SAA 2021: General Sessions

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Semon.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The North American Archaeology Collection at the American Museum of Natural History contains more than 4,000 cataloged objects from New York City. These accessions were acquired or donated to the museum between 1869 and 2017. In this poster, I examine these legacy collections by exploring the materials and artifact types collected from the area. In addition, I...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Witmore.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. What difference does an archaeological approach make to a period saturated by historical documents, photographic archives, and recordings of eyewitness accounts? Since 2011 a group of archaeologists have undertaken fieldwork at a World War II prisoner of war camp at Sværholt in Norway’s far north. The labor camp for Soviet prisoners was established in 1942 as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sophie Reilly. Andrew Roddick.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists track the social, political, and economic dynamics of the ancient Lake Titicaca basin through the circulation of people and things. Plant things, in particular, reveal food choices, quotidian diets and special meals, and broader trade relations before and after the settling of the urban center of Tiwanaku. In this paper, we discuss...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kamen Boyadzhiev.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The prehistoric tell at Yunatsite in the Maritsa River valley (Southern Bulgaria) is among the biggest tell sites in the Balkans. During large-scale excavations a medieval cemetery, fortification from the Roman period, and layers from the Iron Аge, Early Bronze Age and Chalcolithic have been revealed. The studies in the last years have concentrated on the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dominica Stricklin.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study applies isotopic analyses of carbon (ẟ13Ccoll) and nitrogen (ẟ15Ncoll) from bone collagen, with carbon (ẟ13Cap), oxygen (ẟ18O), and strontium (87Sr/86Sr) to faunal remains excavated from a peri-abandonment deposit at the ancient Maya site of Xunantunich during the Terminal Classic period. Peri-abandonment deposits represent a distinct phenomenon in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sherman Horn. Anabel Ford.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ongoing research at El Pilar—an ancient Maya city located along the Belize/Guatemala frontier—has documented hundreds of landscape-modification features in the area surrounding the monumental civic center. The complexity and variety of these features, which include terraces, berms, quarries, check-dams, and aguadas, indicate the sophistication of Maya...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacob Jepsen.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ephemeral nature of many Fremont habitation sites has made site identification extremely difficult for Fremont archaeologists today. Unlike the standing and partially exposed ruins of their ancestral Puebloan neighbors, the Fremont left little evidence of their habitation across the region. Those that remain include structures now buried below the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Davenport.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study investigates the organization of production for Inka pottery at Pachacamac from several contexts throughout the site’s ceremonial core and elite residential sector. Pachacamac was a major Ychsma center on Peru’s central coast that was transformed into a major Inka provincial center around 1470 C.E. The Inka constructed a number of buildings and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lucyna Bowland. Samuel Martin. Dominique Langis-Barsetti. Joseph W. Lehner. Nicolle Hirschfeld.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Geometric morphometric-based landmark analyses have long been used as a method for quantifying the shape of biological data sets, but their utility for non-biological samples is often overlooked. The Cape Gelidonya shipwreck, dated to 1200 BCE, contained cargo consisting of over one ton of fragmentary and complete copper oxhide ingots originally classified by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kevin Gilmore. Jonathan Hedlund. Bonnie Clark.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Obsidian was technologically and symbolically important to the prehistoric inhabitants of western North America, and analysis of the small but diverse obsidian assemblage from the Bayou Gulch site (5DA265) in Colorado suggests both uses were important to the site’s inhabitants toward the end of the Late Prehistoric Period (AD 1000-1540). Chemical analysis...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Coco. Radu Iovita.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists typically define cultural areas on the basis of similarities between the types of material culture present in sites. The similarity is assessed in order of discovery, with newer sites being evaluated against older ones. Despite evidence for time-dependent site loss due to taphonomy, little attention has been paid to how this impacts...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Noa Corcoran-Tadd. Arturo Rivera Infante. Barbara Carbajal Salazar. Sarah Baitzel.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent field work in Tacna (far southern Peru) by a joint team from Princeton and Washington University in St. Louis has investigated the long-term landscape history of the Sama Valley and its desert margins. Located between the research hotspots of Moquegua and Arica, the Sama Valley has long been overlooked. At the same time, it is well positioned to offer...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angela Feak. Brian Stewart. Genevieve Dewar. John Kingston.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Stable isotopes in ratite eggshells record information about the birds’ diet during shell formation, making them valuable proxies for paleoenvironmental reconstruction. Here we present the results of carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen stable isotope analyses in ostrich (Struthio camelus australis) eggshell (OES) collected in excavation at Spitzkloof A, a rock...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julia Earle. Lina Macedo Molina.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Late Intermediate period (900–1400 CE), many communities throughout the Andean highlands built funerary towers (*chullpas) to inter the dead. The distribution of *chullpas has often been understood to materialize ethnic identity, territorial boundaries, and claims to natural resources. However, results of fieldwork carried out in the Vilcanota...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam Wiewel.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Midwest Archeological Center (National Park Service) has long been at the forefront of geophysical surveys for archeological research and heritage management in the United States. Since the Center’s pioneering efforts to showcase the practicality of geophysical methods nearly 50 years ago, our use of ground-based surveys has become indispensable for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Vincent MacMillan. Mark Varien. Grant Coffey. Steve McCormack. Daryl Crites.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Research Institute at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center partnered with Canyons of the Ancients National Monument and two private companies, Routescene Inc. and Caddis Aerial, to conduct a lidar survey of Sand Canyon Pueblo. The drone-based lidar data penetrates the dense vegetation present on the site to make a highly accurate map. This allows...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nobuyuki Ito.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. En la Costa Sur de Mesoamérica, se han descubierto numerosas estelas esculpidas. Sin embargo, solamente una docena de estas se registró dentro de un contexto arqueológico del período Preclásico. No obstante, en esta región se localizan dos sitios que poseen estelas con las fechas calendáricas más tempranas del Bak’tun 7, como Chiapa de Corzo y El Baúl,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jay Silverstein. Robert Littman. AbdelRahman Medhat.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient sources reference the quality and importance of perfume manufactured in the Mendesian nome through the periods of Hellenistic and Roman control of Egypt. Archaeological evidence has identified areas of manufacture for Greek-style lekythoi, Roman Unguentaria, and possibly a location to produce incense at the site of Tell Timai that dates to the period...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kenneth Hladek. Molly Herron.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research presents the macroscopic and microscopic attributes of hair and feathers from the artifact assemblage of North Fork Cave #1, better known as Mummy Cave (48PA201) in Park County, Wyoming. The results of this research enable us to better understand the mammalian and avian resources exploited during the Archaic and Prehistoric periods in the Greater...

DOCUMENT Citation Only 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. While there are several commonly tracked non-metric and pathological features of the temporal bone, rarely are they found on the internal petrous portion. In this case study, the bilateral presentation of perforations located on the internal, superior aspect of the petrous portion of the temporal bone are discussed. The lesions are laterally placed near to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Abigail Musch. Anna Semon.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the North American Archaeology Lab at the American Museum of Natural History transitioned a long running internship program to a remote micro-internship. We had to consider if offering a remote internship was feasible, what it would require on our end, what projects could be done remotely, what the interns would get out of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Wattenmaker.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dramatic demographic growth is a hallmark of the urban process, yet reasons for population growth in emerging urban systems are not well understood. This paper draws on archaeological and textual evidence pertaining to ideology of the house and cultural values to explore why populations increased so dramatically in third millennium Mesopotamia. Additional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Johnston. Michael Buckley.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Biological age at death (AAD) is an important component of the biological profile, to aid investigators in cases with skeletal remains, also in archaeology to aid establishing site context. Current methods rely on predictable patterns of bone or teeth mineralization, growth and fusion or damage over time, though these methods are often subject to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alan Farahani. Hanna Grossman.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Advances in the last decade of open-source computation have improved the capability of archaeologists to store, analyze, and visualize ever-increasing amounts of data. Developments in the R and Python programming languages specifically have made once-proprietary radiocarbon calibration, stratigraphic analysis, and statistical modeling available to a wider...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dylan Schwindt. Kari Schleher. Michelle Turner. Grant Coffey. Benjamin Bellorado.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Computer vision, machine learning, and artificial intelligence techniques have made much progress in the past several years. Cloud computing has rendered these tools more accessible than ever to researchers in a wide range of fields. Here we explore applications of these models to classify Ancestral Pueblo pottery types in the central Mesa Verde region of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Davis. Lucas Martindale Johnson. Elsa Carpenter. Lee Drake. Daron Duke.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists continue to push the limits of nondestructive X-ray fluorescence (XRF) analysis in efforts to geochemically source small obsidian artifacts. Building on numerous prior investigations, this study examines a statistically large sample of unmodified obsidian flakes to better define the size threshold for acceptable precision and accuracy and to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Giffin. Vanessa Armenta. Leah Grant.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since 2009, the Veterans Curation Program (VCP) has been at the forefront of the effort to address the build-up of at-risk archaeological and archival collections in storage facilities around the United States. The VCP has the added mission of working with veterans to provide vital job skills and assist in the transition from military to civilian life. In...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Rosch.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ottoman archaeology remains in its fledgling stage, struggling against modern research and political biases. This greatly effects the understanding of the rural and highland areas of Anatolia, where excavations or surveys are already less commonly conducted. Historical research has done a great deal to illuminate these places and people, and through art,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brendon Murray. Terence D'Altroy.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological investigation on the north coast of Peru to this day draws from the 1946 Virú Valley Project; however, recent investigations have reevaluated chronologies and settlement hierarchies previously based on these data. Continuing these investigations, this paper revisits the valley to reconsider the idea of place and sight in the Virú landscape....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Perez. Karen Harry.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The upper reaches of the Virgin Branch Puebloan region—particularly, the western Colorado Plateau—has largely remained understudied, partly resulting from difficulties accessing many areas yielding cultural activity. While the majority of data collection has been amassed through surveys, excavations on the western Colorado Plateau have significantly broadened...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Gush.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Visual Storytelling for a Modern Age: In a visually obsessed world, many archaeologists have squandered the potential for effectively sharing the story of their research. This presentation focuses on the importance of integrating a content creator and utilizing modern image creation techniques to more effectively communicate the story of archaeology, while...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elise Alonzi. Barra O'Donnabhain.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Diet, mobility, and trauma are key factors in the performance of social identities and the maintenance of social boundaries between groups. In medieval Ireland, burial at monasteries also provided an opportunity for both lay and ecclesiastical communities to represent the religious identities of deceased individuals. In this study, mobility, trauma, and diet...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Spring. Jessica Smeeks.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This project uses Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to analyze Late Intermediate Period (LIP) spatial organization and defensibility practices in the Huamanga Province, Peru. The Peruvian LIP (AD 1000-1450) is the period between the collapse of the Tiwanaku and Wari States and the rise of the Inca Empire. This is an ideal time period to study the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexander Safronov.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The last quarter of the seventh century was marked by the intensification of military and political struggle in the Ususmasinta Basin. Loss of control over the Western Lowlands by Kaanu’l power at this time led to wars between the largest political centers of the region—Piedras Negras, Palenque, Yaxchilan, Tonina, and Saktz’i. The Lacandon Selva (Chiapas...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Monica Fenton.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Zooarchaeologists have extensively documented the importance of marine resources in the ancient Andes, and the first field season at Cerro San Isidro (Ancash, Peru) proves no different. The multi-component hilltop site lies in the agriculturally rich 'Moro Pocket' of the middle Nepeña Valley, at least an eight-hour walk from the ocean on the north-central...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Manasij Pal Chowdhury. Prof. Stuart Campbell. Dr. Michael Buckley.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Analysis of biomolecules absorbed in unglazed ceramics can provide valuable information about pottery use in antiquity, including detailed information on ancient diet. Such investigation has mostly focused on the analysis of lipids, but recently the more labile proteins have seen increased attention as they are capable of providing more specific information....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lynn Fisher. Susan Harris. Corina Knipper. Rainer Schreg.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Stone shaping tools and hammerstones are among the most ancient and ubiquitous of stone implements in the archaeological record, but they are not commonly studied in detail in archaeological context. This poster presents results of a comparative study of chert objects that show percussion scars at a Neolithic chert quarry in southern Germany. Variation in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Linda Scott Cummings.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Colonization of Central and North America involved Spanish mission construction and growing wheat necessary for Eucharist bread. Using evidence of threshing technology, represented by cut phytoliths, as an indicator of trait adoption, we examine missions in California and the southwestern Puebloan region. Introduction of a new religion, new icons, new...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samantha Lagos.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Feminist scholars have observed the gender disparity in archaeological knowledge production since the 1980s. Since then, both broad, discipline-wide, and smaller regionally focused studies have repeatedly demonstrated the same pattern of male-dominated publication trends. The lack of diverse voices in archaeological research has implications for the questions...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan McGuinness.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the Intermountain West there is mounting evidence that some Western Stemmed Tradition (WST) points are as old, if not older, than Clovis points on the Plains and in the Southwest. Given this, the distribution of WST points may hold the key to understanding how people initially populated the Far West. I use WST point and site location data in Lake County,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrea Lopez.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This project builds on the work of Dr. Bardolph's 2014 gender research, where she analyzed gender publication trends across 11 major archaeological journals from 1995 to 2014, assessing disparities between men and women in their number of publications. Her research put statistical value on what many researchers had before found to be true—men had higher rates...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julien Royer. Andrew Somerville.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The use of oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen isotope analyses of faunal bone samples can provide information reflective of past environmental conditions. White-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) antlers, although found in many archaeological assemblages, remain underutilized as paleoenvironmental proxies. Here we assess their feasibility to serve as proxies of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Donald Blakeslee.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The bison jumps and bison pounds of the Northern Plains are prominent features of the landscape, but conditions are different on the Central and Southern Plains. Early historic documents tell of large long-distance communal hunts conducted from horticultural villages. Thousands of hunters used surrounds to take the animals, but no kill sites of that kind...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Cromartie. Chéïma Barhoumi. Guillemette Ménot. Erwan Messager. Sébastien Joannin.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Humans today and in the past have to contend with the impacts of wildland fires. In grasslands, these fires occur frequently at annual to decadal scale. In the Kasakh valley, Armenia, recent research has revealed periods of increased fire activity during the Early Bronze and Late Iron Age and decreased activity in the Middle and Late Bronze Age (Cromartie et...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elena Mazzetto.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper aims to study the role played by female characters presented in the Mexica and Inca religious hierarchy in a comparative perspective. In first case, we mention the cihuamocexiuhzauhque, the "women who fast for a year," (Mazzetto 2017, 2020) while in the second we refer to the acllacuna. The activities carried out by these ritual specialists...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fabiola Sanchez. Joel Palka. Joshué Lozada.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Representations of hands in rock art is a polysemy motif registered among different archaeological sites in Chiapas, Mexico. Painted hands are a recurrent representation in the cliffs of Mensabak Lake in the Lacandon Rainforest, where these paintings were made by both positive and negative techniques. This paper will discuss the semantics of hand...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Whyte. Michael Callaghan. Brigitte Kovacevich.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent research has demonstrated that Handheld (portable) X-ray fluorescence spectrometers (pXRF) have difficulty in consistently and accurately determining chemical composition of non-homogenous cultural materials such as ceramics. This is unfortunate as pXRF instruments have proven to produce accurate and consistent compositional data for other...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lauren Hosek. Katelyn Bajorek.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Medieval diets may have differed in preparation rather than composition, with certain classes, genders, or age groups eating more abrasive and/or more cariogenic preparations of the same foods (Beranová 2007; Esclassan et al. 2015). This study is a bioarchaeological examination of dental attrition at the 9-11th century site complex of Libice nad Cidlinou in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only India Kotis.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research examines 2,400 samples of desktop graffiti (pictures or words that are drawn or etched into the wood of a writing desk) collected from a liberal arts college study space in Ohio, establishing chronology when possible. Much of what is written in the graffiti approximates patterns of discourse on social media websites like Reddit and Twitter. I...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Estelle Praet. Kitty Emery. Elizabeth Graham. Norbert Stanchly. Michael Buckley.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mammals are an essential part of the jungle world surrounding the Maya, both for their cosmovision and subsistence. Their identification in the archaeological record is essential to understand their complex role. This work, as a proof of concept, tested the application of Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS) in Maya sites of Lamanai and Marco Gonzalez...