Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

DOCUMENT Citation Only April Beisaw. Jayne-Leigh Thomas. Krystiana L. Krupa.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) is 30 years old, and the generation that opposed its passage is now approaching (or past) retirement age. For professionals that succeed them, repatriation has always been both legal and ethical practice and they must confront legacies of mentors/predecessors who found ways to avoid the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Blanca Maldonado.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Charcoal production along the region known as Bishopric of Michoacan, which included the modern states of Michoacan and Guanajuato, as well as parts of Jalisco, Colima, Guerrero, and San Luis Potosí, in Mexico, has changed very little since the arrival of the Europeans. The expansion of this traditional craft is linked to the development of the colonial mining...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristen Pearson.

This is an abstract from the "New Directions in Mongolian Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Mongolia, ethnoarchaeological methods have been applied to questions of mobility, spatial organization, site formation, and animal husbandry practices, among others. An area that remains to be explored is the application of ethnoarchaeological methods to the study of craft production, particularly as out relates to distinctive local resources,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Whitley.

This is an abstract from the "From the Plains to the Plateau: Papers in Honor of James D. Keyser" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Salinan Tribe occupied territory extending from the California’s Salinas Valley across the Santa Lucia/Central Coast Ranges to the Pacific coast. Although poorly known, they created a small but important corpus of rock paintings. Even less well-known is the ethnographic record on these pictographs. This includes a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joshua Duncan. Todd Ahlman.

This is an abstract from the "NSF REU Site: Exploring Globalization through Archaeology 2019–2020 Session, St. Eustatius, Dutch Caribbean" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Dutch Caribbean island of St. Eustatius (Statia) was a free port for much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries where the forces of globalization, such as people, resources, commodities, and ideas moved unceasingly, altering the world as it was and pushing it closer...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Macy Ricketts. Naomi Ward. Todd Surovell. Maddie Mackie.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent studies of microbial communities in terrestrial environments have shown that an input of environmental "triggers" within soil substrate can activate dormant soil microorganisms. Additionally, deep within marine coal deposits, it has been discovered that forest soil microbes thrive, despite their oceanic surroundings. However, terrestrial microbial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sadie Friend. Ashley McKeown. Emilie Wiedenmeyer.

This is an abstract from the "NSF REU Site: Exploring Globalization through Archaeology 2019–2020 Session, St. Eustatius, Dutch Caribbean" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. To uncover details of past people’s day to day life, bioarchaeologists have attempted to reconstruct possible activity patterns by examining changes that occur at musculoskeletal markers, called entheseal sites (ES). While there is general agreement about the overall effect of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Fedick. Louis Santiago.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Far from being limited to maize, beans, and squash, the ethnographic Maya are known to make use of 497 species of food plants indigenous to the Maya Lowlands. This study presents initial results of determining “food values” based on nutritional content for these plant species, and the methods used to determine the values. The results have significant...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kurt Wilson. Daniel Contreras. Joan Coltrain. D. Craig Young. Brian Codding.

This is an abstract from the "People, Climate, and Proxies in Holocene Western North America" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological and paleoclimatological research increasingly reveal long-term impacts of past climate on human subsistence, settlement, and demography, yet positive results are debated and the underlying dynamics structuring these correlations remain questioned. Coupling a comprehensive dataset of radiocarbon-dated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Patton. M. Gabriel Hrynick. Arthur Anderson.

This is an abstract from the "Hearth and Home in the Indigenous Northeast" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper we consider the temporal relationships between dwellings and shell-bearing deposits at the Reversing Falls site in the Maine-Maritimes region of the far Northeast. Shell middens are multitemporal, comprised of the archaeological signatures of historical processes that took place over vastly different durations. They are also...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steven Rospopo. Linda Wheelbarger.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Point Site, LA 8619, is located along the San Juan River in San Juan County, New Mexico. LA 8619 is a multicomponent site within the Point Community of the Middle San Juan Tradition. Based upon preliminary ceramic analysis, the occupation at the Point Pueblo dates from the AD 900s to abandonment in AD 1300, by Totah, Chaco, and Mesa Verde cultural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Seren Griffiths. Ben Edwards. Tom Higham. Julian Thomas.

This is an abstract from the "Constructing Chronologies I: Stratification and Correlation" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeology, at its broadest, constitutes a specific set of practices utilizing material culture to create meaningful narratives. Central to this is our discipline’s relationships with time. This paper will discuss the "time dimensions" and ways archaeological narratives are structured. We suggest that archaeologists need to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justine Shaw. Thania Ibarra Narvaez.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Following a peak in construction activity during the Terminal Classic, most of the 105 sites documented in the Cochuah Region in the central Yucatan Peninsula were abandoned with only a fraction boasting minor Postclassic activity in the form of small shrines and temples. However, at a number of settlements, a much-reduced population continued during a newly...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kaley Tucker. Lisbeth Louderback. Erick Robinson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the Green River Basin of Wyoming, archaeological sites dating from the Early Archaic to Late Prehistoric are often found associated with or adjacent to dense patches of *Cymopterus bulbosus, a nutritious geophyte that would have been an important food source for prehistoric humans living in the region. Experimental data have shown that the caloric return...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Collins. Ayanda Mdludlu. Jayne Wilkins. April Nowell. Christopher Ames.

This is an abstract from the "From Veld to Coast: Diverse Landscape Use by Hunter-Gatherers in Southern Africa from the Late Pleistocene to the Holocene" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Humans are social beings and being able to track social interactions and relationships across space and through time is a major focus of both anthropological and archaeological research. Within archaeology, the scale and intensity of social interactions has been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lucas Martindale Johnson. Adrian Chase.

This is an abstract from the "The Urban Question: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Investigating the Ancient Mesoamerican City" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Household and city scales are typical units of archaeological analysis at Maya sites. More recent models of urban space include intermediate scales referred to as “neighborhoods” that encompass clusters of households and “districts” that effectively integrate neighborhoods. Using flaked stone...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Walden. Michael Biggie. Victoria Izzo. Julie Hoggarth. Rafael Guerra.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Traditionally anthropologists envisioned ritual as playing a functional role in the formation and ongoing cohesion of ancient complex societies. More recent perspectives consider ritual to represent a powerful tool of resistance, and therefore pivotal not just to the integration, but also the disintegration of polities. Situations in which a higher order...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Myles Miller.

This is an abstract from the "Constructing Chronologies II: The Big Picture with Bayes and Beyond" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over 4,000 radiocarbon age estimates are used to examine temporal trends in the Jornada region of the American Southwest between 4500 and 400 BP. Chronometric analysis reveals changing frequencies in architectural forms, technologies, and subsistence, a series of punctuated demographic trajectories and regional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Weston McCool.

This is an abstract from the "Life Is Risky: Human Behavioral Ecological Approaches to Variable Outcomes " session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Resource procurement and the avoidance of interpersonal violence are critical features of human survival strategies. Yet these features are often competing, requiring individuals to make trade-offs in order to maximize fitness. Recent decades of research have shown violence to be a pervasive, albeit variable,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lorena González.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Multidisciplinary Investigations in the Mirador Basin, Guatemala" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. El Grupo Saraguate, está localizado sobre la segunda plataforma del Complejo La Danta que había sido fechado para el Clásico Tardío 600-900 dC. El Grupo Saraguate se caracteriza por contar por varios edificios de baja altura, que se distribuyen en aglutinadas plazas y patios, la presencia de entierros, y piedras de...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Catalina Barrientos Pérez.

This is an abstract from the "Cholula to Chachoapan: Celebrating the Career of Michael Lind" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Se reportan las excavaciones realizadas en los terrenos de la UDLAP en los años 1968 y 1979 a 1 km al este de la Gran Pirámide de Cholula. En 1968 se localizó un parte de un complejo habitacional y se identificaron diferentes áreas de actividades, entre ellas un horno para la producción de cerámica. En 1979, a 30 m al este...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Piotr T. Bojakowski. Evander E. Broekman.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Applying the Power of Partnerships to the Search for America's Missing in Action", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In the context of underwater forensic archaeology, addressing WWII U.S. Military losses require a complex research process, while the end goal is to recover and identify the remains of unaccounted for individuals, or to otherwise resolve their fate. This project showcases research and excavation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Lassen. Brittany S. McClain. Tomothy Griffith.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Crane Dune site (41CR61) was identified by AmaTerra archaeologists during a survey for the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) prior to widening Highway 385 in Crane County, Texas. The site consists of at least two components (Late Prehistoric and Late Archaic) centered on stabilized sand dunes. The cultural occupations span a 40-50 cm thick dark...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michelle Eusebio.

This is an abstract from the "Thinking about Eating: Theorizing Foodways in Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The cultural aspects of science and technology—the science, culture, and art in everyday life—can be demonstrated through food and foodways. Foodways is the chaîne opératoire of what happens to food and associated materials from their acquisition until their discard. It is also a series of cultural formation processes, where...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kari Goold. Daniel Perez.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ground stone use-wear analyses in the North American Southwest have been increasingly pursued through both collection studies and experimental approaches since at least the 1980s. Although analyses of prehistoric ground stone are common throughout all portions of the North American Southwest, experimental approaches to understanding ground stone technology in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Blank. Sarah K. Gilleland. Matt Chmura.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In recent years, 3D modeling has become a more common method for evaluating archaeological materials, as it is a non-destructive method to test how artifacts will handle stress. 3D modelling has advantages over testing of physical artifacts because the exact same artifact can be reused multiple times to test different hypotheses. However, 3D models must be...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Corinne Springer. Shannon Boomgarden.

This is an abstract from the "Experimental Archaeology in Range Creek Canyon, Utah" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological investigations in Range Creek Canyon, in east-central Utah, have led to the identification of 500 prehistoric sites. The majority of sites that can be affiliated are linked to the Fremont Culture, semi-sedentary horticulturalists occupying the region 300–1175 CE. Sites range from long-term habitation sites, artifact...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Catherine Brun. Julien Riel-Salvatore. Claudine Gravel-Miguel. Fabio Negrino. Jamie Hodgkins.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The discovery of an Early Mesolithic (10,000–9000 cal BP) newborn buried in Arma Veirana Cave (Erli, Italy) is very important both for the rarity of prehistoric newborn burials and for the richness and diversity of its grave goods. Those are composed of 84 perforated *Columbella rustica and four perforated *Glycymeris sp. with different levels of use-wear. Our...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Murray. Scott Keohane. Andrew Zipkin.

This is an abstract from the "Human Origins Migration and Evolution Research Consortium Poster Symposium" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The heat treatment of stone for tool production represents one of the oldest technologies for transforming the material properties of a natural product to better suit human needs. The earliest evidence for such technology is the heat treatment of silcrete at the South African Middle Stone Age site Pinnacle Point...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kenneth Vernon. David Zeanah. D. Craig Young. Robert G. Elston. Brian F. Codding.

This is an abstract from the "Far West Paleoindian Archaeology: Papers from the Next Generation" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Identifying the ecological drivers of Paleoindian settlement has broad implications for a host of related behaviors, including colonization, mobility, and subsistence. Unfortunately, important proxies like spatial site patterning suffer from well-known sampling biases, most notably, taphonomic decay, opportunistic survey,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicolette Edwards.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Numerous oleaginous (oil-producing) tree species exist across tropical Africa. Indigenous populations both past and present used many of these species in a variety of ways including for fuel, cooking, medicinal, and cosmetic purposes. Current emphasis in the literature is often placed on the importance of E. guineensis (African oil palm) likely due to it being...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alicia Torres Porras. Patricia Plunket. Gabriela Uruñuela.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. La llegada de los hispanos a la ciudad sagrada de Cholula, donde peregrinos y gobernantes se congregaban para rendir homenaje a Quetzalcoatl en su recinto ceremonial, trajo consigo grandes cambios debido a la literal cimentación del catolicismo sobre dicho recinto. Para tener un acercamiento acotado a patrones de uso y consumo en una época de transición, se...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Brock.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Callejón de Huaylas is a valley in the North Central highlands of Peru located in a dynamic environment prone to environmental hazards such as glacial floods, avalanches, landslides, and seismic activity. However, the abundance of archaeological sites and long-term occupation in the Callejón de Huaylas which spans preceramic to modern times, suggests a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Lewandowski.

This is an abstract from the "Research Hot Off the Trowel in the Upper Gila and Mimbres Areas" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster presents the results of a study that uses the neutron activation analysis (NAA) dataset that has been compiled for the Mimbres region in order to conduct social network analysis (SNA) for the Classic period (AD 1000–1130). The NAA dataset for the Mimbres region identifies compositional groups and probable...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Taylor Bowden. Todd Ahlman. Ashley McKeown. Nicholas Herrmann.

This is an abstract from the "NSF REU Site: Exploring Globalization through Archaeology 2019–2020 Session, St. Eustatius, Dutch Caribbean" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Multiple isotope analyses of skeletal tissues are a useful tool for exploring lifeways of past populations. Isotopic analysis of Caribbean populations is still in its infancy, making the technique a useful tool for learning about these populations. St. Eustatius is a small island...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bryna Hull. Jelmer Eerkens. Reba Fuller.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. δ34S can be used in conjunction with δ13C and δ15N to examine if people were accessing resources from within the same local area or were seasonally mobile to exploit foods from other regions. Here we apply this stable isotopic triad to investigate mobility of hunter-gatherers from the central Sierra Nevada region. The δ13C and δ15N results demonstrate a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kendra Sirak. Jakob Sedig.

This is an abstract from the "Increasing the Accessibility of Ancient DNA within Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Preliminary research and anecdotal evidence suggest that there is an overrepresentation of male samples relative to female samples in published ancient DNA research; however, the reason behind this bias is poorly understood. In this paper, we quantify this sex bias within an ancient DNA database of 3,365 individuals for whom...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Schlanger.

This is an abstract from the "Refining Archaeological Data Collection and Management to Achieve Greater Scientific, Traditional, and Educational Values" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There may be no more vexing heritage resource issue facing public land agencies today than the management of culturally significant landscapes. The challenges begin with identification. They continue through the definition of critical values and appropriate...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Juan Melendez. Emiliano Melgar.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Maya Embedded Economies" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With the aim of exploring the economic system surrounding prestige Maya items during precolumbian times, we present research focused on greenstone mosaic masks (GMM) found in funerary precincts of high elite individuals in the Guatemalan Maya Lowlands. Through microarchaeological analyses of a select number of tesserae (n = 249) that form sections of 13...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victoria Priola.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lightweight crescent-shaped ceramics with perforations on each end are fairly common finds at Copper Age settlements in southwestern Iberia. These objects are usually assumed to be related to textile production, however, the actual function of these objects is often debated. Were these ceramic crescents, often weighing less than 100 g, heavy enough to function...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Camille Johnson. Rachel Kaufman. Cecelia Turkewitz. Rohan Walawalkar.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Following the lead of other institutions, a group of faculty and students of the Roots Commission at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, have been researching racism and inequity in the university’s history. Since 2018, the research goal has been to uncover ways in which the institution and its founders benefitted from slavery. Student researchers used...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Lentz. Brian Lane.

This is an abstract from the "Plant Exudates and Other Binders, Adhesives, and Coatings in the Americas" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Both the ancient and modern Maya have employed a broad range of plant exudates, gums, resins, and other natural products for many centuries. Numerous plant species indigenous to Mesoamerica possess bioactive compounds that have served as medicine, pesticides, fish poisons, dyes, adhesives, unguents, tanning...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sean Field. Donna Glowacki. Timothy Hovezak.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the history of Mesa Verde National Park (MVNP), the Far View community has been the focus of multiple, yet discrete, archaeological projects, from Fewkes’ excavations in the 1920s to more recent architectural documentation and stabilization in 2012. However, there are gaps in survey coverage, site forms require updating, and the community lacks an overall...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Deirdre Fulton.

This is an abstract from the "Etruscan Centralization to Medieval Marginalization: Shifts in Settlement and Mortuary Traditions at San Giuliano, Italy" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A large number of faunal remains were uncovered during the four seasons of excavation (2016–2019) at the San Giuliano Plateau (SGP), Italy. The collection consists of species that are typical to inland sites in the northern Mediterranean during the Medieval period,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maia Dedrick.

This is an abstract from the "Place-Making in Indigenous Mesoamerican Communities Past and Present" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As famously outlined by historian Nancy Farriss, mobility was an important survival strategy for Indigenous peoples of the Yucatán peninsula of Mexico throughout the colonial period. During the middle colonial period and beyond, a tension existed between mobility and emplacement, as demonstrated when entire communities...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Helina Woldekiros. Michael Harrower. Catherine D'Andrea.

This is an abstract from the "Cultivating Cities: Perspectives from the New and Old Worlds on Wild Foods, Agriculture, and Urban Subsistence Economies" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Local and long-distance trade and productive agricultural systems contributed to establishing complex socioeconomic institutions in the Horn of Africa between 800 BCE and 900 CE. Several important urban centers and towns, such as Yeha, Aksum, and Matara, emerged...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebekah Mills. Lauren Brooks. Rachel Brody. Valerie Watson. Zoe Merod.

This is an abstract from the "Female Firsts: Celebrating Archaeology’s Pioneering Women on the 101st Anniversary of the 19th Amendment " session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2018, among the top five hashtags in Ireland was #repealthe8th. On May 25, 2018, the amendment that largely banned all abortions was repealed. With this vote, many Irish women felt their voices were finally heard. With women's rights and activism at the forefront in Irish...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yuko Shiratori. Ángel González López.

This is an abstract from the "Sculpture of the Ancient Mexican Gulf Coast, Part 2" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Large-scale female terracotta sculptures were extensively produced in the Mixtequilla region of Veracruz during the Late Classic period. It is likely that numbers of these sculptures were looted and smuggled into the United States prior to the 1970 UNESCO Convention on Cultural Property. This paper focuses the female terracotta...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jamie Countryman.

This is an abstract from the "Finding Fields: Locating and Interpreting Ancient Agricultural Landscapes" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. On Mediterranean islands and coastal areas of southern Europe, extensive field systems of drystone walls, terraces, and clearance cairns are common landscape features that attest to generations of landscape modification for cultivation. Tracing the precise chronologies of these fields is perennially challenging....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Madison Crow.

This is an abstract from the "Etruscan Centralization to Medieval Marginalization: Shifts in Settlement and Mortuary Traditions at San Giuliano, Italy" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The burial of unbaptized fetuses at San Giuliano exposes friction between the institutional church and medieval Italy's laity. The church's theology of Original Sin, baptism, and salvation left young children especially vulnerable to dying unbaptized and being denied...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Kallenbach.

This is an abstract from the "Far West Paleoindian Archaeology: Papers from the Next Generation" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Plant fiber identifications were made for a subset of Oregon’s Paisley Caves cordage and netting in order to explore plant selection for fiber technologies. Fiber artifacts from this assemblage include basketry, matting, netting, cordage, and rope, with the oldest braided rope dating to ca. 12,000 years ago....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kirsten Lopez.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Strontium sourcing is a technique often used in sourcing the origin or migration patterns of animal and human remains but also used occasionally to source the growing location of plant material. While these studies are uncommon, they are not new. Here I will be presenting the eagerly awaited results of the sourcing data from Terminal Pleistocene and Early...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark McCoy. Jesse Casana. Thegn Ladefoged.

This is an abstract from the "Finding Fields: Locating and Interpreting Ancient Agricultural Landscapes" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The significance of urbanization and royal centers in the development of productive agricultural systems and state formation has been minimized in the Hawaiian Islands. Today, thanks to several key methodological advances, especially remote sensing using lidar, we are closer than ever to an integrated and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only J. M. Adovasio.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The year 2020 marks the 50th anniversary of my first publication on prehistoric basketry. Over the past half century, the field of perishable artifact analysis has evolved dramatically. Though this evolution has not resulted in a geometric increase in the number of practitioners of this still arcane specialty, it has witnessed numerous transformations and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Damien Marken. Matthew Ricker. Robert Austin.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the limiting factors to settlement aggregation in the Maya lowlands is the availability of potable water. With few perennial surface rivers and lakes, the ancient Maya collected water from rainfall for consumption. In areas with high population densities, such as Classic period cities, this required engineering the built landscape to funnel water for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kyle Woodson.

This is an abstract from the "Finding Fields: Locating and Interpreting Ancient Agricultural Landscapes" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For over a century, archaeologists have investigated the vast network of prehistoric Hohokam canal irrigation systems in the lower Salt and middle Gila River valleys in southern Arizona. However, documentation of the agricultural fields in which prehistoric farmers irrigated their crops generally was lacking until...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wetherbee Dorshow.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology in the Xingu River Basin: Long-Term Histories, Current Threats, and Future Perspectives" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper summarizes preliminary results of an AI-based analysis that identifies potential precolumbian Amazonian archaeological site locations based on the presence of clusters of a specific species of palm tree. The study uses Landsat-8, Sentinel-2, and Planet satellite imagery as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only BrieAnna Langlie. John Wilson. Jacob Frank.

This is an abstract from the "Finding Fields: Locating and Interpreting Ancient Agricultural Landscapes" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Driving through the Lake Titicaca basin of southern Peru travelers are often struck by terrace covered hillsides rising from the plain. Nearly every hillside encountered has been transformed from steep faced rocky hillsides into arable land. These ancient fields were constructed and farmed millennia ago to help...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katie McElfresh Buford. Billie Follensbee.

This is an abstract from the "Sculpture of the Ancient Mexican Gulf Coast, Part 1" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Among the most diagnostic sculptures made by the Gulf Coast Olmec is the tabletop altar/throne. This sculpture is best known for its most common features: a wide, heavy cornice; a generally rectangular structure; and often, a niche in the front. Given the tabletop form, scholars originally interpreted these sculptures as altars, but...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine A. Hastorf. Melanie Miller.

This is an abstract from the "Thinking about Eating: Theorizing Foodways in Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological studies of ancient foodways focus on understanding subsistence practices in terms of the movement of species over space and time, human/plant/animal strategies, ecological transformations, periods of abundance/famine, economics, and politics. The values that foods are imbued with, the meaning and significance they...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Harkness.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Point of Pines Pueblo is a key site for understanding the Kayenta migration to the Mogollon and how communities adapt or maintain practices while experiencing changing demographics. This study analyzes practices in corrugated jar production before, during, and after the migration in the Point of Pines area. Exposed coils on corrugated jars allows us to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephanie Bergman. Kelsey, M. Reese. Anastasia Steffen. Nicholas, L. Jarman.

This is an abstract from the "Beyond Triage: Prioritizing Responses to Climate Change Impacts on Archaeological Resources" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Jemez Mountains in north-central New Mexico have experienced devastating wildfires due to the intersection of climate change and twentieth-century forest management practices. In the past decade 63% of the Valles Caldera National Preserve and 50% of recorded archaeological sites have been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Schmader.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The immense expedition into the American Southwest led by Francisco Vázquez de Coronado from 1540 to 1542 was the first contact from outsiders experienced by many indigenous groups of the region. Coronado's entourage included Europeans from several countries, North Africans, Blacks, and Native soldiers from numerous Mexican ethnic groups. Well over 2,500...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricio De Souza. Isabel Cartajena. Rodrigo Riquelme. Eugenia De Porras. Boris Santander.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The early peopling of the Atacama Desert coincided with the Central Andean Pluvial Event II (CAPE II), an extensive pluvial event during the Late Pleistocene-Early Holocene (13,800–8500 cal yr BP). A large number of early human archaeological sites from this period have been found along the borders of the Imilac and Punta Negra (24.5° S) high altitude basins...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrea Vianello.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In a world changed by COVID-19, it is valuable to look at past reactions to epidemics and learn from them. Modern economies and political systems are designed with the assumption that such events cannot happen. The real risks in food and staples production and distribution in America and Europe or the inability to protect the work force for just a few months...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alessandra Pecci. Agustin Ortiz. Luis Barba. Natalia Moragas.

This is an abstract from the "Teotihuacan: Multidisciplinary Research on Mesoamerica's Classic Metropolis" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the years 2017–2020, the UNAM and the University of Barcelona carried out an international and interdisciplinary project in the N2E1 and N2E2 quadrants of Millon’s map at Teotihuacan (Barrio del Río San Juan). This very central location had not been deeply investigated until then. The project aimed to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only José Luis Punzo Díaz. Jakob Sedig. Alejandro Valdes Herrera. David Reich.

This is an abstract from the "Increasing the Accessibility of Ancient DNA within Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Genomic analytical techniques have matured enough to address longstanding problems about the interactions and migrations of ancient populations inhabiting the north and west border of Mesoamerica, as well with populations from the US Southwest. With this in mind, we have established a collaborative, binational project...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Dombrosky.

This is an abstract from the "Animal Bones to Human Behavior" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Small numbers of fish remains are frequently recovered from Pueblo IV (AD 1350–1600) sites in the Middle Rio Grande basin of central New Mexico, but they are rare during earlier time periods. Increased aquatic habitat quality during this time could have increased fish body size and the energy obtained by Ancestral Puebloan fishers could have been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Annick J. E. Daneels.

This is an abstract from the "Sculpture of the Ancient Mexican Gulf Coast, Part 2" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The god Xipe Totec has been mostly analyzed from Postclassic evidence (Toltec and Aztec). He is recognized by the representations of a person wearing the skin of a flayed victim or the victim himself. While both types of figures appear in several regions of Mesoamerica, their contexts vary. In this paper I will review Classic and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edgar Carpio.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents the preliminary data from a study that has been carried out on a considerable collection of flint artifacts from Salinas de los Nueve Cerros, Guatemala. These were uncovered during the excavations of the site over eight field seasons. Flint is a local resource in Salinas and it was widely used to produce many objects mainly used as cutting...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michaelyn Harle. Laura Smith. Suzanne Fisher. Heather Heart.

This is an abstract from the "Female Firsts: Celebrating Archaeology’s Pioneering Women on the 101st Anniversary of the 19th Amendment " session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the pioneers of dendrochronology, Florence Hawley was employed by Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in the 1930s during the archaeological excavations that were conducted prior to impoundment of Norris Reservoir. Hawley’s work was one of the earliest attempts at establishing a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Logan. Sophie Reilly.

This is an abstract from the "Thinking about Eating: Theorizing Foodways in Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Why do we do food archaeology, and what can we use it for? In the last few decades, social archaeology has strongly shaped approaches to food in the past, directing our attention to how food is used to create social boundaries and values. More than ever before, archaeology is now facing the challenge of making ourselves relevant...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily McKenzie.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past few decades, archaeologists have embraced the compositional and elemental analysis of archaeological materials—primarily ceramic, metallic, and lithic objects—drawing new conclusions about the circumstances surrounding their production, such as the geographic origins of their raw components or the processes by which they were made. To explore the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephanie Lozano.

This is an abstract from the "Teotihuacan: Multidisciplinary Research on Mesoamerica's Classic Metropolis" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Foreign influence was a major component at Teotihuacan from very early on and throughout Teotihuacan’s history. Extensive archaeological research notes Teotihuacan as a religious center and the largest Classic Mesoamerican city with multiethnic apartment compounds and neighborhoods. However, the impact of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katharine Kolpan. Nicholas Passalacqua.

This is an abstract from the "Applying the Power of Partnerships to the Search for America's Missing in Action" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation will discuss search and recovery efforts concerning an isolated, World War II-era burial from the Federal Republic of Germany. This was a project partnership between the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) and Western Carolina University (WCU), coordinated between DPAA, WCU, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Margotta.

This is an abstract from the "Research Hot Off the Trowel in the Upper Gila and Mimbres Areas" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The national forests of the United States represent a highly contested cultural space, where narratives of archaeological heritage, stewardship, wilderness, and more intersect and clash in the present day. For two previous field seasons (2018 and 2019) the Upper Gila Preservation Archaeology (UGPA) field school, run jointly...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Luis Morett-Alatorre. Joaquín Arroyo-Cabrales. Xolotl Morett-Muñoz.

This is an abstract from the "Current Zooarchaeology: New and Ongoing Approaches" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Based on the findings of extinct animal remains in Tocuila, Municipality of Texcoco, State of Mexico, in 1996, a study of a large Late Pleistocene deposit was initiated, excavating an initial unit (UE1), 30 m2 and 3.35 m depth, located on a deltoic paleochannel in the old lacustrine riverbank, which eventually was filled up by a series...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Morgan Schmidt. Jennifer Watling. Sam Goldberg. Taylor Perron. Afukaka Kuikuro.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology in the Xingu River Basin: Long-Term Histories, Current Threats, and Future Perspectives" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent research in the Upper Xingu carried out in partnership with the indigenous Kuikuro community (Associação Indígena Kuikuro do Alto Xingu; AIKAX) has revealed that modified soils associated with archaeological remains and possibly with ancient cultivation areas may be much more...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caitlin Davis.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Salinas La Blanca, located within the coastal estuary of the Soconusco region of Guatemala, was occupied from the Early to Middle Formative periods. This was a period of considerable cultural change, as Olmec influence on the Pacific Coast waned and regional centers developed more centralized power. This paper presents the results of a chemical compositional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Pollack. Bruce Manzano. Gwynn Henderson. Thomas Royster. Moriah Raleigh.

This is an abstract from the "Birds in Archaeology: New Approaches to Understanding the Diverse Roles of Birds in the Past" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Wild turkeys (*Meleagris gallopavo silvestris) were an important component in the diet of the middle Ohio Valley’s Fort Ancient farming cultures from AD 1000 to 1750. Wild turkeys often accounted for about 4% of the meat consumed by village residents. Our research into Fort Ancient wild turkey...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nathan Klembara.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite a long history in the philosophy of the science that has defended the gendered, subjective, and value-laden nature of knowledge production, few (if any) inroads have been made into the formulation of an explicitly queer philosophy of science. In this paper, I argue that archaeologists are uniquely situated to develop such a queer philosophy of science....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ventura Pérez.

This is an abstract from the "Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Debra L. Martin" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Our scientific perspectives of the world are bound to moments of clarity. Clarity comes from the realization that the questions worth asking are the ones that illuminate the human experience while understanding positionality and privilege in the exploration of those questions. As an MA student, Dr. Martin encouraged me to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shannon McPherron.

This is an abstract from the "Inference in Paleoarchaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Insights into flake formation have come from fracture mechanics, controlled experiments, replication studies, and attribute analysis of lithic assemblages. Fracture mechanics would seem to offer great potential for offering insights into how the variables that knappers manipulate actually change flaking outcomes, and its strength is that it is based on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Begley.

This is an abstract from the "Advances and New Perspectives in the Isthmo-Colombian Area" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Throughout their history, the polities in eastern Honduras existed along a frontier, interacting with larger, powerful groups from a different cultural tradition to the west and with more closely related people to the south. During the period between 500 and 1200 CE, eastern Honduran groups adopted several significant elements...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Keri Porter. Kaelyn Olson. Andrea Lopez.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Photogrammetry is a technique that creates a 3D model from 2D images. Photogrammetry is currently being used in archaeology to create models of artifacts, structures, excavation profiles, and burials with almost unlimited applications. Although the use of proprietary software may be related to general user-friendliness and accessibility, the cost can still be...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Frank Reilly.

This is an abstract from the "Art Style as a Communicative Tool in Archaeological Research" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. I suggest that at some point in the development of the Braden art style that the 3D flint-clay statuettes (AD 1100–1175) take the place of the earlier Braden-style paintings (AD 900–1000) found in caves and rockshelters, while temples (BBB Motor Site) that house the flint-clay statuettes substitute for the caves that housed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tiffany Fryer.

This is an abstract from the "The Conceptual and Ethical Limits of Heritage in Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past two decades, the Critical Heritage Studies Movement (CHSM) has spurred a sea change in archaeological, anthropological, and historical approaches to the study of heritage. CHSM scholars interrogated the underlying assumptions of the growing heritage industry, including how places and objects designated as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Luis Muro.

This is an abstract from the "Them and Us: Transmission and Cultural Dynamism in the North of Peru between AD 250 and 950: A Vision since the Recent Northern Investigations" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Colonialist perspectives of territorial expansion envision the political entities as spatially defined by discrete frontier boundaries. Under this approach, the distribution of objects a given cultural style parallels the area of influence of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barry Rolett.

This is an abstract from the "Constructing Chronologies I: Stratification and Correlation" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Marquesas Islands comprise part of East Polynesia, a culture area that also includes Hawai'i, New Zealand, and Tahiti. Calcareous sand dunes are rare in the Marquesas but play an outsized role in Polynesian archaeology. Dune sites yield remarkably rich evidence of human settlement and the preservation of organic remains is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Woollett. Héloïse Barbel.

This is an abstract from the "Social Archaeology in the North and North Atlantic (SANNA 3.0): Investigating the Social Lives of Northern Things" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological studies have conventionally regarded Inuit relationships to animals in terms of subsistence and food-getting, from seasonality and hunting strategies to calories of meat, fat, and marrow consumed. Inuit oral traditions and ethnographic sources, however, offer...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alex Garcia-Putnam. Christine Halling. Ryan Seidemann.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Charity Hospital, which operated from the eighteenth century until Hurricane Katrina in 2005, served New Orleans’s poorest citizens. During the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the remains of many individuals who died at the hospital were used for medical dissection and autopsy. A collection of commingled skeletal remains associated with one of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Satoru Murata. Adam Kaeding.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology and the History of Human-Environment Interaction in the Lower Belize River Watershed" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the primary objectives of the Belize River East Archaeology (BREA) project has been to identify and document archaeological sites in a relatively understudied part of north-central Belize that encompasses the lower Belize River Watershed. In this area, which measures roughly 6,000...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brendan Weaver. Lizette Muñoz. Karen Durand.

This is an abstract from the "Approaches to the Archaeology of Health: Sewers, Snakebites, and Skeletons" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The nineteenth century was a dynamic period for hacienda workers on the south coast of Peru. Once Jesuit vineyards with two of the largest enslaved Afro-descended populations in rural coastal Peru, the haciendas of San José and San Javier and their annexes in Nasca’s Ingenio Valley underwent dramatic changes with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashuni Emmanuel Romero Butrón.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The municipality of Puerto Morelos is located in northern Quintana Roo, Mexico. Beginning in the past century, and continuing through present day, researches have reported numerous archaeological sites in this region. However, many of them do not have a precise location, and we do not know about their conservation status. As a result of this issue and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Veronica Ikeshoji-Orlati.

This is an abstract from the "Etruscan Centralization to Medieval Marginalization: Shifts in Settlement and Mortuary Traditions at San Giuliano, Italy" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The San Giuliano necropolis, located within the Marturanum Regional Park in northern Lazio, Italy, is well-known for its hundreds of Villanovan and Etruscan graves. As part of our mission to understand the patterns of human habitation at the site from the ninth...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandra Covert.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Wupatki Pueblo has a high concentration of prehistoric shell artifacts. Through a literature review, analysis, and spatial analysis, this research project examined the prehistoric shell artifacts from Wupatki Pueblo. This research project determined trade routes of shell to Wupatki Pueblo from the coast of California, Gulf of California, and Gulf of Mexico....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexander Smith.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Frost Town Archaeology (FTA) is a historical archaeological project through SUNY Brockport and the Rochester Museum and Science Center that explores the site of Frost Town, a once thriving logging area that was gradually abandoned during the early 20th century. FTA examines the environmental devastation of the Euro-American presence in the Finger Lakes region,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nelda Issa Marengo. José Osorio León. Francisco Pérez Ruíz.

This is an abstract from the "New Perspectives on Ritual Violence and Related Human Body Treatments in Ancient Mesoamerica" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human skeletal assemblages from Chichen Itza and its surrounding regions are complex, which makes Chichen Itza a prime location to study mortuary practices. The complexity stems most likely from Chichen Itza’s multicultural relationships with other groups not only within the Yucatán Peninsula...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marisol Gama-Vooz.

This is an abstract from the "The Big Bend Complex: Landscapes of History" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the 1900s a group of adventurous entrepreneurs resumed mining activities that had been abandoned a decade prior in the Big Bend region. The idea this time was to utilize new mining technologies. Overcoming long distances, rugged terrain, and international and cultural borders, an expensive and new mineral transport system known as an aerial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Rodning. Stephen Acabado.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dominant historical narratives have favored interpretations that conquered groups yielded to the political and economic might of colonizing powers. Recent models in archaeology, however, emphasize that indigenous responses to colonialism are more complex than succumbing or capitulating to colonial and imperial hegemony, and that indigenous peoples...