Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Khaled Abu Jayyab. Natalia Handziuk. Stephen Rhodes. Sean Doyle.

This is an abstract from the "Experimental Pedagogies: Teaching through Experimental Archaeology Part II" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Concepts, such as the “chaîne opératoire” and “communities of practice” are central to material analyses and student training at the Gadachrili Gora Regional Archaeological Project Expedition (GRAPE), Republic of Georgia. Teaching abstract conceptual frameworks to undergraduate students is a challenging task for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Martin Sikora. Krish Seetah. Rosa Fregel.

This is an abstract from the "Islands around Africa: State-of-the-Art and Future Directions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Malaria remains one of the most devastating infectious diseases affecting human populations, with over 200 million cases and 500,000 deaths annually worldwide, most of which focused on the mainlands of sub-Saharan Africa. While malaria is an “old” disease on the mainland dating back tens of thousands of years, its history on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Morehart.

This is an abstract from the "Beyond Maize and Cacao: Reflections on Visual and Textual Representation and Archaeological Evidence of Other Plants in Precolumbian Mesoamerica" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Studies on traditional ecological knowledge stress the importance of local resource management and autonomous governance. Resourcefulness constitutes an integral aspect of such bottom-up pathways. Dependent on knowledge, skills, and social...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jose Nuñez. Alejandro Chu.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Se ha conceptualizado que la relación entre un imperio arcaico y una sociedad conquistada ondula entre dos polos: el hegemónico y el territorial. Ambos sistemas conllevan distintas estrategias, las cuales son aplicadas según los deseos del imperio, pero también atendiendo a las características locales, sean geográficas, políticas y sociales. Los inkas no...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Jasper.

This is an abstract from the "New Work in Medieval Archaeology, Part 1: Landscapes, Food, and Health" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the context of an archaeological excavation in northern Lazio, Italy, this paper will discuss solutions for incomplete datasets in the study of pre-modern agriculture. The focus of excavation is a Roman imperial period, monumental fountain located 300 m from the western coast of Lake Bolsena in central Italy. Its...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Chiou. Araceli Aguilar-Meléndez. Christine Hastorf. Andrés Lira-Noriega. Emiliano Gallaga Murrieta.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeobotany of Early Peopling: Plant Experimentation and Cultural Inheritance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Our project investigates the origins and domestication pathways of the Mesoamerican chili pepper (Capsicum annuum var. annuum L.). Undertaken by an interdisciplinary team and relying on a tripartite methodological framework, this study employs morphometric analyses of extant and archaeological Capsicum...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Thakar. Gina Buckley. Jason De Leon.

This is an abstract from the "The Intersection of Archaeological Science and Forensic Science" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Thousands of clandestine migrants die every year while traversing the hostile terrain of the United States/Mexico border. Most of these individuals go unidentified, leaving families in a desperate search for answers regarding their loved one’s whereabouts. Rural counties along the South Texas Borderlands lack resources for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anastasia Walhovd.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Pageant Tavern and Hotel operated during the 1920s and 1930s on the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Reservation in Northern Wisconsin. The Pageant Tavern was owned by non-Native and non-local businessmen, but the hotel staff and caretakers were Indigenous (Ojibwe) residents of Red Cliff. A recorded interview indicates the staff lived at or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Hair.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Structural vulnerability, an individual or population's risk for adverse health outcomes, is the product of various financial, environmental, biological, and social variables. Factors including disease, food security, exposure to trauma, and social status all contribute to any individual's level of structural vulnerability. While clinicians make modern...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeff Burnett. Fred Handcock. Ifeoma Ekwuocha. James Richardson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In August 2023, an archaeologist from Michigan State University and participants living and vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard, an island off the coast of Massachusetts, documented and mapped the remnants of a 19th century Baptist Camp Meeting site in Oak Bluffs. Utilized by Baptist groups for weeklong revivals from 1875 until ca. 1930. The Baptist Temple...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sami Savateri.

This is an abstract from the "Checking the Pulse II: Current Research in Oaxaca Part 2" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ritualized movement such as processions are one way in which people in Oaxaca, both past and present, interact with and shape the landscape. To better understand the sacred landscapes of Postclassic communities in Oaxaca, this project examines ritualized movement through the analysis of a modern procession as described in James...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Margaret Morris. Isabel Rivera-Collazo. John Hildebrand.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Humans had established presence on California’s Channel Islands by the Younger Dryas (YD) Period (~12.9-11.7 ky BP), during which stable sea level was relatively stable for ~1 ky. No archaeological sites from this time have been identified on the nearby continental shelf, likely destroyed by subsequent rapid sea level rise, but submerged paleochannels...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabriela Oré Menéndez.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mapping archaeological sites has become more precise, faster, and cheaper than ever, especially once archaeologists began using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs or drones) to capture high-resolution aerial views of archaeological sites. Nevertheless, the next step, manually tracing structures and archaeological features from orthophotos, is still daunting...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kaleigh Best. Jessica Spencer. Christopher Jazwa.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the 19th century, East St. Louis attracted immigrants to work in its centers of industry and was a hub for westward expansion. St. Henry’s Cemetery in East St. Louis, Illinois was the prominent Catholic cemetery within the area, serving the community from 1866-1908. Supposedly relocated by 1926, the cemetery site was then developed into a National Guard...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Noémie Galland.

This is an abstract from the "Underwater and Coastal Archaeology in Latin America" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent archaeological work has revealed that the north-central coastal region of Peru had been the territory of a cultural entity that we recognize today as “Casma” between the ninth and fourteenth centuries AD. Some aspects of this culture remain largely unknown and require further investigation, particularly its iconography. It...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Consuelo Huidobro. Josefina Macari. Victoria Soto. Maria Celina Alvarez Soncini.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Otway Sea and Strait of Magellan region in Southern Patagonia witnessed the emergence of maritime lifeways approximately 7,000 to 5,600 years ago, leading to the establishment of the 'Englefield Culture.' This culture is characterized by its bone and lithic technology, notably the use of green obsidian. Our research is dedicated to reconstructing the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Manuel San Roman. Ismael Martínez. Robert McCulloch. Jimena Torres. Flavia Morello.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the context of research reassessing the chronology and distribution of early evidence for maritime settlement at Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, we have developed surveys in different areas of the archipelago to expand the geographical scale of the search, thus allowing us to incorporate aspects related to the geographical directionality of the process....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Hammer.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Wetlands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The marshlands of the Tigris-Euphrates delta were for millennia among the largest wetland systems in Eurasia. The Gulf coast, the river delta, and marshes extended further north ca. 8000–2000 BCE than they do today. As a result, the world’s earliest cities in southern Mesopotamia may have emerged 6,000–5,000 years ago within or on the edge of wetland and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Uzzle.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The effects of unregulated (laissez-fair) capitalism on working class people and on landscapes are often only beneficial in the short-term. The 1930s were especially difficult times for Americans as people became displaced during the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. Many were forced to move into new areas in search of work and better living conditions...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lindsay Bloch. Matthew Reilly. Craig Stevens.

This is an abstract from the "Reinvent, Reclaim, Redefine: Considerations of "Reuse" in Archaeological Contexts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Nineteenth-century Black American and Caribbean settlers of the Back-to-Africa movement to Liberia brought with them a wide variety of objects for building new lives and landscapes for their emancipatory and civilizing mission in West Africa. The migrants arrived to lands already inhabited by people long...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jesper Nielsen. Christophe Helmke. Claudia Alvarado. Silvia Garza.

This is an abstract from the "Interactions during the Epiclassic and Early Postclassic (AD 650–1100) in the Central Highlands: New Insights from Material and Visual Culture" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With the collapse of Teotihuacan, the central Mexican highlands were plunged into a period of social restructuration, known as the Epiclassic (AD 650–950). This period saw the emergence of independent city-states, rising in the wake of a highly...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jamie Forde.

This is an abstract from the "Bringing the Past to Life, Part 1: Papers in Honor of John M. D. Pohl" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Prehispanic visual sources and colonial alphabetic texts provide rich descriptions of what scholars have termed "the Flower World" in Mesoamerica. This idealized celestial realm was filled not just with flowers, but an array of other precious substances, ranging from gemstones to precious metals, to bird feathers and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kendra Leishman. Kara Ren. Aleksa Alaica. Milton Luján Dávila. George Lau.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Pastoralism in a Global Perspective" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Fluctuating political allegiances during the Early Intermediate period (200 BCE–600 CE) were coopted by competing leaders throughout the central Peruvian highlands and more broadly in the south-central Andes. The relationships and conflicts that resulted from socioeconomic negotiations among local networks; alongside the vacuum of power left...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yu-chun Kan.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Food and Foodways: Emerging Trends and New Perspectives" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological and ethnographic data indicates that East and Southeast Asian cuisines have long been characterized by diverse boiling and steaming repertoires and techniques. These practices and resulting flavors and texture of foods are imbued with rich sociocultural meanings. This paper explores charred food...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alex Knodell.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Surveillance: Seeing and Power in the Material World" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Textual and archaeological evidence make clear that most ancient polities were concerned with surveillance in some way. However, the scale of material investment in surveillance suggests different motivations in different contexts. This paper compares the material signatures of surveillance in Greek Bronze Age...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Divina Perla Barrera. Julien Sion. Fiama Hernández. Jennifer Arguijo.

This is an abstract from the "Materials in Movement in the Isthmo-Colombian Area" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. En los territorios considerados como los márgenes fronterizos entre Mesoamérica y el Área Istmo-colombiana, la transición entre el Clásico y Postclásico (siglos IX-XII dC) corresponde a un periodo de reorganización de sus sociedades. Particularmente en el noroeste de Honduras se caracterizaron notables evoluciones en los centros...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Saburo Sugiyama. Nawa Sugiyama. Kazuhiro Sekiguchi. Kuninori Iwashiro. Yuta Chiba.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Landscapes and Cosmic Cities out of Eurasia: Transdisciplinary Studies with New Lidar Mapping" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Primary archaeological data indicate that the current reconstruction of the city of Teotihuacan was apparently built with a master plan around AD 200. Three major monuments were harmoniously integrated into a rigorously calculated city layout with functional and/or symbolic units...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Henry Bacha.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper engages as its central problematic a recurrent iconographic motif—identified by scholars as depicting a ritualized drinking encounter between the Sapa Inka and his Colla (an ethnic polity of the Late Intermediate Period Lake Titicaca basin) counterpart—painted on keros (Andean ceremonial drinking vessels) produced in the colonial Viceroyalty of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan Southorn. Siân Halcrow. Claire Cameron.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Motherhood" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. New Zealand was the “poster child” for relatively low infant mortality rates in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries compared with other OECD countries; however, little is known about how social disadvantage may have increased the mortality rates for marginalized groups. We investigate the causes of death and age at death of infants (one year of age...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angela Huster.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1565, the Matlatzinca Pablo Ocelotl and the Nahua Alonso Gonzales appeared before a Spanish judge in lawsuit over lands in the community of Tlacotepec, in the Toluca Valley of Central Mexico. While describing the rise and fall of their families under Matlatzinca, Aztec, and Spanish rule, both swore their families were long time residents of community. ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebekah Planto.

This is an abstract from the "Taphonomy in Focus: Current Approaches to Site Formation and Social Stratigraphy" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Home to Virginia’s oldest standing house, the Bacon’s Castle site is the most visible remnant of a (post)colonial landscape, continuously occupied as such since at least the 1640s. The extant portion alone, where archaeology has concentrated, has been inhabited over multiple generations by a complex...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Jazwa. Aomar Akerraz. Stephen Collins-Elliott. Katelin McCullough. Katie Tardio.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological understanding of the chronology of pre-Roman and Roman occupation of northern Morocco has typically been determined by datable materials from large urban sites. We expand the scope to include smaller sites in the Loukkos River Valley near present-day Larache to investigate the understudied lives of rural populations in Roman North Africa....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angelina Locker. Diane Z. Chase. Arlen F. Chase. Tiffiny A. Tung. Rick W. A. Smith.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Located in Corozal District in northern Belize, the coastal Maya archaeological site of Santa Rita Corozal, hereafter Chactemal, was continuously occupied from the Middle Preclassic (BCE 800–300) through the Late Postclassic (CE 1250–1532). While many sites in the Southern Lowlands experienced decline and abandonment in the Terminal Classic (CE 800–900),...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Devon Howell. Jennifer Newton. Helen Haines.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research investigated the intentionally modified dentition found within chultuns at the Maya site of Ka’kabish, Belize. The site has a history spanning from the Middle Formative (800–600 BC) to the Postclassic (900–1500 AD) periods. The primary aim of this research was to closely examine the modified dentition, evaluate any dental pathologies present,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alizé Lacoste Jeanson.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Archaeological Investigations in Chiapas, Mexico" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient Maya land is characterized by a great diversity of funerary practices. The settlement of Lakamha’ (Palenque) sharply evidences such heterogeneity: pluralism is found in terms of places of inhumation, types of containers, number of people per grave, grave goods, postmortem treatments, positions, and orientations of the body....

DOCUMENT Citation Only W. James Stemp. Rachel Horowitz. Scott Simmons.

This is an abstract from the "“The Center and the Edge”: How the Archaeology of Belize Is Foundational for Understanding the Ancient Maya" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over more than a century, archaeological research in Belize has contributed greatly to our understanding of past Maya stone and metal technologies. From the preceramic through the colonial periods (~11,000 BC−AD 1700), the analysis of flaked and ground stone tools recovered from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alejandro Garay Herrera.

This is an abstract from the "Mountains, Rain, and Techniques of Governance in Mesoamerica" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Among the Maya of northwestern Guatemala, modern populations continue to use the mountains found in their territories as places of worship. Often altars are located directly on the peaks of hills and mountains, while in other cases they are found on pilgrimage routes in or around these high sacred points, such as on the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Geoffrey Braswell.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Permanent occupation of inland southern Belize began at the dawn of the Classic period and continued into the Terminal Classic. Excavations at Pusilha, Lubaantun, and Nim li Punit have recovered more than 5,000 obsidian artifacts that date to these periods. These have all been sourced using portable XRF and subject to metric and attribute analyses....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Josuhé Lozada. Joel Palka. Alizé Lacoste Jeanson.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Archaeological Investigations in Chiapas, Mexico" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation focuses on the anthropology of pilgrimage as a journey to places outside of everyday realms. For Maya societies, pilgrimages are important for maintaining the relationships between people and nonhuman persons linked to the ritual landscape. In this context, the presence of human bones in caves around the lakes at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only María J. Novelo Pérez. Daniela González Chablé. Lilia Fernández Souza.

This is an abstract from the "Adventures in Beekeeping: Recent Studies in Ecology, Archaeology, History, and Ethnography in Yucatán" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Balché is a ritual beverage elaborated with honey and tree bark that, during many centuries, has been fundamental for Maya religious rituals in Yucatán, as documented in precolumbian codices, historical sources, and ethnographic research. Some information at the Madrid Codex indicates...

DOCUMENT Citation Only J. M. Adovasio.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As I have done no comparative study on the subject, I assume that it is relatively unusual to amend one’s dissertation research let alone to point out its flaws. Nevertheless, this is precisely what I am doing in this presentation. While the salient points of my dissertation (The Origin, Development, and Distributions of Western Archaic Textiles, 1970)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Dungan.

This is an abstract from the "Ideas, Ethical Ideals, and Museum Practice in North American Archaeological Collections" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In addition to being tangible heritage and a material cultural record of the archaeological past, archaeological museum collections are products of archaeological and curation practice during and after the time of their collection. Likewise, the laws, rules, and procedures that shape archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Liam Brady. Luke Taylor. Sally May. Paul Tacon.

This is an abstract from the "Painting the Past: Interpretive Approaches in Global Rock Art Research" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A core feature of rock art studies concerns the characterization and analysis of motif styles to generate new insights into their function, meaning, and symbolism in the deep and recent past. Yet what is oftentimes overlooked is attention to the production sequence used to create motifs, and what this can reveal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Roxanne Lebenzon. Leore Grosman. Natalie Munro.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Linear skeletal measurements have long been harnessed by zooarchaeologists to differentiate animals by taxon, breed, age, and sex, to investigate domestication and animal management strategies and the impact of factors such as climate change and anthropogenic activity. However, due to equifinality, interpreting archaeological body size data remains...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rafael Cruz-Gil.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Mesoamerican and Andean Cities: Old Debates, New Perspectives" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While spatial analysis has become commonplace in archaeology, the social implications of mobility and accessibility in urban contexts remain an aspect that can be studied in much more depth. Drawing theories and methodologies from urban design has long been a staple for understanding the lived built environment, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Terje Oestigaard.

This is an abstract from the "Embodied Essence: Anthropological, Historical, and Archaeological Perspectives on the Use of Body Parts and Bodily Substances in Religious Beliefs and Practices" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although cannibalism is a contested theme in anthropology, there is one area and era that has received little attention: Scandinavian folklore in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The widely documented practices...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Bair.

This is an abstract from the "New Work in Medieval Archaeology, Part 2: Crossing Boundaries, Materialities, and Identities" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Though by strict definition the study of any literate society might be considered “historical archaeology,” in practice American historical archaeologists largely focus on the centuries after 1492—in other words, the archaeology of the modern world. But modernity was not immaculately conceived;...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Berikashvili.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Zakagori fortress in Truso Valley, Northern Georgia (South Caucasus) represents unique medieval complex which was controlling military and economical routs leading from the South to the North in medieval times. This unique complex is known as an architectural and archaeological monument, which combines stratas and sediments of High and Late Medieval...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Kirk. Michael Kolb. William Balco.

This is an abstract from the "New Work in Medieval Archaeology, Part 1: Landscapes, Food, and Health" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Defensive Settlement or late medieval escape for nobility? When it comes to castles and many of their associated settlements it seems the latter has been pushed in English language literature more than the former for a few decades now. In this paper, we present a case study that showcases the development of a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Tran. Anabel Ford.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Maya land-use strategies, based on traditional agricultural methods documented by the Spanish conquerors and oppressed during the colonial period, have demonstrated a staunch resilience into the modern age. The milpa forest garden cycle demonstrates dynamic regeneration via an asynchronous cycling of open fields with annual crops, perennial succession...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Garraty. J. Andrew Darling. Craig Fertelmes. Barnaby Lewis.

This is an abstract from the "Collaborative Archaeology: How Native American Knowledge Enhances Our Collective Understanding of the Past" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists who study the relationship of memory to material culture or landscapes examine the ways in which history and cultural practice contribute to tradition-building and its perpetuation. Cultural practices are the daily embodiment of one’s traditions, beliefs, or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ted Gragson. Lydia Allué Andrés. Victor Thompson. Faith MacDonald. Brett Parbus.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. San Miguel de Mercadal is one of 23 villages abandoned in the late 15th century during the Medieval Crisis in the Comunidad de Aldeas de Daroca created AD 1248 to encourage resettlement and self-defense of the southern borderlands of the Kingdom of Aragon. In 2023 we conducted a geophysical and satellite survey of Mercadal and its surroundings combined...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew D. Turner.

This is an abstract from the "Bringing the Past to Life, Part 1: Papers in Honor of John M. D. Pohl" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. John Pohl’s groundbreaking investigations of the tandem roles of merchant exchange, alliance building, and migration have caused us to reconceptualize the multiethnic sociopolitical landscapes of central Mexico and Oaxaca in the Epiclassic and Postclassic periods and the social actors that populated them. In the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Baquedano.

This is an abstract from the "Misinformation and Misrepresentation Part 1: Reconsidering “Human Sacrifice,” Religion, Slavery, Modernity, and Other European-Derived Concepts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Aztecs and other Mesoamerican peoples were exceptionally aware and observant of their natural world and the cycles of nature, particularly the alternation of the seasons. Many of their representations were aptly identified with the dry or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Davide Domenici.

This is an abstract from the "Bringing the Past to Life, Part 1: Papers in Honor of John M. D. Pohl" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Museo delle Civiltà (Rome) holds two famous Late Postclassic Mesoamerican knife-handles, sculpted in wood and encrusted with a mosaic of turquoise, malachite, lignite, Spondylus, Strombus, mother-of-pearl, and gold. Both represent crouching figures—one anthropomorphic and the other zoomorphic—facing toward the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Bell.

This is an abstract from the "Gender in Archaeology over the Last 30+ Years" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper builds on the author’s earlier research that documents previously unrecognized female rulers among the Aztec. Over the last 50 years, interest in elite women in other areas of Mesoamerica has grown, and the author presents the outcome of some of that research. Woman rulers from not only the Aztec area but also from the Valley of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Knab.

This is an abstract from the "Bringing the Past to Life, Part 2: Papers in Honor of John M. D. Pohl" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We use metaphors for the human mind just as we do for religious, mythic and symbolic systems. These metaphoric systems reproduce the same social phenomena in ritual process and social organization. It should thus be clear that we find reintegration of social, symbolic, and metaphoric systems as a society is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lara Gonzalez Carretero.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeogastronomy: Grocery Lists as Seen from a Multidimensional Perspective" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Research into food in archaeology has traditionally focused on the potential resources and ingredients from the identification of recovered plant and animal remains, as well as cooking technologies including pottery, ground stone tools, fire installations, etc. However, the different processes behind the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cassandra Apuzzo. Kory Cooper. Elizabeth Brite. Aysulu Iskanderova. Azizkhan Toreniyazov.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Abu Muslim qala is a multi-phase site located west of the Sultanuizdag mountain range in Karakalpakstan, Uzbekistan, with an occupation beginning as early as the seventh century AD. Situated along the route connecting two of the region’s most prominent medieval cities, Abu Muslim qala may have played a role in the broader network of medieval metals trade...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aspen Greaves. Jargalan Burentogtokh. Jang-Sik Park. William Gardner.

This is an abstract from the "Steppe by Steppe: Advances in the Archaeology of Eastern Eurasia" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Two models are employed to explain iron objects in assemblages from nomadic peoples of Mongolia. One argument posits that pastoralists imported Chinese iron objects, and when they practiced metallurgy, used methods learned from Chinese craftsmen. Another model, notably argued for by Jang-Sik Park, suggests that nomads...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ruiliang Liu.

This is an abstract from the "Resources and Society in Ancient China" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The concept of the Arc, proposed in 1980s by Tong Enzheng and further developed by J. Rawson in the last 10 years, refers to the vast landscape stretching from northeast to southwest China. Its unique geography incorporates both pastoralism and agriculture, vital to the communication between the Eurasian Steppe to the Central Plains of China in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cristian Ramirez.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper will contextualize the diverse range of materials found in several shaft tombs throughout West Mexico. I argue that there are examples of ontological ecologies connected to animals and the seasons by understanding the connections between the landscape and the materials found in the tombs. I explore how the metamorphoses of several animals such...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Regina Meyer.

This is an abstract from the "Application of Geophysical Techniques to Military Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Lockhart cemetery is located within the Missouri Army National Guard’s Macon Training Site, Macon Missouri. The cemetery is located within the eastern half of Site 23MC1586, a site recorded within the Northwest section of the Macon Training Site. The western half of the site has foundation remains with historic deposits...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Dalmas. Lawrence Todd.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Differential use of obsidian sources by pre-contact peoples has been used to infer mobility patterns and occupations in the Absaroka mountains, Wyoming. Identifying sources of obsidian involves measuring the relative abundances of trace elements using eXRF and analyzing clusters to differentiate sources. Using a large dataset of 1,842 obsidian artifacts,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Maffie.

This is an abstract from the "Embodied Essence: Anthropological, Historical, and Archaeological Perspectives on the Use of Body Parts and Bodily Substances in Religious Beliefs and Practices" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Mexica tzompantli (“skull rack”) consisted of multiple, agricultural-style ordered rows of human skull-seeds. As such it constituted an enormous “battery pack,” or milpa, that contained, stored, and radiated the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Blaine Burgess. Jeffrey Ferguson. Suzanne Eckert.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Micaceous utility wares are commonly found at Ancestral Pueblo villages along the Rio Grande and adjacent areas, yet they have received comparatively little attention relative to the contemporary well-studied glaze wares. Compositional studies show that glaze ware vessels and their ingredients were often transported across the landscape, driven by a mix of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Hazard. John Dudgeon.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Plant microfossil analysis has been utilized for environmental reconstruction at numerous archaeological sites around the world; however, the process of preparing and examining samples is labor intensive, requiring skill and a large investment of time in order to manually obtain sufficient count numbers. Furthermore, observations based on microfossil...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samantha Mahan. Alexandra Kuo. David Stalla. Gregor Bader. Brandi MacDonald.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Eswatini is home to several rock art sites of the Late Stone Age in Southern Africa. Ochres, iron-oxide rich pigments, are present in many of these sites but their compositions are yet unknown. Previous studies of ochres have shown the potential for the identification of trade, resource management, and other aspects of human behavior. The analysis of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aleksandr Ulanov.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Microblade industries emerge around 20,000 BP and spread rapidly throughout Northeast Asia and Beringia. However, at the turn of the Pleistocene-Holocene, microblade industries disappear in some areas while persisting in other regions until the late Holocene. The reasons behind the uneven disappearance of microblade industries are not clear, and to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ting An.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Archaeobotany Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Lower Yangtze valley is widely recognized as the earliest center of rice agriculture. The process of rice domestication, based on the morphology of spikelet bases, has been traced to between 9000 and 5000 BP. However, the domestication status of rice before 9000 BP remains a subject of debate due to the near absence...

DOCUMENT Citation Only K. Carter. Crystal A. Dozier.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Microfossil and residue analysis can provide valuable information about past dietary practices and environments. Etzanoa (14CO3) or the Arkansas City Country Club site, is an Ancestral Wichita site attributed to the Lower Walnut Focus of the Great Bend Aspect. This site is situated on the Walnut River at its confluence with the Arkansas River and is dated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Kulick.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Geoarchaeology and Environmental Archaeology Perspectives on Earthen-Built Constructions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent geoarchaeological studies of earthen architecture have demonstrated the social and environmental information that may be gained from combined macroscopic, microscopic, and elemental analyses of mudbricks and degraded building materials. Micromorphology can elucidate construction...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carlos Simões. Antonio Herrera Herrera. Carolina Mallol. Vera Aldeias.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeophycology: New (Ethno)Archaeological Approaches to Understand the Contribution of Seaweed to the Subsistence and Social Life of Coastal Populations" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mesolithic shell mounds are prominent testaments of the prehistoric coastal adaptations along the Atlantic shores of Europe. In the Iberian Peninsula, postglacial hunter-gatherers largely turned to coastal regions and lived...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kyle Shaw-Müller.

This is an abstract from the "Bridging Time, Space, and Species: Over 20 Years of Archaeological Insights from the Cañoncillo Complex, Jequetepeque Valley, Peru, Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since excavations began at the Late Moche and Middle Horizon ceremonial center of Huaca Colorada (ca. 750–920 CE) in 2009, its expansive residential and production zones have attracted much attention for their ephemeral architecture. Largely located...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Verónica Vázquez López. Hannah Zanotto. Kazuo Aoyama. Takeshi Inomata.

This is an abstract from the "Aguada Fénix and the Middle Usumacinta Region: Interregional Interactions and Social Transformations in the Middle Preclassic Period" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pajonal is a Middle Preclassic site situated between La Venta and Aguada Fénix in Tabasco, Mexico. The site has a spatial layout similar to La Venta, formed by an elongated plaza with an E Group at its center, several structures to the east and west edges,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Stewart. Genevieve Dewar. Mike Morley. Andrew Carr. Kyra Pazan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While settlement of the world's high plateaus represents a final chapter in Homo sapiens’ global colonization, there were surprisingly early dispersals into high mountain systems. Africa possesses evidence for an early hominin presence in such settings, yet the processes by which human-highland engagements unfolded remain obscure. This paper introduces a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sharon DeWitte. Janet Montgomery. Julia Beaumont. Rebecca Redfern.

This is an abstract from the "New Work in Medieval Archaeology, Part 1: Landscapes, Food, and Health" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Previous bioarchaeological work in medieval London (ca. 1000–1540) has produced evidence of higher survivorship and lower hazards of mortality and, by inference, better health in adults with nonlocal isotopic (lead and strontium) signatures compared to those with local signatures. This may be a medieval example of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laresa Dern.

This is an abstract from the "Life and Death in Medieval Central Europe" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Throughout history, the Carpathian Basin has been a natural crossroads for populations migrating between Europe and the rest of Eurasia. During the medieval and early modern periods, three major migrations shaped the demography of the basin: 1) the migration of the Avars; 2) the conquest of the Magyars; and 3) the invasion of the Ottomans. While...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meradeth Snow. Michael Mathiowetz. Patricio Gutierrez Ruano. Emma Zoiss.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The world has always been connected through the movement of people, exchange of goods, and sharing of cultural traits; thus, evidence of such can be found within the genomes of individuals, as well as the archaeological sites they leave behind. The present research is comprised of multiple lines of inquiry that address questions of gene flow, genetic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samuel Duwe. Kurt Anschuetz. Kenny Wintch.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Near the summit of Comb Ridge, an imposing monocline that rises above the dry landscape of southeastern Utah, is a great series of petroglyphs that archaeologists call the Procession Panel. The panel depicts four lines of anthropomorphic figures converging on a central double circle. Dating to Basketmaker III/Pueblo I transition (ca. A.D. 650-800), the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sherman Johns. Jay Stephens. Virginie Renson. Keith Ashley.

This is an abstract from the "Geological and Technological Contributions to the Interpretation of Radiogenic Isotope Data" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Long-distance movement of copper across North America is often noted by archaeologists but little studied, with its provenance typically assumed to be the Great Lakes region. Such claims need to be tested, and recent studies have approached this problem using laser-ablation instrumentation to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stéphen Rostain. Antoine Dorison.

This is an abstract from the "Theorizing Prehistoric Large Low-Density Settlements beyond Urbanism and Other Conventional Classificatory Conventions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A dense system of prehispanic urban centers has been found in the Upano Valley of Amazonian Ecuador, in the eastern foothills of the Andes. Fieldwork and lidar analysis reveal a deeply anthropized landscape with complexes of monumental platforms; plazas and streets...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samantha Zahn-Hiepler.

This is an abstract from the "There and Back Again: Celebrating the Career and Ongoing Contributions of Patricia B. Richards" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The original design and use of the Garden Cemetery deathscape encouraged recreation and social interaction among the living and the dead. Forest Home Cemetery, a historic (1850–present) Garden Cemetery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, hosts more than a dozen events in the cemetery each year, including...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Kennedy. Maria Smith. Di Hu.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Surveillance: Seeing and Power in the Material World" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Spanish Empire drew on multiple forms of forced Indigenous labor in their American colonies during the sixteenth–eighteenth centuries. In the Andes, forced Indigenous labor was used to mine silver, craft textiles, grow sugar cane, and produce wine, among many other tasks critical to the colonial economy. Crucial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ann Merriman. Christopher Olson.

This is an abstract from the "What’s Canoe? Recent Research on Dugouts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Maritime Heritage Minnesota (MHM) has completed four Minnesota Dugout Canoe Projects that focused on 13 museum-held artifacts and one dugout canoe in situ in Lake Minnetonka. The artifacts were measured, photographed, drawn, and sampled for 14C dating. Two of the canoes underwent 3D analysis using a handheld scanner and underwater photogrammetry....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Giulietta Guerini.

This is an abstract from the "And They Look into the Mirror for Answers: Mirror Analysis to Understand Its Holder" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ancient Adriatic Sea (seventh–second century BC) was a place where consistent encounters and trades happened between the many peoples and cultures who lived on its shores (Etruscan, Picenes, Daunians, Greeks, Illirian . . .). This paper focuses on the use of mirrors in this area by analyzing the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emiliano Gallaga.

This is an abstract from the "And They Look into the Mirror for Answers: Mirror Analysis to Understand Its Holder" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. No matter what material they were made of, stone, metal, or crystal, or if it was cheap or expensive (gold, silver, copper, bronze, obsidian, or pyrite), mirrors are one of the most fascinating artifacts made by artisans in the past. The users of these items were normally high-class members of society...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Phillip Newman.

This is an abstract from the "Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While it has been established that the Natives of the Mississippian Ideological Interaction Sphere employed a number of magical plants toward entheogenic ends (Barrier 2020; Rafferty 2021; Simon and Parker 2018), e.g., Nicotiana spp., Datura spp., Ipomoea spp., etc., the general consensus has been that the use of N,N-Dimethyltryptamine, in the forms...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jo Osborn. Gaspar Morcote Rios. Francisco Javier Aceituno. José Iriarte.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ongoing research by the LASTJOURNEY project has investigated multiple archaeological sites located near rock art panels in the Serranía La Lindosa, Colombia, to explore human-environmental interactions during the Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene transition. Due to severe taphonomic conditions in the Colombian Amazon, only one of these sites, Cerro Azul, has...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicole Mathwich. Isaac Ullah.

This is an abstract from the "The Columbian Exchange Revisited: Archaeological and Anthropological Perspectives on Eurasian Domesticates in the Americas" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Columbian Exchange reshaped ecosystems and societies across the Western Hemisphere, and the Pimería Alta (today Sonora and Arizona) was no exception. The establishment of Spanish colonial missions in the Pimería Alta region beginning in 1687 marked a pivotal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel LaDu. Sean McCraw.

This is an abstract from the "What’s Canoe? Recent Research on Dugouts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1986, Sam McGahey published the first compendium of Mississippi dugout canoes. He listed the attributes of eight watercraft including recovery location, date of manufacture, wood type, method of construction, and dimensions. McGahey also included a composite drawing to better facilitate comparison. While dugouts are only infrequently...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shante Wilcox.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study explores how African American cemeteries in the Southeast have faced environmental and human threats, which makes it difficult for descendant communities to piece together their backgrounds. American law offers some protections against the intentional desecration of cemeteries, yet the maintenance and landscaping of individual cemeteries is left...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ludovic Celle.

This is an abstract from the "Bringing the Past to Life, Part 2: Papers in Honor of John M. D. Pohl" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Illustrating the past in a faithful and immersive way requires finding the right balance between the available archaeological data and the imagination that fills in the many blanks. This presentation is about such an experience, from a background in architecture and digital arts. The Zapotecs are one of the most...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nomaan Hasan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As material forms become central to the ongoing formulation of history and national identity in contemporary India, archaeology is acquiring an increasingly prominent place in the popular imagination. Initially motivated by the current regime’s interest in ascertaining the provenance of and recovering buildings allegedly usurped by Muslims, numerous...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Holt. Richard Madgwick.

This is an abstract from the "Integrating Isotope Analyses: The State of Play and Future Directions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The origins of Sardinia’s Bronze Age Nuragic Culture remain poorly understood. Few early Nuragic sites have been systemically excavated and published, making it difficult to assess the social, political, and economic processes that took place in the Middle Bronze Age and laid the foundations for the culture’s Late...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Asa Cameron. Christina Carolus. Bukhchuluun Dashzeveg.

This is an abstract from the "Steppe by Steppe: Advances in the Archaeology of Eastern Eurasia" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From the appearance of monumental traditions in the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1500–1000 BC) through the emergence of the Xiongnu state (ca. 250 BC–150 AD), populations of the semiarid Gobi-steppe of Mongolia underwent a series of dramatic transitions. These changing dynamics altered how people interacted with and moved within...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Isobel Coats.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Located in the foothills of the Manzano Mountains in southeastern New Mexico, the site of Comanche Springs has been an object of research and excavation spanning five decades. However, the social fabric of the people who once occupied this seventeenth-century colonial settlement remain unclear. Was this relatively isolated population an exemplary ‘hybrid’...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wolfgang Alders.

This is an abstract from the "Islands around Africa: State-of-the-Art and Future Directions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists in the Pacific have viewed islands as “laboratories” for studying social, agricultural, and ecological transformations. Can a similar approach be applied to the near-shore island environments of coastal East Africa, and what might island case studies contribute to broader anthropological understandings of East...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Keith Eppich.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper attempts to model Classic Maya society and social dynamics, as expressed at the ancient city-state of El Perú-Waka, Guatemala. Large-scale ceramic analysis, combined with traditional excavation and an ambitious test-pitting program, allow for novel perspectives on the internal functioning of this complex Native American society. The urban...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andreu Arinyo I Prats. Debora Zurro Hernandez.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeophycology: New (Ethno)Archaeological Approaches to Understand the Contribution of Seaweed to the Subsistence and Social Life of Coastal Populations" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The use of fire is essential for contemporary human populations. Yet the presence of an active population in the coastal Atacama desert, with limited land-based combustible, leaves us with the intriguing possibility that the ancestral...