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

DOCUMENT Citation Only Santiago Juarez.

The site of Noh K’uh in Chiapas, Mexico is a mid-sized ceremonial center that is found near the boundary between the Southern Lowlands and the highlands of Chiapas. Abandoned during the Late Preclassic (400 B.C.- A.D. 200), the site of Noh K’uh has provided an opportunity to study the Late Preclassic settlement patterns without the overburden of later period remains. Recent investigations in 2016 and 2017 have provided new evidence that allows me to compare the construction techniques utilized...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Hutson.

In the ancient cities of Ur and Chan Chan, excavations revealed that when a lord died, dozens of servants were sometimes put to death and buried with the lord. Such examples of retainer sacrifice, also mentioned for Aztec kings and documented in Maya tombs, raise questions about slavery, violence, and subjectivity. David Graeber has argued that slavery played a key role in the origin of commercial systems. The transition at issue concerns the melding of human economies (which make and remake...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Reed. Jonathan Libbon. Aidan McCarty. Benjamin Demchak. Erica Birkner.

Starting in 2015, archaeological survey for a large natural gas pipeline project investigated large portions of the Conotton Creek Drainage in Eastern Ohio. Prehistoric site clusters, identified during the project and previous investigations along Conotton Creek, provide an opportunity to investigate the prehistoric utilization of the landscape. Analysis of the dataset generated suggests there is patterning in the temporal and spatial distribution of prehistoric sites along Conotton Creek....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brittany Hundman. Jay Franklin.

Situated at the confluence of the industrial North and the agricultural South, the rural Appalachian Mountains of east Tennessee had unique access to a variety of material and agricultural goods. These resources were key to the practice of homesteading; a type of small-scale subsistence living that was a mechanism not only for survival but of familial and communal pride that continues to this day. Boone Lake, formed from the damming of the Holston and Watauga Rivers, has covered many early...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yufeng Sun.

As one of the most highly-developed cultural regions in China, many aspects of the lower Yellow River Valley have been systematically studied, including climatic revolutions, cultural patterns, and subsistence strategies, among others. It is now known that the diversified environments of the Valley, including flood plains, hills and coastal regions, facilitated the development of distinctive cultures and subsistence patterns in these areas. These distinctions are principally reflected in their...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rani Alexander.

Cross markers that consist of a wooden cross supported by a stone cairn (multun) are among the most pervasive landscape features encountered in rural Yucatán. They delimit water sources, features along roadways and paths, agricultural parcels, and the entrances of rural towns. The cross markers show substantial formal variation and are associated with material evidence indicating diverse practices of veneration. Cross markers were first established in the sixteenth century after the Spanish...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Flint.

Historians and archaeologists are habitually drawn to one or the other of two very different types of causal explanation. Those habits arise in great measure from the two distinctly different kinds of data that the two disciplines deal with. Archaeological causal explanations are frequently limited to "latent causal conditions," that is, environmental and cultural (thus anonymous and collective) vulnerabilities or proclivities, broad-scale physical and societal pushes and pulls that set the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steve Kosiba.

Recently, the term "infrastructure" has gained a remarkable degree of traction in both academic and political discourses. Politicians, from the left and right, bemoan what they term "crumbling infrastructure," offering fixes by way of material and technological improvements to roads, waterways, cities, and energy grids. Scholars draw on and expand posthumanist theories to analyze and expose how infrastructure does not just passively support social aims, but actively shapes (and subverts) human...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fabiana María Martin. Francisco Juan Prevosti. Luis Alberto Borrero.

Cueva Nordensjkold is a cave located in the Cerro Benitez, at Ultima Esperanza, Chile, above 150 masl, and accordingly beyond the highest stand of the Late Glacial Consuelo paleolake. The study of its Late Pleistocene faunal remains -Mylodontinae, Hippidion saldiasi, Camelidae, Panthera onca mesembrina and a large undetermined carnivore- is crucial for the understanding of the process of biological colonization of the Cerro Benitez area, where ephemeral Late Pleistocene human occupations were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jayur Mehta.

In project-based learning, students are expected to be at the center of discovery, wherein educators set the parameters of inquiry with complex and engaging questions and learning happens when students gain knowledge and skills through frequent check-ins, structured lectures, and with both open-ended and guided research. Under this model, I used indigenous cultigens, agricultural cash crops, and creole gardens to guide students in learning about the complexities and nuances of prehistoric...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Halstad McGuire.

This poster examines the use of experimental archaeology as a teaching tool in undergraduate courses. It looks at issues relating to the design, implementation, and assessment of experimental archaeology projects in upper division courses ranging from 30 to 70 students. The case studies examined here involve group-based projects centred on topics in medieval archaeology from the University of Victoria. Methods for monitoring student projects and assessing diverse experiments will be discussed....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Raymond Hunter.

Historical and archaeological research on the Colonial Andes and Spanish colonialism more broadly has drawn parallels between the conversion of indigenous populations to Catholicism and the conversion of agricultural land to ‘Christian’ food production. This scholarship contends that for colonizers, religious conversion was irrevocably connected to agricultural practice – a particular concern to Spaniards in the Andes given the strong links between agrarian production and Inka ritual practices....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ann Peters.

Improving documentation of artifact assemblages in the funerary contexts of the Necropolis of Wari Kayan (Paracas site, south coast of the Central Andes) leads to identification of multiple contemporary textile styles as well as their transformation over the period of cemetery use (c. 250 BCE to 250 CE). While artifact variability in the region has largely been organized in hypothetical phases, expanded data on garment design and production details, as well as imagery, is most usefully organized...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Franziska Fecher. Markus Reindel. Peter Fux.

The Postclassic settlement of Guadalupe is located on the northeastern coast of Honduras, near Trujillo. With its location inside the interaction sphere between Mesoamerica, Lower Central America and the Caribbean, it lies within a culturally dynamic region that has received influences from various areas during different times. With respect to the Postclassic period, it has been demonstrated that access and distribution patterns of resources and goods changed and new networks of interaction...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jaelyn Roland.

George Milner points out in his 2015 work, "Population Decline and Culture Change in the American Midcontinent: Bridging the Prehistoric and Historic Divide", that reactions and changes by Native Americans during the Protohistoric period were highly localized, and that each tribe was affected differently through direct and indirect contacts with Europeans. The La Crosse locality was inhabited by the Oneota until c. 1625 when the area was abandoned for the Riceford Creek locality (in southeastern...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Sunell.

The Santa Barbara Channel region of southern California lacks reliable sources of high quality toolstone except in a few prominent locations. The nearest obsidian sources are hundreds of miles away, and local chert can be highly variable in quality and availability. Monterey chert, common to both the northern Channel Islands and the adjacent mainland, varies widely in terms of inclusions, color, and consistency; Franciscan chert from the mainland is similarly troublesome for tool-makers on a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jorge Ulloa Hung.

The island of Hispaniola has been considered an initial place by the formation of creoles cultures in the Caribbean and the Americas. This consideration has been founded on the study of the socio-economic dynamics and cultural transformation generated by the European colonial irruption, specially the creation of first Spanish colonial settlement on the island. At the same time, generate an excessive dependency of archaeological data of ethnohistorical sources, and formalized a reductionist...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elham Ghasidian. Saman Heydari-Guran.

Located in western Eurasia, at the crossroads of human migrations out of Africa during the Pleistocene, the Iranian Plateau stands at the centre of models of anatomically modern human dispersals out of Africa. This paper aims to understand the cultural diversity among the first modern human populations in the area, and the implications of this diversity to evolutionary and ecological models of human dispersal through the Iranian Plateau, by re-examining four key UP lithic assemblages from the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ellen Hoobler.

During the depths of the Great Depression and prior to and after World War II, Mexico’s Museo Nacional de Antropología undertook exchanges, or canjes, of archaeological pieces with a variety of museums, disseminating small portions of its collection across the nation and the world. Actual trades of archaeological works were completed in the early 1930s with museums in Yucatán, Mexico; Lima, Peru; and New York and Chicago in the United States. There were more limited exchanges of casts with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christen Erlingsson. Bruce Davenport. Susanne Bollerup Overgaard.

Background: The 3-year Active Ageing and Heritage in Adult Learning project (2014-17, EU Erasmus+ program) involved five open-air museums in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, UK, and Hungary. Sessions were conducted in venues matching the era of clearest memories for participating older persons with dementia (PwD), e.g., 1940-ties apartment. University researchers (Sweden, UK, & Denmark) evaluated the project. This presentation describes qualitative results. The objective was to investigate if/how...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Seltzer.

The arrival of the Spanish shattered the Pueblo people’s worldview in the Rio Grande during the 16th century. Nevertheless, the Pueblo people held onto specific icons that socially identified them as Pueblo, while yet creating Spanish commissioned pottery and other Spanish materials. The 1680 Pueblo Revolt and cultural revitalization movement by Puebloan groups sought to return indigenous peoples to their heritage through an emphasis on traditional religious practices and lifeways. Using...

DOCUMENT Citation Only L. Antonio Curet.

Traditionally, the ancient history of the Caribbean is viewed as one where one culture replaces or dominates another through time. These views were highly influenced by the perspective of the early Anthropologists who saw intercultural relations through the colonial lens of dominant cultures and acculturation. Despite this emphasis on cultural "purity," the history of Caribbean archaeology includes several scholars who viewed cultural interaction more as an exchange of ideas and material...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amelia Chisholm.

Generals Highway (MD-178), a major roadway that stretches from Annapolis to the Severn River in Anne Arundel County, was paved in the early part of the twentieth century, but portions of the original colonial roadbed still exist. Anne Arundel County’s Cultural Resources Division, in partnership with Maryland State Highway Administration, conducted a multi-year investigation to identify, locate, record, assess, study, and share with the public the range of archaeological and cultural resources...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristen Fuld. Terry Ozbun.

Located on the northern fringe of the Great Basin, in Lake County, Oregon, the Glass Buttes volcanic complex is the most important obsidian toolstone source in North America. Glass Buttes obsidian is world renowned because it is colorful, abundant, available in large pieces, and of extremely high quality for making flaked stone tools. Throughout the late Pleistocene and Holocene, Native Americans have continuously used Glass Buttes obsidian, and it was widely traded in the Pacific Northwest...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabrielle Vail.

Analysis of the iconography, hieroglyphic captions, and calendrical component of the Postclassic Maya codices, believed to derive from the Northern Maya Lowlands, provides important information about their possible antecedents. Portions of the Dresden Codex, for example, suggest clear links to the mural program painted on the interior of the Los Sabios structure from the site of Xultun, Guatemala, which includes a section with detailed calculations of a lunar cycle and another that may depict a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stacie King.

This paper explores the interactions between multiple groups of people in the Sierra Sur region of Nejapa and Tavela, Oaxaca in trans-conquest and Colonial Mexico. Bringing together ethnohistoric accounts, oral histories, and archaeological data in Nejapa and Tavela, I highlight three case studies to show that migration, conquest, and interregional trade created a complex, dynamic, pluralistic ethnic landscape prior to the arrival of the Spanish. As such, when the Spanish colonial regime took...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicole Lohman.

The Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) mission of multiple use is unique among federal agencies. Managing areas with cultural resources for multiple use is a tricky balancing act of NEPA, NHPA, Native American Consultation, Bureau directives and policy, and Statewide policy. Add public scoping and consulting parties representing the local community and special interest groups and things get even more complicated. This paper discusses the challenges associated with oil and gas lease sales that BLM...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Boulanger.

The Paleoindian (ca. 13,000–11,000 calBP) record of eastern North America has long been characterized as exhibiting a remarkable variety of fluted-point forms. The temporal, spatial, and cultural significance of this variety remains poorly understood owing to a sparse radiocarbon record as well as to inconsistencies in nomenclature and traits used to define point forms. Building on previous studies, paradigmatic classification is used to create replicable fluted-point classes from a large...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jack Hofman. Barbara Crable.

Feature 15-1 at a 9,000 year old bison kill site in Rawlins County, northwest Kansas yielded remains of black footed ferret (BFF) and numerous other species. Here we summarize cultural and taphonomic factors related to the feature’s formation and review BFF biogeography for the early Holocene period in the central Plains region. The diverse fauna from this feature and its varied modifications may reflect special cultural behavior associated with the bison kill at Burntwood Creek. Both natural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ebony Creswell.

Until recently, the development and spread of tuberculosis in humans has been associated with the advent of Old World animal domestication and agriculture. However, recent evidence for the presence of Mycobacterium tuberculosis raises the possibility of a Pleistocene era dispersal. Poor bone preservation and small populations make finding Pleistocene-era bioarchaeological evidence of the disease difficult. Coupled with this, epidemiological studies suggest that population numbers were too low...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael L. Terlep.

The age, origin, and function of the enigmatic cup and channel petroglyphs of the Arizona Strip have fascinated archaeologists for decades. The petroglyphs size, up to 2 m long, as well as, placement on horizontal surfaces at prominent locations, contributes to the intrigue of the glyphs. Previous hypotheses for the age and function of the petroglyphs include prehistoric navigational markers to water sources, solstice markers, historic tar burners, and ceremonial water channels. Hundreds of cup...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Morag Kersel.

The crisis in the curation of materials generated as a result of excavation and survey is one of the most pressing issues facing the discipline. Storage is of constant concern as questions of how to store materials, where to store materials, and how long to store these items confront archaeologists and license/permit-granting agencies around the globe. This is an examination of an innovative approach to solving the curation crisis of Early Bronze Age ceramic vessels from the Dead Sea Plain in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elliot Lopez-Finn.

The Postclassic Mexica maintained what Sophia and Michael Coe (2005) refer to as a "curious ambivalence" regarding cacao: despite its prevalence in everyday life as currency, the plant rarely appears in artistic programs and consumption was highly restricted via sumptuary laws that controlled social behavior. The visual scarcity of this crop extends into divine imagery – for instance, cacao remained an important aspect of Ek’ Chuah, the Postclassic Maya merchant god, but does not appear among...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justine McKnight.

A growing body of research from across the Middle Atlantic reveals patterns of native plant use that are both highly variable and unique within the North American landscape. This paper provides an overview of the current state of paleoethnobotanical research across the region, with a focus on the Chesapeake Bay where maize (corn) was a relative latecomer to the native subsistence regime. Multiple lines of evidence (including macro and micro-botanical data, direct radiocarbon assays and stable...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carl Walsh. Justin Yoo. Paul van Pelt.

This paper suggests that Egyptology has reached a critical juncture in which the opening of the field to other areas, such as anthropology and sociology, is critical in revitalising and safeguarding the future of the discipline. Discourse beyond disciplinary boundaries is becoming increasingly important in academia, due to wider changes in university structures, employment, and funding opportunities. Given the current importance of these issues, the authors wanted to determine how these aspects...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rosalind Wallduck. Silvia M. Bello.

It has been suggested that cutting into decaying bodies occurred in the past, for instance during the cleaning or dismemberment of corpses during protracted funerary rituals. However it can be difficult to confirm the timings of such interactions, particularly for secondarily deposited bones. An experimental study was therefore conceived to test whether the frequency, location and micro-morphometric characteristics of cut marks might differ on fresh compared to decaying bodies. In order words,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Flynn.

Semi-lunar knives, or ulus, have been considered a diagnostic tool of the Laurentian Late Archaic in the Northeast since William Ritchie’s 1940 report on the Robinson and Oberlander No. 1 sites in upstate New York. Archaeological research conducted since Ritchie’s definition of the Laurentian Aspect demonstrate semi-lunar knives were used in New England long before 5,000 B.P. and occur in both coastal and interior settings. Recently identified semi-lunar knife fragments from a coastal Laurentian...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hirokazu Kotegawa.

Uno de los grandes problemas de los monumentos escultóricos olmecas es que, para identificar la cronología y la cultura pertinente, la mayoría de ellos se ha perdido el contexto arqueológico. Por ello, existen algunos monumentos dudosos por su estilo y los de la procedencia desconocida en el corpus total de ellos. El sitio Estero Rabón es conocido como uno de los centros secundarios de San Lorenzo y fue reportado con la presencia de varios monumentos escultóricos olmecas. Sin embargo, casi todos...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Birmingham. Christine Ames.

In the summer of 2017, the D.C. Urban Archeology Corps (UAC), jointly managed by the National Park Service, National Capital Parks-East, and Groundwork DC, conducted a Phase I shove test pit survey at the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site, where Douglass lived between 1877 and 1895. The UAC is a summer program where urban youth learn about the field of archeology and how it applies to local communities and parks. Participants research the archeological significance of local parks,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Golitko. James Zimmer-Dauphinee. John Edward Terrell.

Progressive cultural and biological diversification and divergence over space and time is one of the grand meta-narratives of archaeological thought. Much of the method and theory employed in support of this narrative is arguably at odds with what Emirbayer and Goodwin label the "anti-categorical imperative" at the heart of social network relational thinking. Here we utilize spatial network models within the broader family of Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGMs) to examine the relationship...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexander Craib.

Previous research in the Southeast has demonstrated that Dalton groups underwent a process of settling in to the landscape. This has been demonstrated through the identification of raw materials used for the production of Dalton hafted bifaces. A preference for locally available raw materials has been noted in previous studies, a departure from Clovis groups who routinely made use of non-local cherts. This trend has been well established outside of the Tennessee River Valley; however, little...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jesper Nielsen. Christophe Helmke. Fiorella Fenoglio.

Ever since the first attempts to explain the close correspondences (in iconography, architecture, and writing) between Chichen Itza and Tula in the Early Postclassic it has been assumed that it was mainly between these two cities, sometimes even called "twin Tollans", that the extended and intense contact between Northern Yucatan and central Mexico took place. A tendency among Mesoamericanists not to look further to the north and west, to present states such as Guanajuato and Querétaro, have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Colleen Strawhacker. Peter Pulsifer. Noor Johnson. Shari Gearheard.

The Exchange for Local Observations and Knowledge of the Arctic (ELOKA, eloka-arctic.org) partners with Indigenous communities in the Arctic to create online products that facilitate the collection, preservation, exchange, and use of local observations and Indigenous Knowledge of the Arctic. ELOKA has created numerous digital products guided by Indigenous partners, ranging from atlases preserving and visualizing Indigenous Knowledge and information, to online databases allowing for Arctic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daron Duke. D. Craig Young.

The Old River Bed delta is a premier open-air Paleoindian locality in the eastern Great Basin. Its chief distinction is scale—some 2,000 square kilometers-plus of nearly continuous and single-component archaeological material on what would have been the largest basin wetland in the region. But the record is largely surficial. In this poster, we detail a series of sites that have yielded temporal data from buried cultural contexts. The sites help clarify the broader associations of artifact types...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Shennan.

Archaeologists have long used site counts and other measures to infer past population histories and such efforts have always been criticised by those who point to all the known and unknown unknowns that in their view make such efforts as dubious as getting to the topmost steps on Hawkes’s ladder of inference. In recent years most effort has been devoted to the use of summed radiocarbon probabilities for demographic inference since for most of later prehistory in most of the world it gives a much...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Linda Scott Cummings. R. A. Varney. Thomas W. Stafford Jr.. Scott Anfinson. Patricia Emerson.

Sources of carbon in wetlands and calcareous areas represent unique challenges for interpreting the archaeological radiocarbon record. Atmospheric carbon dioxide is assumed to be the only carbon source for photosynthesis. However, dating modern and historic reference fish and modern reference wild rice indicates the presence of ancient carbon in bones and plant material. Dating four historic reference fish obtained from the Mississippi River in 1939 in southeastern Minnesota yielded four...

DOCUMENT Citation Only G. Logan Miller.

Prepared core and blade industries emerge in various times and places throughout the prehistory of North America. One of these is in association with the Hopewell phenomenon of the Eastern Woodlands. As such, they are often recognized as a Middle Woodland "index fossil" and a key materialized indication of Hopewell ceremonialism. However, few formal tests of their occurrence across space and time exist. Drawing on published reports, as well as an extensive review of the unpublished gray...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Steelman. Liam Brady. John Bradley. Amanda Kearney.

Working with Yanyuwa elders, we collected seven rock painting samples for radiocarbon dating from Kamadarringabaya rock shelter on Vanderlin Island in the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria (Northern Territory). Hand motifs – prints and stencils – dominate the site, covering the shelter walls and roof, and are said by Yanyuwa to be the hands of the Namurlajanyugku spirit beings. In control experiments, negligible levels of humic acid contamination were shown to be present in the unpainted rock;...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Petrozza. Jason Yaeger. M. Kathryn Brown. Kit Nelson. Rachel Horowitz.

Archaeologists working in the Maya area frequently find dense deposits of artifacts that are classified ‘terminal deposits,’ ‘final deposits,’ or ‘problematical deposits’. These classifications may accurately reflect a deposit’s stratigraphic placement, but ultimately mask or even misrepresent the diverse social behaviors which led to the creation of such deposits. Excavations in the courtyard in front of Structure B-6 at Xunantunich, Belize, exposed a dense deposit of artifacts. Through...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Hansen.

Archaeologists have long striven to interpret mortuary rituals as qualitative signs of a living people--indices of sex, gender, age, status, wealth, and craft. Though the doctrine "as in life, so in death" can have some merit for archaeological inquiry, viewing mortuary ritual in this manner ignores the social act itself, which is one of the most intimate, personal, and weighted actions humans produce, serving, among other roles, to return the society to homeostasis in the wake of the loss of a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lindsey Büster.

Personal possessions are inherent in the construction and maintenance of social identity. In some prehistoric cosmologies, artefacts may even have been integral to an individual’s personhood. As such, they can become culturally and ritually charged objects within a community. What happens then to this social remnant of an individual when they die? Objects that are on the one hand redundant but on the other too problematic to be casually discarded. In the increasingly materialist and consumerist...

DOCUMENT Citation Only India Kotis. Jenna Hurtubise.

The choices groups make in the type of decorative techniques and styles on ceramics are referential to key components of a group’s social structure. This research examines social aspects of the Casma and Chimú using a cognitive approach in analyzing iconographic elements on elite ceramics from Pan de Azucár, located in the Nepeña Valley, Peru. Casma ceramics are locally made vessels where no two are alike and are characteristically defined by the presence of circle-and-dot and serpentine...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jerry Lyon. Barbara Montgomery. Jeffrey Jones.

The Dairy site is a long-lived prehistoric locality situated at the juncture of the Tortolita Mountains piedmont and the Santa Cruz River floodplain north of Tucson, Arizona. Although the site has yielded important evidence of early Hohokam settlement and cultural developments, the sporadic nature of investigations, the lack of data from early fieldwork, and the destruction of significant portions of the site by the original Shamrock Dairy operation provide substantial challenges to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Clare Bedford. David Robinson.

The composition of background substrate, overpainted layers and admixtures can influence the data acquired from portable instrumentation at rock art sites. An understanding of the extent and impact of this influence is crucial when comparing in situ rock art pigments with potential source materials. This study uses an experimental process to assess the impact of factors such as a pigment thickness, overpainting, and addition of organic binders on the readings acquired using portable...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alison Damick.

Archaeology has engaged with ecology in various ways over the years. Recently, post-humanist thinking has gained popularity as an approach, urging us to think about human and non-humans relationally, as having contingent qualities that vary in relation to their interaction over time. Simultaneously, we see increasing attempts to think with indigenous philosophies and descendent communities about what the environment is and does. However, there remains a disconnect between approaches that seek to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Zeidler.

This paper explores the notions of ‘material memory’ and human agency in deep time as expressed in the repetitive reconstruction of earthen platform mounds over some three millennia in the Jama Valley of coastal Manabí Province, Ecuador. Empirical evidence of repetitive mound-building is presented over a long stratigraphic record extending from approximately 2030 BCE to about 1260 CE, and special emphasis is given to the site of San Isidro, a major civic-ceremonial site and ‘persistent place’...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Berquist. Thomas Hardy.

The end of history has ended. Our social conditions, and indeed many of our greatest social ills, are now understood to have been generations in the making, the result of accumulations and sedimentations of quotidian human action. This introduction posits that such accumulations and sedimentations are not mere metaphor, and that the material world is the ongoing expression of the force of history. Following key post-structuralist insights, we argue that the contents of these histories are not...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hernando Giraldo Tenorio.

The prehispanic societies from the Cauca river Valley, Colombia, have been portrayed as classical examples of the development of political complexity caused by intergroup conflict for basic resources in constrained environments. However, the existence of warfare in the region itself has not been backed by strong archaeological evidence. The re-analysis of the earth structures of the archaeological site of Malagana, in southwestern Colombia, suggest the existence of regional warfare, which...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrea Torvinen.

Situated in the Malpaso Valley of Zacatecas, Mexico, the site of La Quemada was one of a series of polities that developed along the northern frontier of Mesoamerica during the Epiclassic period (A.D. 500-900). Widely distributed ceramic wares suggest interaction among northern frontier polities, but it remains unknown whether they are the product of widely recognized social categories (i.e., shared style) or direct, face-to-face interaction among individuals (i.e., shared composition)....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eva Lemonnier. Charlotte Arnauld.

Based on the study of two Classic Maya Lowland sites, La Joyanca and Naachtun (Guatemala), this paper explores the topic of rurality through the parameters of potential land use, visible architectural variation, and plausible population mobility. La Joyanca was a medium-sized settlement surrounded by villages and hamlets all of which were recorded by means of conventional surface mapping, whereas Naachtun was a regional capital located amidst extended communities linked by causeways that have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karime Castillo. Patricia Fournier. Roberto Junco.

In the viceregal society of New Spain, Chinese porcelain objects were expensive objects consumed primarily by people of high status. The white porcelain objects produced in Dehua, located in the Fujian province of China, were incorporated into the household items of palaces and mansions, as indicated by archaeological evidence from Mexico City, Acapulco, Sinaloa, and some rural sites in the Otumba Valley. The production of this fine porcelain, also known as Blanc de Chine, involved complex...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Abbott. Caitlin Wichlacz. J. Scott Wood.

Various conflicting ideas pervade debate about how 13th century occupation was organized in the upland zone of central Arizona, which overlooks the Phoenix Basin to the south. Some researchers characterize the upland settlements as subservient and peripheral to the densely packed irrigation-based Hohokam communities along the Salt River. Others, instead, describe the upland populations as independent communities with rich histories of their own. Still others speculate about the extent to which...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristin Corl. Kristina Solis. Robert J. Hard. Michelle Carpenter.

A series of mortuary sites on the Texas Coastal Plain provide a dataset useful for analyzing demographic change through examination of age profiles. Other archaeological data suggest that populations peaked during the Late Archaic period (4000-800 BP) and sharply declined during the Late Prehistoric period (800-350 BP). Analysis of the ratio of adults to young individuals has been used to identify rapid population growth among other populations. Hunter-gatherer groups living in the Texas...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Valerie Sgheiza. P. Willey.

A critical question concerning the Point San Jose (PSJ) skeletal remains is the nature of the living population from which the assemblage was derived. We approach this issue indirectly through comparison with other mortality profiles. Here, we report the age, sex, and ancestry of the PSJ skeletal remains, and compare them with those parameters of other groups. The comparative age distributions consist of the 1870 California mortality census, 1870 California living census (as a proxy for a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Allan Cobb. James Brady. Guillermo De Anda Alaniz.

One of the most enigmatic publications in Maya cave archaeology has been Edward H. Thompson investigation of the High Priest’s Grave at Chichen Itza in 1896. Thompson discovered a masonry shaft running down the center of the pyramid that gave access to a cave/cenote beneath the structure. This was the first account of a cave with a pyramid built over it and Thompson suggested that the cave contained seven chambers, hinting at the possibility of a Chicomoztoc. J. Eric Thompson in editing and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Collins.

Dennis Stanford heads up the Archaeology division at the Smithsonian Institution and its Paleo-Indian Program. From the time he completed his graduate studies (PhD 1974, University of New Mexico), Dennis has held positions in the Department of Anthropology at SI, repository of the major archaeological collection in the United States. In his more than four decades at SI, he has fostered acquisition of archaeological (especially PaleoIndian) additions to the Department's collections, conducted...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tom Dillehay.

The influence that Dennis Stanford has had on archaeologists (and others) working in Latin America on the topic of early peopling is discussed, with specific reference to lithic technology, migratory models, and logistical/academic support.

DOCUMENT Citation Only E. James Dixon.

Dennis Stanford was first introduced to Alaskan archaeology in 1966 as a field assistant to Robert L Humphrey during an archaeological survey in the Utukok River valley in the western Brooks Range. At the urging of John M. ("Jack") Campbell he began work near Point Barrow in 1968 to investigate controversial questions about the origins of Thule culture. Following brief investigations at the Utkiavik site, he focused his excavations south of Barrow at Walakpa, where he discovered more than 20...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chin-hsin Liu. Coralia Guandique.

Three adjacent, chronologically overlapped, and metallurgically active sites in central Thailand were excavated by the Thailand Archaeometallurgy Project (TAP). This study focuses on dental pathology (caries, calculus, periapical abscessing, antemortem tooth loss, linear enamel hypoplasia) observed on human skeletal remains from Nil Kham Haeng (500 B.C.-A.D. 600) to investigate possible foodways and lifeways of its inhabitants. Among approximately 20 individuals represented, 16 have sufficient...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Blankenship-Sefczek. Joseph Ball.

Classic Maya social status is more complex than an elite verses non-elite dichotomy. Research suggests that a "middle" status group exists. However, the social segment from which they arise is unknown. This study focuses on individuals from the urban center of Buenavista del Cayo who are below the ruling elites in the "middle" rungs of social status, and those from the neighboring farming community of Guerra who are recognized as nonelites. Previous research suggested that no biological affinity...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tanya Chiykowski-Rathke.

How sherds ultimately enter the archaeological record reflect the roles and beliefs regarding the discard, reuse and repurposing of pottery across the Southwest US and Northwest Mexico. This paper examines the deposition of whole vessels and ceramic sherds from Cerro de Trincheras, Sonora, Mexico. It compares two contexts: the debris of domestic spaces, and the careful internment of vessels as part of mortuary ritual. The ceramic deposition practices of Trinchereños (Trincheras Tradition...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dominique Sparks-Stokes. Susan E. Allen. Alan P. Sullivan III.

This study assesses the utility of archaeobotanical measures to recognize differential site formation processes, drawing on the Bronze and Iron Age hill fort site of Zagorë, in northern Albania, as a case study. The blanket sampling strategy for collection of flotation samples applied by the Projeki Arkeologjik I Shkodres (PASH) (2010-2014) during the site’s excavation provides a complete record of archaeobotanical changes across the depth of each excavation unit. The use of small mesh sizes for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samantha Linford.

Between PIII and PIV the Southwest saw the largest shift in population from the Mesa Verde region (SW Colorado) to the Northern Rio Grande (N. New Mexico). Traces of this migration are difficult to identify in material culture, but Pueblo oral traditions document the migration from the North and discuss two moieties: summer and winter. My research aims to understand dual division within Pueblo society and whether summer and winter moieties can be referenced through ceramic designs before and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexis Clark.

During the Late Postclassic (A.D. 1200-1520) in the Mixteca Alta of Oaxaca, Mexico, aesthetic qualities of ceramics were utilized as both decorative values and tools for negotiating the creation of group identities and ideologies within communities. Through a stylistic analysis of Yanhuitlan Red on Cream type ceramics recovered from excavations at the site of Etlatongo, in the Nochixtlán Valley, I explore how these vessels and the motifs depicted on them were used during the creation of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Striebel MacLean.

At the close of the 18th century, a planter’s dwelling overlooking the Caribbean Sea on the northwest coast of Montserrat was destroyed by fire, and never reoccupied. Archaeological excavations yielded an intimate portrait of the domesticity of the British Empire materialized in fragments of everyday life. Little Bay was a small-scale sugar plantation with a physical landscape that conformed to the logic of sugar production—planting fields, sugar works, and the dwellings of the laboring...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Vining. Hali Thurber.

Several models have discussed links between warm (el Niño) phases of the el Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and cultural developments on Peru’s north coast. In particular, the abandonment of Moche settlements and agricultural systems and periods of social stress in both Moche and Chimu societies have been interpreted through the lens of ENSO disasters. ENSOs during the years 1982-83, 1997-98, and most recently 2016-17 offer the opportunity to better understand the spatial development of el...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Van Alstyne.

As archaeologists, we are looking for ways to engage the public and help them learn about the past and human diversity. Using photogrammetry, photospheres, and digital 3D modelling, this project creates an immersive experience through Virtual Reality (VR) for the public to learn about the Ancestral Puebloan people. This poster demonstrates an interactive public outreach effort that can be replicated by universities and museums, with limited budgets, to convey their research. It is a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Werlein. Joan Coltrain. Jeffrey Ferguson. Virginie Renson. Karen Schollmeyer.

The analysis of strontium and oxygen isotopes in archaeological bone is commonly used to trace human mobility and migrations. We are using this isotopic approach to reconstruct changes in human access to large animal resources acquired through trading and hunting in the Mesa Verde area between 750-1280 AD. Current work is focused on determining the isotopic variability of the complex geology surrounding the primary study area. Isotopic analyses have been conducted on non-cultural archaeological...

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

The Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS), in collaboration with MURR and UNC Research Laboratories of Archaeology, has analyzed the elemental composition of nearly 400 coarse earthenware sherds from eighteenth and early nineteenth century plantation contexts from Jamaica. All of the sherds were analyzed using Neutron Activation Analysis (NAA), while nearly forty percent of these same sherds were analyzed via laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ruby Kerwin. Sarah Klassen.

Chile is largely reliant on fossil fuels for energy and is working to transition to more renewable energy sources, specifically hydroelectric power. As part of this initiative, the state is proposing the construction of five hydropower dams in southern Chile. In this paper, we analyze the potential impact of this project on the ancestral land of the Mapuche. The Mapuche have been resisting the modern Chilean state’s approach to water and power and are fighting for land rights and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nia Ridwan.

This paper will focus on the development of marine archaeology in Indonesia and Southeast Asia. It will also highlight the interdisciplinary and integrated marine archaeology research programs in the region having aims to investigating shipwrecks, cargoes, and maritime heritage recent condition as well as identifying human and environmental threats. Marine archaeology research, sustainable shipwreck utilization for tourism development, and local people engagement in underwater cultural heritage...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zachary Cooper.

The origin of Tanoan language diversification is inextricably linked to the debate around the origin of the Tewa. While paleodemographic, bioarchaeological, linguistic, and DNA evidence support a thirteenth century Mesa Verde-Northern Rio Grande migration, the lack of clear material culture evidence of this migration is perplexing. Critical to this discussion is the possibility of an earlier, tenth century migration of (presumably) Proto-Tiwa speakers from the Upper San Juan region into the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lauren Koutlias. Annie Riegert.

The veneration of space is a process that at times incorporates deviant practices as a method of signifying key importance. The deposition of burnt infant remains and associated grave goods diverges from burial norms at the Maya site of Colha. In May of 2017, archaeologists with the Programme for Belize Archaeological project returned to the site after a multi-year hiatus. The burnt skeletal remains of an infant, between the ages of 1.5 and 2.5 were found in association with burnt pottery...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rhianna Bennett.

As a social science, archaeology utilizes disciplines within science, mathematics, and technology to answer questions about human behavior and our shared cultural heritage. With its interdisciplinary nature, archaeologists and educators over the last few decades have sought to promote archaeological lessons in K-12 classrooms. The presentation, "Deviating from the Standard: The Relationship between Archaeology and Public Education" uses the state of Georgia as a case study to examine the past,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabriel Hrynick.

Archaeological studies of the Protohistoric period in Maine and the Maritimes have emphasized cosmology implicitly through their focus on copper kettle burials. Archaeologically, copper kettle burials may be the only truly diagnostic archaeological manifestation of the Protohistoric period in this region. The Wabanaki ethnographic record reveals that seemingly mundane activities—the organization of space, the disposal of animal remains, for instance—were also central to Wabanaki relational...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brendan Weaver.

Ecclesiastical records suggest that the Ingenio Valley in Nasca’s northern Rio Grande Drainage has been defined by a predominantly black population since the early 17th century, most of whom worked as enslaved laborers on the two large Jesuit wine haciendas and a number of smaller secular estates in the valley. In this paper I approximate Afro-Andean ethnogenesis in the coastal valleys of Nasca from multiple temporal and spatial scales, considering both historical documentation and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zenobie Garrett.

The site of Dún Ailinne (Knockaulin) in County Kildare is one of four major ceremonial sites of the Irish Iron Age. Although numerous ceremonial centers of various size dotted the Irish landscape, Dún Ailinne, along with Teamhair (Tara), Emain Macha (Navan Fort), and Crúachain (Rathcroghan,) stand out due to their size and location. These characteristics indicate that the sites would have been major foci of ceremonial activity, and would have impacted the ceremonial activity itself. Although...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eleni Kotoula. David Robinson. Clare Bedford.

This presentation discusses two complementary approaches for visualization of pictographs; interactive relighting and diagrammatic representation. Visible and false colour Reflectance Transformation Images (RTI) provide enhanced visualization of texture in combination with colour enhancement. By extension, the proposed techniques offer the opportunity to explore the characteristics and application of paint as well as the layering and preservation state of pictographs. The extracted information...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katharina Zinn.

This paper explores the possibility to extract information about sensory experiences inherent in the material culture of ancient Egypt which are often overlooked due to the difficulty to track them in the material. By implementing new intellectual frameworks like New Materialism and the consequent application of methodologies from archaeology and anthropology we gain insight in the actions of ancient bodies. Taking inspiration from Latour’s actants (2005), Barad’s agential realism (2007) and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carolina Belmar. Omar Reyes. Ximena Albornoz. Flavia Morello Repetto. Manuel J. San Román.

In the western Patagonian channels, the archaeofaunistic record, technological and isotopic studies show subsistence strategies based on fishing, hunting and gathering of marine resources. Unfortunately the consumption of plant resources still has not been assessed for this area and the consumption of C3 plants is hard to detect though these type of analysis. Our aim is to evaluate the consumption of wild and domesticated plants and parafunctional use of the teeth for the processing of plant...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Baumann. Charles Faulkner. Heather Woods.

Enslaved African Americans in the Upper South worked and lived in both rural and urban settings as farm laborers, cooks, house servants, miners, and roustabouts. Their quality of life and cultural identity may be best understood by how their food was acquired, the types of plants and animals eaten, and the recipes they created. This paper provides a summary of the enslaved African American diet in the Upper South and compares it with that of their white owners as well as with enslaved...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Burtt.

The archaeology of dog-keeping by indigenous Native North Americans enriches our understanding of ways people conceptualized their environments in the past. Finding new ways to investigate this topic contributes to broader anthropological knowledge about relationships among humans and the natural world. In this paper, I present exploratory research to examine ways that domestic dogs were maintained and the assumed value of dogs among Native Americans who lived in the Ohio River valley, in Plains...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stanley Ambrose. Andrew Zipkin. Douglas J. Kennett. Abigail Fisher. Jessica Thompson.

The early Holocene African humid period (AHP, ~12,000-6000 bp) was followed by the Middle Holocene dry phase (MHDP, ~6000-3500 BP), and the modern climatic regime was established during the later Holocene (~3500 bp to present). The relationship of environmental change to human social and territorial organization adaptations are fairly well-documented in northern, eastern and southern Africa. However, the Holocene terrestrial record of environmental change in east-central Africa is poorly...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Taylor. Robert H. Tykot.

Earlier studies of subsistence at the site of El Dornajo in southwestern Ecuador examined faunal, macro- and macro-botanical remains. These studies indicated that residents consumed large quantities of shellfish and marine fish during both the Formative and Regional Development periods (2800 BC – 700 AD), with a marked decrease and differential access based on socioeconomic status in the later period. It has been hypothesized that site residents increased their reliance on domesticated plant...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katelyn McDonough.

The Connley Caves site is composed of eight rockshelters situated in a south-facing ridge of welded tuff on the margin of Paulina Marsh in the Fort Rock Basin of central Oregon. Poor preservation of perishable materials and the removal of much of the Middle Holocene deposits at the site with a backhoe during archaeological excavations carried out in the 1960s limit our knowledge of this period at the Connley Caves. Recent excavations conducted by the University of Oregon uncovered a small alcove...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Hall. Eric Bartelink. Julia Prince-Buitenhuys.

This study used stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis to evaluate dietary variation among 30 adult individuals from a commingled assemblage recovered at Point San Jose (now Fort Mason), California (1863-1903). These remains comprise mostly middle-aged adults, both male and female, and two or more ancestral groups. The assemblage was recovered from a medical waste pit with evidence of anatomical dissection, suggesting that these individuals were likely of low socioeconomic status. Right...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexis Mantha.

During the Late Intermediate Period (1000-1450 C.E.), the inhabitants of the Rapayán region in the Peruvian central Andes created a complex landscape for the dead. These were disposed of in natural caves along cliffsides surrounding residential sites as well as in a variety of above-ground mausoleums constructed at highly visible locations. In this paper, I develop a typology of sepulchres and analyze their spatial patterning. Building on ethnographic and ethnohistorical material, I argue that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Silvia Tomaskova. Muzi Msimanga.

Our 2017 fieldwork in the Northern Cape, South Africa presented us with a dilemma: how do methods of rock art research aimed at studying image making help us understand petroglyphs that may not be "images". The site Wildebeest Kuil near Kimberley, Northern Cape has two discrete areas of engravings: an area covered with distinct images of animals, humans, "geometric patterns" (80% of engravings), and a second adjacent area covered with peckings and stone modifications that do not easily translate...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Allison Mann. Susanna Sabin. Kirsten Ziesemer. Kirsten Bos. Christina Warinner.

Ancient DNA (aDNA) studies of preserved microbiomes from dental calculus and paleofeces shed light on the evolution of these complex microbial communities, as well as both human health and behavior in the past. Despite recent advances in the recovery and authentication of aDNA, environmental contamination and inconsistent molecular preservation remains a continuous concern. Recent studies suggest that dental calculus may provide a better preservation environment for DNA than other archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Deidre Whitmore. Willeke Wendrich.

Archaeological data are a form of at-risk cultural heritage, because they are the only record of an excavation. As a research community that deals with often irreplaceable datasets and continuing threats to records and sources, archaeologists regularly reuse data, despite these datasets frequently being locked in printed tables and appendices. DIG, the Digital Information Gateway from the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, aims to facilitate reuse by publishing research data within the...