Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kevin Gilmore. John Ives.

This is an abstract from the "Approaches to Archaeological Footwear" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Franktown Cave (5DA272) on the Palmer Divide south of Denver contains an assemblage of perishable artifacts unrivaled on the western Great Plains, and among these perishables is footwear from occupations dated 3300 BC–AD 1280. The footwear has proven to be the most useful for determining regional and cultural associations. Most of the analysis of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Hanscam. Brian Buchanan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For archaeology to survive in the current political environment and for critical discourse on the past to thrive, archaeologists need to be proactive and advocate for our subject’s contemporary relevance. We illustrate the problems and potentials of this advocacy by examining popular perceptions of Roman border zones like Hadrian’s Wall, and how these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lance Pursey.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology of Medieval Eurasian Steppe Urbanism" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the course of its 200+ year tenure the Kitan-Liao dynasty (907–1125) saw large migrations, intensification of settlements, and widespread construction of walled sites of varying sizes north of the Great Wall (N41°+) across the grassland ecotones of North Asia. The remains of some 650 such walled sites are distributed across Inner...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Billman.

This is an abstract from the "Warfare and the Origins of Political Control " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The central Andes has a long history of the rise and fall of centralized political organizations, beginning with construction of the first large-scale ceremonial centers in the New World between 3000 and 1800 BC. Some see these early centers as pilgrimage centers, lacking significant political power, while others argue they were urban...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Seibert.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the 280 years since July 7th, 1742, the exact locations of Gully Hole Creek and Bloody Marsh have been speculated and debated without resolution until now. Fort Frederica National Monument partnered with the Frederica Baptist Church regarding private metal detecting finds found on a property near Gully Hole Creek on St. Simons Island, Georgia. National...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tyler Ferree. Gregory Wilson. Amber VanDerwarker.

This is an abstract from the "Warfare and the Origins of Political Control " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper considers the impact of warfare-induced settlement nucleation on the sociopolitical organization of the thirteenth-century Central Illinois River Valley. Concurrent with the beginning of a period of intense warfare, Mississippian groups in the region abandoned their small, dispersed farmsteads and aggregated into the region’s...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Verano. Khrystyne Tschinkel. Helen Chavarria. Gabriel Prieto.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Depictions of combat and the capture and killing of captives are well known in Moche (ca. AD 200-850) art. Since 1995, the iconographic record has been joined by archaeological evidence of the practices themselves. The most dramatic discoveries were made in Plazas 3A and 3C at the Pyramid of the Moon between 1995 and 2001, with scattered deposits...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Suárez Calderón. Yahaira Núñez-Cortés. Francisco Corrales-Ulloa.

This is an abstract from the "Warfare and the Origins of Political Control " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Southern Central America is rich in examples of early complex societies, and yet, the timing and mechanism for the emergence of social complexity and differentiation are still not well understood. Recent works are moving archaeologists in the region to question, on the one hand, the definition of social complexity itself, and on the other...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rod Campbell.

This is an abstract from the "Warfare and the Origins of Political Control " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Intercommunity conflict and sociopolitical complexity are both complicated topics, not only because of their large literatures and diverse approaches, but because of the multifaceted nature of the phenomena involved. For my talk I would like to focus on what I see as two key variables relevant to both warfare and political community. These...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nam Kim.

This is an abstract from the "Warfare and the Origins of Political Control " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists have long been interested in the development of social complexity and associated institutions of governance and political control. Within Southeast Asia, historical societies such as Angkor provide insights around premodern state societies. This paper deals with evidence from the late prehistoric era, addressing the role of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Catherine Cameron.

This is an abstract from the "Warfare and the Origins of Political Control " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Raiding and captive-taking were common activities in small-scale societies prior to the modern era. A majority of captives were women and children; some were enslaved while others were incorporated into the societies they joined. Ethnohistoric accounts make it clear that regardless of their social position, captives created power for the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Moore.

This is an abstract from the "Almost 100 Years since Julio C. Tello: Research at Huaca del Loro, Nasca, Peru" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Emerging evidence increasingly suggests that D-shaped structures were a tool of Wari imperial and cultural expansion throughout the Middle Horizon landscape. Analysis of their construction, geographic distribution, regional context, and specific orientations reveals that their use and purpose was not...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Douglas Bamforth.

This is an abstract from the "Beyond “Barbarians”: Dimensions of Military Organization at the Bleeding Edge of the Premodern State" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Indigenous Plains warfare is one of the anthropological archetypes of tribal war, often seen as just as much of a status-related game as real violence directed toward larger social and political ends. This view misrepresents colonial-era warfare by focusing on only one aspect social...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bruce Benz.

This is an abstract from the "Subsistence Crops and Animals as a Proxy for Human Cultural Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Excavation of Coxcatlan cave recovered remains of Setaria cf. macrostachya. Analysis suggested early increase in abundance of florets (so-called seeds) in deposits associated with El Riego Phase contexts and later decrease in Coxcatlan Phase deposits. Callen observed a size increase of Setaria florets recovered from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Coon. Julia Furlong.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The field of archaeology, and especially the cultural resource management (CRM) industry, faces ongoing systemic inequalities in access to training and employment. The gaps between demand, recruitment, and retention of archaeologists continue to widen annually. One way that this problem manifests is through a lack of networking opportunities and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bethany Mathews.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Homestead Act of 1862 enabled feme sole—women who were legally single, widowed, divorced, or deserted—to claim up to 160 acres of land. In Washington State 8.5 million acres (20%) of lands were claimed through the Homestead Act; and although feme sole were a minority of these homesteaders, their homesteading experiences illustrate important themes of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Palus.

This is an abstract from the "Unsettling Infrastructure: Theorizing Infrastructure and Bio-Political Ecologies in a More-Than-Human World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cultural resource management projects in and around Washington, DC, have documented the episodic and nearly complete displacement of the city’s first exurban Black communities in areas that would become metropolitan suburbs. This recurring theme illuminates a posture of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Raveena Manhas-Tamoria. Estelle Praet. John Schofield.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. World Heritage sites are subject to a host of threats and impacts, be it from socio-economic pressures, climate change, or natural disasters. In more recent times, the threats from waste and, in particular plastic pollution, has become far more prevalent at various UNESCO sites around the world. There is indeed a growing concern over marine plastic debris...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Morgan Clark. Sheryl Luzzader-Beach. Byron Smith.

This is an abstract from the "La Cuernavilla, Guatemala: A Maya Fortress and Its Environs" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper will present the final results and interpretations of data collected from La Cuernavilla’s aguada. Special emphasis is placed on new data collected through several types of soil and geoarchaeological analyses that crucially supplement the data that have already been presented. Previous presentations on this topic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anthony DeLuca.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study explores the relationship between several Teuchitlán Culture archaeology sites and their proximity to permanent and seasonal water sources within the Tequila Valleys of Jalisco, Mexico. Water is an essential resource that humans cannot live without. With a lengthy dry season of nearly seven months, questions arise regarding access to water and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabriela Prestes Carneiro. Roberta Sá Leitão-Barboza. Myrian Sá Leitão-Barboza. Claide de Paula Moraes.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Animal management and domestication have been widely studied in relation to terrestrial mammals; however, there are still debates over what “domestication” means for aquatic animals. Across the Amazon, in recent years, a great number of archaeological structures such as fish weirs, canals, ponds, and turtle and fish corrals have been documented, dating...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chelsea Rose. Tiah Edmunson-Morton.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Largely assumed to consist of a male-dominated workforce and clientele, many early Oregon breweries were actually family affairs. The Eagle Brewery and Saloon, one of the first breweries in Oregon, was run by German immigrants Joseph and Fredericka Wetterer. They sold lager beer, distilled whisky and brandy, and had a small vineyard on their property. Upon...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alyssa Henss.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A major feature of colonization of the Americas was the weaponization of the Christian faith. In colonial Latin America it was distorted and weaponized to push a political agenda of forced conversion upon Indigenous peoples. In the instance of the Maya Caste War, however, this idea was flipped on its head by Indigenous peoples who used their spirituality...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark McCoy.

This is an abstract from the "To Have and Have Not: A Progress Report on the Global Dynamics of Wealth Inequality (GINI) Project" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Polynesia has been largely overlooked in previous archaeological assessments of levels of wealth difference despite the pivotal role that research in the region has played in advancing our understanding of inequality in human societies. The Global Dynamics of Wealth Inequality (GINI)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Jones. Annabelle Lewis. Gabby Cruz.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We examine a sample of surface-survey-collected ceramics from the Cook Farmstead, which was in operation in Fenner, NY, during the second half of the nineteenth century. After the farm stopped operation around the turn of the century, the house remained in that location until the late 1930s, when it was moved a mile down the road. Since that time, the area...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Phil Geib. Laurie Webster.

This is an abstract from the "Cordage, Yarn, and Associated Paraphernalia" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pre-pottery farmers on the Colorado Plateau of the North American Southwest known as Basketmakers fabricated various artifacts using human hair cordage. The textiles made of this material ranged from intimate personal adornments to utilitarian rabbit nets and load-bearing tumplines. Aside from important functional properties of elasticity and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Molly Carney.

This is an abstract from the "Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the last 20 years practitioners, activists, and scholars across disciplines have repeatedly pointed out the importance of incorporating other-than-human kin, relationality and reciprocity, and Traditional Ecological Knowledge into scientific practice when working with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sharisse McCafferty. Geoffrey McCafferty.

This is an abstract from the "Cordage, Yarn, and Associated Paraphernalia" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Bribri myth, the Creator God Sibó commanded Sál, the head of the spider clan, to weave cane and thatch to cover the cosmic house, which was built to encapsulate the world order. The house was supported by a central pole with eight surrounding posts representing each of the major clans. In 20+ years of archaeological research in Pacific...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrea Picin. Katarzyna Kerneder-Gubala. Damian Stefanski. Sahra Talamo.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Weichselian (MIS 5d–MIS 3), the climatic deteriorations and the rapid decrease of the temperatures caused significant difficulties for Neanderthal groups that had to cope with an increased seasonality of resources and faunal turnover. Central European Neanderthals reacted to these new ecological conditions by designing a toolkit composed of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa Cipolla. Daryl Basarte. Michael Zimmerman. Anna Coon. Bryanda Owen.

This is an abstract from the "Digitizing Archaeological Practice: Education and Outreach in the Archaeogaming Subdiscipline" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The emergent field of archaeogaming explores how people interact with gaming worlds. In this poster, we take a look at a subset of gaming, role-playing games (RPGs), and their potential for teaching archaeological concepts and critical thinking. We present three case studies of RPGs with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Gilmore. Jonathan Dombrosky. Lisa Nagaoka. Steve Wolverton.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Zooarchaeological Methods" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Taxonomic identification is a key goal of faunal analysis, but few controls are in place to ensure data quality. Comparative collections and identification guides offer valuable information; however, the validity of faunal identification can be questioned without assessing each feature’s utility for differentiating taxa. Analysis of biometric...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tim Kerig.

This is an abstract from the "To Have and Have Not: A Progress Report on the Global Dynamics of Wealth Inequality (GINI) Project" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Neolithic and Bronze Age wet preserved settlements are among the most fascinating sites of European prehistory. The circum-alpine sites (“pile-dwellings”) in particular attracted attention early on: because of their excellent preservation, they promised an immediate interpretative access...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Keith Prufer. Megan Walsh. Nadia Neff. Amy Thompson. Douglas Kennett.

This is an abstract from the "2023 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Timothy Beach Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent research in the American neotropics suggests that cultivation of plants for food began early in the Middle Holocene (ca. 7500 BP) and continued for millennia prior to the adoption of surplus agricultural production of domesticated staple foods by 5000 BP in South America and 4000 BP in the Maya lowlands. Data...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bruce Winterhalder. Eugène Morin. Douglas Bird. Rebecca Bliege Bird.

This is an abstract from the "Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the mid-1970s the biologist D. Griffiths proposed that body size determines prey return rates and, citing the diet breadth model, D. S. Wilson stated that the lowest-ranked prey type harvested reveals the general efficiency of the foraging economy. Archaeologists, beginning with Bayham and Anderson, quickly made use of these proposals, initiating a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Conard. Manuel Will.

This is an abstract from the "Establishing the Science of Paleolithic Archaeology: The Legacy of Harold Dibble (1951–2018) Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. After over a decade of excavation and analysis at the Middle Stone Age site of Sibhudu in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, the team from the University of Tübingen has established a uniquely complete and well-documented record of cultural change from the end or the Middle Pleistocene until...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marc Levine. Alex Badillo.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite increasing scholarly interest in the role of plazas in prehispanic Mesoamerica, we still have a relatively incomplete understanding of what actually occurred in such places. In this paper, we address this vexing question for the Main Plaza at Monte Albán in Oaxaca, Mexico. Our study draws on data from recent fieldwork on the Main Plaza, including...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessi Halligan.

This is an abstract from the "Liquid Landscapes: Recent Developments in Submerged Landscape Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Aucilla River basin in northwestern Florida contains 92 recorded sites with components predating 9000 cal BP, making it an excellent area in which to examine terminal Pleistocene and early Holocene landscape use. More importantly, some of these sites, all drowned terrestrial localities, contain strata with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Ortman.

This is an abstract from the "Research, Education, and American Indian Partnerships at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper discusses two important directions in archaeology today. The first is the urge to better-incorporate Native views and interests into archaeological practice; and the second is the urge to make the results of archaeology more useful for the present and future. I suggest that a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dan Sandweiss.

This is an abstract from the "Fryxell Symposium in Honor of Dolores Piperno" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dolores Piperno has been a trailblazer in interdisciplinary research, building on deep, innovative approaches to plant remains to answer a multitude of questions in archaeology and beyond. In this interdisciplinary spirit, I review research into Holocene paleoclimate along the Peruvian coast derived in the first instance from the study of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only A. Gwynn Henderson. David Pollack. Benjamin Barnes.

This is an abstract from the "Dedication, Collaboration, and Vision, Part I: Papers in Honor of Tom D. Dillehay" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A hallmark of Tom Dillehay’s career is his engagement with local and descendant communities. This is exemplified by his tireless work for the Mapuche, the establishment of anthropology departments throughout South America, and the instrumental role he played in creating the Kentucky Archaeological Survey....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dru McGill. Katherine Chiou.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this poster, the authors introduce a 3-year NSF-funded project to advance knowledge on the pervasiveness and effectiveness of ethics training interventions in archaeology and other STEM fields. Specifically, the project will examine the organization, implementation, and long-term results of competitive ethics case study-based debates, such as the SAA...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Briana Doering. Grace Stanford. Kassandra Dutro. Joshua Reuther.

This is an abstract from the "Hearths, Earth Ovens, and the Carbohydrate Revolution: Indigenous Subsistence Strategies and Cooking during the Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The subsistence traditions of the early Americans residing in Beringia have played a key role in debates surrounding the spread of people across the continent. Hunting and related technologies have garnered the most...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ava Godhardt. David Hyde.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Excavations between 2004 and 2019 at the Medicinal Trail Hinterland Community in northwestern Belize have uncovered numerous special deposits from a variety of contexts including caches, termination offerings, exposed offerings, and problematic deposits (PDs). Caches and the offerings have been reported on extensively and are generally understood to have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julia Coverdale.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Corrugated exterior whitewares in the Ancestral Puebloan world are often thought of as a rarity. While these ceramics are not as common as gray ware corrugated or regular black-on-white ceramics, they are an important blending of pottery manufacture. Corrugated whiteware ceramics can also help us begin to understand symbolism and meaning of corrugation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peri Johnson. Ömür Harmansah.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological landscapes are not heritage landscapes similar to the picturesque; they are the living heritage of the contemporary inhabitants and stakeholders who live with the past, ecological destruction, and climate change. Our paper is informed by the Yalburt Yaylası Archaeological Landscape Research Project (2010–2021) in western central Turkey. At...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Letícia Correa. Astolfo Araujo.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Historically, the shift from the study of form to the study of techniques was guided by the transition from the Cultural History approach to the New Archeology. This theoretical readjustment was incorporated into Brazilian archeology decades later, strongly impacting the way that the collections was studied. Today the reality is that, although lithic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Brandeberry.

This is an abstract from the "A Celebration and Critical Assessment of "The Maya Scribe and His World" on its Fiftieth Anniversary" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In “The Maya Scribe and His World,” Michael Coe published some of the first detailed photographs of a series of vases depicting ghoulish, supernatural characters identified by the Maya as “wahy.” With names like “Deer Death,” “Head Louse Spider Monkey,” and “Red Bile Death,” Coe and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Alperstein. Jesse Casana. Madeleine McLeester. Nathaniel Kitchel. Carolin Ferwerda.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There is a general absence of evidence of Woodland village sites (~900–1600 CE) in New England’s archaeological record. Due to a long history of colonization and environmental factors, even Woodland house sites, let alone villages, are incredibly scarce in the region. Despite that, many large village settlements appear within the early colonial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julien Riel-Salvatore. Fabio Negrino. Claudine Gravel-Miguel.

This is an abstract from the "Hunter-Gatherer Archaeology of Liguria: Recent Research and Insights" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Due to a suite of topographical and geomorphological factors, Liguria, and the Liguro-Provencal arc more generally, is an interesting natural laboratory in which to revisit some of the debates about forager mobility and its analysis that have unfolded over the past several decades. This paper presents an overview of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert DeMuth.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A standard truism in archaeology is that studies that reveal no new material data are as important as those that recover many artifacts and features. This paper examines what this truism means when—by all accounts—data should have been recoverable but was not. Archaeological surveys of the Black neighborhoods from the former West Virginia coal towns of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samantha Fladd. Sarah Kurnick. Katelyn Bishop.

This is an abstract from the "Beyond Leaky Pipelines: Exploring Gender Inequalities in Archaeological Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent studies have shown that the proportion of female faculty members in anthropological archaeology—while still below the proportion of women receiving doctoral degrees in the discipline—has increased over time. Nevertheless, there has been little consideration of the types of tenure-track / tenured...

DOCUMENT Citation Only L. Antonio Curet. Jorge Estevez.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Traditionally, the terms chiefdoms and cacicazgos have been used throughout the Caribbean as synonyms of stratified sociopolitical systems encountered by Europeans at the time of contact. However, recent data unearthed by the Archaeological Project of the Ceremonial Center of Tibes put into question the applicability of these categories based on generic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kirsten Mink. Antonio Beardall. Victoria Izzo. Jaime Awe.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. No country is immune to crumbling infrastructure and (un)predicable weather that exposes archaeology. How we deal with these sudden assemblages and how we use the information gained from these quick and limited excavations can be a place of growth in our field. This can be most crucial in salvage burial excavations. The biological, especially the human,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Santarone. William Eckerle. Katherine Puseman. Kenneth Cannon.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Site 26EK16689 is a multiple component open archaeological site near West Wendover, Nevada, approximately three miles from Danger Cave. Despite a history of inundation, ground disturbance, and generally rough treatment, excavations have shown that site 26EK16689 preserves extensive and intact cultural deposits with good organic preservation. In addition,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kate Shantry.

This is an abstract from the "Fire-Cracked Rock: Research in Cooking and Noncooking Contexts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The potential range of behaviors represented in heating stone assemblages is enormous. This paper is an attempt to identify targets for hot rock sampling and analyses that can develop our understanding of ancient global technologies in a day-to-day context. Hot rocks are ubiquitous in archaeological assemblages, yet the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Greer.

This is an abstract from the "Deepening Archaeology's Engagement with Black Studies" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For decades, Black Studies scholars have provided powerful, far-ranging critiques of the concept of race and the processes of racialization. Yet, when applied to archaeological case studies, these concepts are often only used to discuss the lives of Africans and their diasporic descendants. However, as Black Studies scholars point...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katelyn Bishop. Samantha Fladd. Sarah Kurnick.

This is an abstract from the "Beyond Leaky Pipelines: Exploring Gender Inequalities in Archaeological Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A recent paper by Mary Leighton problematizes the culture of archaeological practice and the emphasis on embodying aspects of “performative informality.” Social relationships among archaeologists are attributed to assessments of merit rather than the friendships they often represent, and these relationships...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Farrell. Nancy Ukai.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Eighty years ago, James Wakasa was shot and killed while walking his dog in the Utah desert. Wakasa was one of 120,000 Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II because of their ethnicity; he had been imprisoned at the Topaz Relocation Center and his killer was a Military Police guard. In a finding that would sound all too familiar even today, an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Neeley. Geoffrey Clark.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since the 1980s, surveys in Jordan’s Wadi al-Hasa document dozens of Late Pleistocene hunter-gatherer sites, some of them tested or partly excavated. To track landscape-scale forager mobility and settlement patterns over time, we examine 26 levels from 13 sites dated to the Middle, Upper and Epipaleolithic using aspects of Barton’s WABI research protocol,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ken Seligson.

This is an abstract from the "An Exchange of Ideas: Recent Research on Maya Commodities" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Burnt lime (calcium hydroxide) has been crucial for architectural, dietary, and other purposes in Maya society since as far back as the Formative period. The recent identification of hundreds of pit-kilns used for lime production in the Puuc region of the Yucatán Peninsula allows for an investigation of the socioeconomic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Birch. Ben Raffield.

This is an abstract from the "Beyond “Barbarians”: Dimensions of Military Organization at the Bleeding Edge of the Premodern State" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There are good reasons to problematize and theorize dimensions of military organization. Despite the wellspring of research on the archaeology of warfare over the last 30 years, conceptual gaps remain. Warfare among small-scale societies remains typified as total war, while the study of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Loughmiller-Cardinal. James Scott Cardinal.

This is an abstract from the "Coffee, Clever T-Shirts, and Papers in Honor of John S. Justeson" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Fifty years ago, what was arguably the most important paper ever written for modern work in quantitative archaeology was published in “American Antiquity.” Unfortunately for its author, and generations of archaeologists, few took notice of it at the time. With few citations, more than half of which have occurred in just...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jason Miszaniec. Paul Szpak. John Darwent. Christyann Darwent.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Zooarchaeological Methods" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Saffron cod (Eleginus gracilis) are small nearshore fish distributed throughout the Pacific and Arctic oceans and were a staple to preindustrial Indigenous fisheries of Western Alaska. Fish, mammal, and bird-bone were sampled for carbon and nitrogen stable isotopes from sites in Norton Sound, Alaska, spanning 2500 BCE–1850 CE. Comparing our...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Weinmeister.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While both lithics and color have a long history in archaeological research, archaeologists rarely address the importance of color in lithic artifacts. The ethnography of the American Southwest indicates that both color and lithics can play a critical role in indigenous ritual and ceremony. To explore the relationship between lithic artifacts and color...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew LoBiondo.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Research on Glass Beads and Ornaments in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Scholarship has long recognized the significance of glass beads in postcolumbian North America. For northeastern Native Americans, beads were relationally entangled within sociopolitical relationships and the spiritual world. In the Mohawk Valley, bead types and colors have been useful temporal markers, but their social and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Troy Lovata.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation examines how wickiups—light, compact wooden structures common across many times and places in the American Mountain West—reflect the conception and use of contemporary mountain landscapes. Landscape archaeology allows us to understand how people’s actions and experiences transform the physical environment from an abstract space to a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tatiana Niculescu.

This is an abstract from the "Seeing Migrant and Diaspora Communities Archaeologically: Beyond the Cultural Fixity/Fluidity Binary" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Historical archaeological investigations of Jewish diaspora sites have often heavily relied on faunal remains, particularly the presence or absence of pig remains, as a proxy for Jewishness. Keeping kosher is not the only relevant component of Jewish diasporic identities or even the only...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Traci Ardren.

This is an abstract from the "Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Academic reconstructions of south Florida Indigenous lifeways prior to European contact have focused primarily on the deliberate choice of these highly complex societies to rely exclusively on wild foods, even while corn agriculture was practiced in nearby parts of the peninsula....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lawrence Todd. Daniel Dalmas.

This is an abstract from the "A Further Discussion on the Role of Archaeology in Resource and Public Land Management" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since 2002 the Greybull River Sustainable Landscape Ecology (GRSLE) project has undertaken an artifact-based, landscape-scale inventory in the eastern Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, on the Shoshone National Forest in NW Wyoming. Much of the project has been conducted in the Washakie Wilderness and has...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joel Gunn. Lynda Florey Folan.

This is an abstract from the "A Session in Memory of William J. Folan: Cities, Settlement, and Climate" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We recall the moment that William J. Folan was struck by the Climate Fascination. In 1978 he had a visiting professorship at the University of Texas at San Antonio and we were sharing an office. He suggested that JDG should do an article on Maya Lowlands climate change. JDG responded that Willie was the expert who...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Dewhirst.

This is an abstract from the "A Session in Memory of William J. Folan: Cities, Settlement, and Climate" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although most recognize William Folan’s contributions to Mayan archaeology, his early career was devoted to significant national heritage projects in Canada. From 1965 to 1972, Willie carried out two unprecedented large archaeological projects for Parks Canada. It was a ground-breaking time in Canadian archaeology,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claudia Garcia-Des Lauriers.

This is an abstract from the "The Role of Women in Mesoamerican Ritual" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Teotihuacan is a complex multiethnic urban metropolis whose history is slowly becoming more nuanced after more than 100 years of research. Despite the recent attention that this Mesoamerican city has received, we still have many questions, among them, about the role of women, their life histories, their identities, and their role in the ritual...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Baustian. Claira Ralston. Maryann Calleja. Debra Martin.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. When examining violence in archaeological contexts, the roles of females have often been undertheorized or omitted completely. Violence research is quick to identify males as warriors and aggressors but women should not be ignored as actors in past violence. Our perception and interpretation of females as actively engaged in violent interactions in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bailey Raab. Dana Bardolph.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As Patricia Galloway aptly observed in her 1998 paper, “Where Have all the Menstrual Huts Gone?”, menstruation is rarely discussed in archaeological literature. Recent research in the Ohio River Valley has brought renewed interest to these ‘invisible’ spaces, attempting to identify potential menstrual structures in the archaeological record. It was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Akin Ogundiran.

This is an abstract from the "Essential Contributions from African to Global Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Women’s work and administrative leadership were essential to the running of the Oyo Empire (ca. AD 1570–1836). As wives, mothers, sisters, daughters, enslaved and free bureaucrats, traders, artisans, and laborers, women played a wide range of roles in palace administration and in financing and reproducing the state (materially...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charles Cheek.

This is an abstract from the "The Role of Women in Mesoamerican Ritual" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dress is an important way people interact with others. Modern concepts of dress include the entire body and how people adorn or change it. Maya rituals use specific sets of dress elements to convey not only what is happening but also to ensure the ritual was done correctly. After a brief review of women’s dress, I identify dress in ritual and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Vaclav Hrncir.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There is a popular idea that archaic humans commonly used wooden clubs as their weapons. This is not based on archaeological finds, which are minimal from the Pleistocene, but rather on a few ethnographic analogies and the association of this weapon with simple technology. This paper presents the first quantitative cross-cultural analysis of the use of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alicia Beat.

This is an abstract from the "Outreach and Education: Examples of Approaches and Strategies from the Pacific Northwest" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation will discuss the Colville National Forest Heritage Program’s collaboration with the Kalispel Tribe of Indians Language School on the reimagining of the Pioneer Park Heritage Interpretive Trail. The trail was constructed in the mid-1990s as mitigation for construction of a forest...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Crowley-Champoux. Zoe Jopp.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Maine’s island communities are the primary stewards of archaeological heritage. This project connects archaeologists, island communities, and natural and cultural heritage organizations in their shared concerns for preserving Maine’s shell midden sites, as these sites are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and development. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristine Martirosyan - Olshansky. Alan Farahani.

This is an abstract from the "Thinking Big in the Andes: Papers in Honor of Charles Stanish" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Evidence of woven materials such as baskets, mats, cordage, string, and rope rarely preserve in archaeological contexts, but when these plant-based artifacts do preserve, they provide important insight into the social, technological, and environmental practices involved in the creation and use of such objects. At many...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Oswaldo Chinchilla.

This is an abstract from the "A Celebration and Critical Assessment of "The Maya Scribe and His World" on its Fiftieth Anniversary" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. An enduring contribution of “The Maya Scribe and His World” was Michael Coe’s call for attention to the Popol Wuj as a source for the interpretation of ancient Maya deities. Developed in subsequent works, this approach has yielded important insights on ancient Maya art and religion, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Frauke Sachse.

This is an abstract from the "The Role of Women in Mesoamerican Ritual" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the Popol Vuh, the creation of the world and humankind is conceptualized as a process of birth. The old creator couple Xmucane and Xpiyacoc are described as the first diviners, just like their counter parts Oxomoco and Cipactonal who are the first calendar priests in Central Mexican mythology. This paper explores the relation between human...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonah Augustine. Brandi MacDonald.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents the results of a combined XRF and Raman spectroscopic analysis of pigments used in the production of Middle Horizon ceramics from Arani, Cochabamba, Bolivia, that are currently housed at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. The two central questions that this analysis investigates are (1) which of these materials were produced in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caroline Antonelli. Timothy Hare.

This is an abstract from the "Provisioning Ancient Maya Cities: Modeling Food Production and Land Use in Tropical Urban Environments" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Mesoamerica, recent scholarship emphasizes the importance of urban smallholders, or intensive production by urban residents. The acquisition of regional lidar imagery of urban centers and surrounding landscapes reveals that the spatial limitations of production were often far more...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David S. Anderson.

This is an abstract from the "Digitizing Archaeological Practice: Education and Outreach in the Archaeogaming Subdiscipline" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From the very origins of tabletop roleplaying games, creators like Gary Gygax turned to scholarship of the ancient world as a wellspring for fantasy worldbuilding, in-game quests, and tradition-rich non-player characters or legendary creatures. Through this lens, gamers took an active role in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristine Richter. Roshan Paladugu. Cleia Detry. Cristina Barrocas Dias. Christina Warinner.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Horses (Equus caballus) and donkeys (Equus asinus) play essential roles in human culture and economy. Unlike most other domesticates, horses and donkeys can produce hybrids. Mules, offspring of female horses and male donkeys, have been found in archaeological contexts across the Old World. Written sources describe the choice of horse, donkey, or mule as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only J. Anne Melton. Emily Liu. Jeff Calder. Katrina Yezzi-Woodley.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. It is widely accepted that angle measurements taken on lithic artifacts form a crucial part of lithic analysis. Thanks to advances in 3D-scanning technology, researchers now have virtual angle-measuring options. However, since these new virtual tools were created independently and thus are utilizing their own “suite” of algorithms dependent on the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jaime Awe. Claire Ebert. Julie Hoggarth.

This is an abstract from the "The Movement of People and Ideas in Eastern Mesoamerica during the Ninth and Tenth Centuries CE: A Multidisciplinary Approach Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological investigations in western Belize have recorded a growing body of evidence that is indicative of non-central lowland Maya influences in this Maya subregion during the Terminal Classic period. Evidence for Yucatec and non-Maya influence in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ellen Hoobler.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The precolumbian site of Monte Albán in Oaxaca, southern Mexico, presents a continuing challenge for scholars because the earliest scientific excavations at the site, conducted in the 1930s by noted archaeologist Alfonso Caso and his collaborators, were only partially published. This is particularly disappointing since many of the tombs of Monte Alban were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Stark. Alondra Flores. Fernando Gonzalez.

This is an abstract from the "Fire-Cracked Rock: Research in Cooking and Noncooking Contexts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Earth-oven processing of agave food and drink has a time depth in Colima, Mexico, of more than 7,000 years, providing a notable example of localized socioeconomic intensification processes throughout the Holocene. The cultural setting for this research is observant of contemporary Agave Culture, a term used to describe...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amelia Jansen.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The current accumulation of archaeological investigations at far-north Alaskan Goldrush sites either completely lack or severely underrepresent the zooarchaeological components at these sites. This data is vital and adds context to past and future archaeological investigations by enabling more accurate and inclusive interpretations of life in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kara Larson.

This is an abstract from the "Stability and Resilience in Zooarchaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human societies do not operate as a stagnated phenomenon but instead experience stacked cycles of adaptation, resilience, and possibly collapse. Identifying and teasing these cycles in the archaeological record can be difficult and have often been applied to hunter-gatherer case studies. This research attempts to apply an adaptive cycling model...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristin Corl.

This is an abstract from the "Mogollon, Mimbres, and Salado Archaeology in Southwest New Mexico and Beyond" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Harris Site (LA 1867) is a Late Pithouse period (AD 550–1000) agricultural village located along the upper Mimbres River Valley in New Mexico. This period is seen as a time of great demographic and social change linked to changes in the environment. This site provides an excellent case study looking at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Kinney. Erin Kennedy Thornton.

This is an abstract from the "Households at Aventura: Life and Community Longevity at an Ancient Maya City" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents the results of a broad zooarchaeological analysis conducted on remains recovered from a variety of contexts at the ancient Maya community of Aventura (Corozal, Belize). Because this is the first analysis of faunal remains from Aventura, it provides valuable information about life in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Seth Bruck. Todd J. Braje. Torben C. Rick. Emma Elliott Smith. Lain Graham.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. On the southern California coast, Point Conception is highly significant for Chumash peoples and demarcates a critical location of ecological diversity. At this location, the coastline abruptly shifts from a north-south to east-west trending shoreline and marks the ecological convergence of colder northern and warmer southern waters, a biogeographic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cameron Munley. Michelle LeFebvre.

This is an abstract from the "Stability and Resilience in Zooarchaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Zooarchaeological baselines of human-animal engagements and their outcomes are increasingly critical to modeling what community stability looked like in the past and what we can learn from it today. Concomitantly, zooarchaeological baselines also provide critical measures of biodiversity distribution, loss, or persistence through time for use...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rani Alexander. Jocelyn Valadez.

This is an abstract from the "Hill People: New Research on Tijeras Canyon and the East Mountains" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We present an initial analysis of zooarchaeological remains recovered from 2022 field season of the NMSU Archaeological Field School, directed by Dr. Kelly Jenks, for the ancestral frontier settlement of San Miguel de Carnué, occupied 1763–1771 by the Cañón de Carnué Land Grant Community in the East Mountains of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lauren Malone. Gerald Schroedl. Anneke Janzen.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The bone button industry of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries at Brimstone Hill Fortress on the eastern Caribbean island of St. Kitts is well documented. Here, British soldiers and enslaved Africans manufactured single-hole bone disks that likely served as cores for cloth covered buttons. Tens of thousands of these disks and removals have been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sebastian Millien. Kristine Korzow Richter. Richard Meadow. Christina Warinner.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Indus Valley Civilization at its peak extended over 1 million km2 and encompassed an estimated five million people, with over 1,000 sites identified. Although faunal remains have been recovered from the excavations of approximately 100 archaeological sites, very few have been analyzed using biomolecular methods. This is largely because many of the...