of Montana conducted an archaeological survey of the Cougar Creek valley, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, in 2017. We mapped Cougar Creek obsidian outcrops, procurement areas, and secondary processing sites. XRF analysis of natural and cultural samples of the snowflake obsidian show a distinct chemical composition, even though its creation event is coeval with the famous Obsidian Cliff ca. 180,000 years ago (ca. 30 miles northeast). Due to its highly variable quality, Native...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kim Christensen.

Data and spatial visualization programs afford archaeologists various ways of showcasing their research. Programs, such as the Knight Foundation’s free StoryMap JS, and Esri StoryMaps, are of particular use when sharing our research results with the public and, I argue, are useful for conducting collaborative research with communities. In this paper, I detail the experience of using online StoryMap programs in the creation of local history maps created by undergraduate students in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edy Barrios. Cameron L. McNeil. Mauricio Díaz. Walter Burgos. Antolín Velásquez.

Cities and the communities in their hinterlands are inextricably linked, and yet the objectives of their inhabitants can be starkly different. The archaeological sites of Río Amarillo and Quebrada Piedras Negras shared a fertile plain along the Río Amarillo and Río Blanco Rivers. Several scholars have suggested that the arable fields here may have acted as a bread basket for the urban center to their west. Research at Rio Amarillo has yielded evidence of strong ties to Copan including...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Roberts.

In this paper, major focus will be given to metal artifacts and fragments, examined with respect to object type, production technique, and their distribution throughout different architectural spaces during the 2017 excavations of Patipampa, a domestic sector of the Middle Horizon (AD 500-1000) city of Huari. These artifacts, collected during excavation and flotation, will be compared to finished products and fragments belonging to other artifact classes, such as shell, across multiple...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Waka Kuboyama.

The "axe-god" jade pendants form the majority of Costa Rican jade artifacts. These pendants were valued for their "celt like shape" and did not function as real axes. Interestingly, some pendants do have abrasions on their axe edges. Because of that, it has been proposed that prior to being reworked into a corporal accessory, some of these pendants had been used as real axes or other tools. The "axe-god" pendants consist of two parts; the superior part with decoration of human or animals, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Céline Lamb.

As Maya archaeology has shifted away from urban-centric perspectives, recent research demonstrates that hinterland populations, like urbanites, were involved in diverse and shifting practices enabling them to build and negotiate complex relationships. Using a community approach, this paper examines non-agrarian activities practiced during the late Early and Late Classic (ca. 500 – 850 AD) by residents of Chunhuayum, a small yet socioeconomically diverse farming settlement located in northwest...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marija Edinborough. Kevan Edinborough.

We use anthropological data and a new statistical method to determine if there is a significant change to the health of people found in the Danube Gorges, Serbia (c. 9500–5500 BC), following the arrival of the Neolithic. A gross anatomical study of porotic hyperostosis and cribra orbitalia was undertaken on 113 individuals. The results show a high prevalence of porotic hyperostosis (89%) and a lower prevalence of cribra orbitalia (13%). 1308 teeth deriving from 89 individuals were examined for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rona Ikehara-Quebral. Michael Pietrusewsky. Michele Toomay Douglas.

Cultural flattening of the posterior skull, rare in the Mariana Islands, was recently observed in multiple human skeletons from a Latte Period site in Guam. Prior to this study, only one case of possible artificial cranial modification was reported for this region. The cranium of a young adult female from Songsong Village, Rota, was described as having "asymmetrical deformation in the occipital region consistent with artificial shaping practices." In a review of the ethnohistoric literature,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Gardner. Robert Hard.

During the 2015 and 2016 University of Texas at San Antonio Field Schools we made use of new low-cost photogrammetry techniques to document metates and rock ring features at Early Agricultural period sites along the Upper Gila River in southeastern Arizona. We systematically photographed a number of ground stone tools and rock ring features using point-and-shoot cameras. These photos were then processed using Agisoft’s Photoscan software to produce colored 3D computer renders of the artifacts...

DOCUMENT Citation Only George J. Micheletti.

The Late Classic period (AD 550 – 800) at Pacbitun, Belize brought about heightened prosperity evinced in a surge of architectural development and an increase in precious exotic materials. However, despite continued growth, by the close of the Late Classic Pacbitun’s affluence appears to have diminished considerably. To the north, settlements of the Belize River Valley also seemingly undergo a concomitant florescence and economic decline. Research suggests the pecuniary instability of the Belize...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam Coker. Kimberly Swisher. Jennifer Birch. Stefan Brannan. Tiffany Yue.

During its estimated 400-year history of occupation, Singer-Moye was a focal point of prehistoric settlement and socio-political development in the Lower Chattahoochee River Valley of southwestern Georgia (USA). Between A.D. 1300 and 1400, the site was a focus of regional settlement aggregation that included the expansion of the site’s monumental core and the deposition of a dense occupational midden surrounding that core. In 2016 and 2017, excavations at Singer-Moye were focused on...