Pushing the Envelope, Chasing Stone Age Sailors and Early Agriculture: Papers in Honor of the Career of Alan H. Simmons

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Pushing the Envelope, Chasing Stone Age Sailors and Early Agriculture: Papers in Honor of the Career of Alan H. Simmons," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This symposium honors the career of Dr. Alan H. Simmons and his scholarly contributions to the studies of the origins and consequences of agriculture, arid lands adaptations, lithic analysis, and island colonization with geographic foci in the American Southwest, mainland Near East, and Cyprus. Simmons began his career working on projects in North America, Lebanon, and Israel, and went on to run field projects in numerous places around the world including Egypt, Jordan, Cyprus, Israel, Nevada, and Colorado. In addition, Dr. Simmons helped build a community of North American scholars who work on Cyprus. Along the way, Dr. Simmons has been an incredible friend, mentor, and colleague to people all around the world. This session honors Dr. Simmons’ dynamic career by bringing together papers from former and current students and colleagues which cover a range of topics. The diverse temporal and geographic contexts covered by these papers highlights the broad impact Dr. Simmons has had on the careers of so many archaeologists and scholars over the last several decades.

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-14 of 14)

  • Documents (14)

Documents
  • Becoming Cypriot: Identity Formation, Negotiation and Renegotiation on Bronze Age Cyprus (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Osterholtz.

    This is an abstract from the "Pushing the Envelope, Chasing Stone Age Sailors and Early Agriculture: Papers in Honor of the Career of Alan H. Simmons" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Work on Cypriot identity has a long history, beginning with the identification of the first Cypriots during the Neolithic. This presentation continues on in the direction begun by Alan Simmons at Ais Giorkis of examining physical remains to understand what it meant to...

  • Characteristics of an Upland Cypro-PPNB Ground Stone Assemblage (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Renee Kolvet.

    This is an abstract from the "Pushing the Envelope, Chasing Stone Age Sailors and Early Agriculture: Papers in Honor of the Career of Alan H. Simmons" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The diverse ground stone assemblage at Ais Giorkis in western Cyrpus is comprised of tools typically associated with early Neolithic sites. Certain tool categories however, appear to be underrepresented. The dearth of grinding slabs, querns, large mortars, and...

  • Filling the Envelope: a History of Archaeobotanical Research in Cyprus (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Leilani Lucas.

    This is an abstract from the "Pushing the Envelope, Chasing Stone Age Sailors and Early Agriculture: Papers in Honor of the Career of Alan H. Simmons" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since the first experiments with the method of flotation in 1962, the sub-discipline of archaeobotany (paleoethnobotany) has developed and revolutionized our understanding of the origins and spread of agricultural systems worldwide. The history of modern...

  • Hippos, Cows and CAARI: Alan Simmons’ impact on Cypriot Archaeology (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Davis.

    This is an abstract from the "Pushing the Envelope, Chasing Stone Age Sailors and Early Agriculture: Papers in Honor of the Career of Alan H. Simmons" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. When Alan Simmons first arrived on Cyprus in 1985, the Cypriot Neolithic was considered a poorly understood and uninteresting backwater lagging behind the developments of the Levant mainland. IN the mid-1908s, The Khirokitia Culture (KC) was thought to be the first...

  • Landscape and Super-Regional Scale Interaction within the Aceramic Neolithic of Cyprus (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Katelyn DiBenedetto. Levi Keach.

    This is an abstract from the "Pushing the Envelope, Chasing Stone Age Sailors and Early Agriculture: Papers in Honor of the Career of Alan H. Simmons" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the course of Dr. Alan Simmons’ career, his work has challenged us to reconsider the Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN) time and time again. His early work on subsistence among the PPNB peoples of the Negev helped researchers to consider a PPNB without farming or...

  • Maize Pollen but No Hippos: Alan Simmons' Contributions to our understanding of the Adoption of Agriculture in the U.S. Southwest (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara Roth.

    This is an abstract from the "Pushing the Envelope, Chasing Stone Age Sailors and Early Agriculture: Papers in Honor of the Career of Alan H. Simmons" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1984 in a remote portion of northwest New Mexico, maize pollen was recovered from an Archaic-period hearth. Alan Simmons’ recovery of early maize pollen at a dune site in the Chaco region precipitated a controversy that lasted for over a decade. In the end these...

  • Neolithic Group Sizes – Further Thoughts (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Nigel Goring-Morris. Anna Belfer-Cohen.

    This is an abstract from the "Pushing the Envelope, Chasing Stone Age Sailors and Early Agriculture: Papers in Honor of the Career of Alan H. Simmons" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The dominant paradigm concerning group size is frequently couched in terms of the "social brain hypothesis" (Dunbar 1998). On the other hand ethnographic evidence (Hill et al. 2014) posits much higher interaction rates amongst individuals than those based solely upon...

  • Neolithic Tales from the Eastern Mediterranean Basin: A Graduate Student’s Experience under Dr. Alan H. Simmons at the University of Nevada Las Vegas in the 1990s (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jason Cooper.

    This is an abstract from the "Pushing the Envelope, Chasing Stone Age Sailors and Early Agriculture: Papers in Honor of the Career of Alan H. Simmons" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Las Vegas Valley in southern Nevada experienced unprecedented growth in the 1990's. The University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) was not immune to this progress and as a result began to attract the attention of top researchers, professors, and graduate students out...

  • The Old Stone Age in the Shammakh-to-Ayl Archaeological Survey Area, west-central Jordan (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Geoffrey Clark.

    This is an abstract from the "Pushing the Envelope, Chasing Stone Age Sailors and Early Agriculture: Papers in Honor of the Career of Alan H. Simmons" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Chipped stone artifacts are nearly ubiquitous throughout the Middle East, and Jordan is no exception. Virtually indestructible, they testify to a human presence that extends back as far as 1.5 million years. They are commonly found on the deflated uplands of the...

  • The Road More Traveled: ‘Ain Ghazal and the Peopling of the Black Desert (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Gary Rollefson.

    This is an abstract from the "Pushing the Envelope, Chasing Stone Age Sailors and Early Agriculture: Papers in Honor of the Career of Alan H. Simmons" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The late Pleistocene and early Holocene Neolithic connections over the maritime routes from the eastern Mediterranean shores to Cyprus have been fruitfully investigated, and those links clearly involved more than the simple movement of ideas. Another development in the...

  • Signs of Shared Identity: Neolithic Incised Stones in Cyprus and Beyond (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew McCarthy.

    This is an abstract from the "Pushing the Envelope, Chasing Stone Age Sailors and Early Agriculture: Papers in Honor of the Career of Alan H. Simmons" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Enigmatic incised stones dating to the Aceramic and early Ceramic Neolithic periods indicate an element of persistent shared material culture between Cyprus and the Levant in spite of cultural trajectories and material culture assemblages that were beginning to diverge...

  • Simmons at DRI: Years of Famine and Triumph (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only David Rhode.

    This is an abstract from the "Pushing the Envelope, Chasing Stone Age Sailors and Early Agriculture: Papers in Honor of the Career of Alan H. Simmons" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Prior to his long and distinguished professorial career at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, Alan Simmons spent eight years in Reno at the Desert Research Institute (DRI), an independent soft-money component of Nevada’s university system. For a young Near Eastern...

  • Stop the Press!!!: Settlement Hierarchies in the Early Pre-Pottery Neolithic? Not… (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Ian Kuijt.

    This is an abstract from the "Pushing the Envelope, Chasing Stone Age Sailors and Early Agriculture: Papers in Honor of the Career of Alan H. Simmons" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists, as with historians, search for patterning, commonalities and order as we seek to explain past human settlement systems. As landscape archaeologists our attempt to reconstruct settlement systems involves connecting the remains of human behavior,...

  • The World as His Oyster: Our Journey with Alan Simmons (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Sharon Debowski. David Doyel.

    This is an abstract from the "Pushing the Envelope, Chasing Stone Age Sailors and Early Agriculture: Papers in Honor of the Career of Alan H. Simmons" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Our journey with Alan Simmons began in Tucson, Arizona as graduate students at different institutions working for the Arizona State Museum. Through time we grew together personally and professionally and maintained contact even though often separated by space. Alan...