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

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elic Weitzel.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. White-tailed deer were an important resource for both Native peoples and European colonists in precolonial and early colonial North America. Yet, evidence for possible overexploitation of deer prior to European colonization remains inconclusive. Some have argued that the species was resilient to human predation due in part to anthropogenic fire, which...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Parnas. Megan Savoy.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Parasitic infections present in human populations are often correlated with increased sedentism, interaction with domesticated animals, and urbanism. However, parasitic population trends are rarely used to infer ancient human behavior. In this study we examine the relationship between soil-transmitted helminth (STH) infection rates and small sedentary...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sara Becker.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research investigates skeletal evidence of labor (i.e., osteoarthritis and muscle entheseal changes), as performed by 525 females within the precontact Tiwanaku civilization (AD 500-1100) of the Bolivian and Peruvian Andes, and compares these labors to those performed by their modern-day indigenous Aymara descendants who live in the same region and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrea Cucina. Allan Ortega Muñoz.

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. Modern migration theories are based on a capitalistic view of economic forces for people (mostly males) to migrate in search of better economic conditions. However, the dynamics that characterize modern times are hardly applicable to prehispanic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Xinyi Liu.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Pastoralism in a Global Perspective" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There has been considerable recent momentum in documenting pastoral communities in the past who engaged with multi-resource subsistence strategies, including both husbandry and cultivation. This paper explores the potential conceptual conflict between cultivation and pastoral activities in the context of labour budget and surplus accumulation....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Baxter. Steve Nash. Michele Koons. Deborah Huntley.

This is an abstract from the "Emerging Voices in Mogollon Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Emily Haury wrote, “[Mogollon studies are] . . . a currently confused state of affairs. Perhaps in another half century [it] will have reached a state of broad acceptability and equilibrium” (1983:xix). Forty years into the prognostication, have we made inroads? This paper will explore the Denver Museum of Nature & Science’s efforts toward that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Semanko. Richard George. Martin Welker. Frank Ramos.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent studies on domestic turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo) and exotic scarlet macaws (Ara macao cyanoptera) have raised new questions about how prehistoric communities in the American Southwest maintained local avian management practices, developed breeding regimes, and fostered trade networks. While strontium isotopic analysis (87Sr/86Sr) can be used to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Schloss.

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 2" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The built environment of the Cañoncillo Archaeological Complex in the northern coast of Peru is dominated by earthen architecture constructed and modified within a span of 1,800 years. Although the sites within the Complex—Jatanca (500BCE–100 CE),...

DOCUMENT Citation Only C. Trevor Duke. Neill Wallis.

This is an abstract from the "Ceramic Petrographers in the Americas: Recent Research and Methodological Advances" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Technological innovations can have profound social consequences. Alterations to a given potting network change the pacing and tempo of interactions between experts and apprentices, effectively restructuring intergenerational relationships within a community. For this reason, experienced potters may...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tammy Buonasera. Shelby Anderson.

This is an abstract from the "American Foragers: Human-Environmental Interactions across the Continents" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ceramic technology was adopted approximately 2,800 and 2,500 years ago in Alaska, coinciding with a transition toward an economy increasingly focused on marine resource use. Despite expectations for marine resource use in early northern pottery, an initial pilot study found strong evidence for freshwater aquatic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Hutson. Travis Stanton. Audrey Rosen. José Francisco Osorio León. Francisco Pérez Ruíz.

This is an abstract from the "Entangled Legacies: Human, Forest, and Tree Dynamics" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Among the Classic and Postclassic period Maya, cacao beans were one of the most common forms of currency. Ancient Maya art depicts this money, which grows on trees, as tribute in courtly scenes most often populated by men. Yet contact period ethnohistoric documents consistently attribute ownership of trees to women. While contemporary...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Allison Densel. Bayarsaikhan Jamsranjav. Julia Clark. Khurelsukh Sosorbaram. Alicia Ventresca-Miller.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this study, we examined leather excavated from the Mongol period (1206-1368) cemetery of Dood Tsakhir located in Khuvsgul province, Mongolia. This cemetery had been looted in the recent past, yet there was quite good preservation. Leather fragments from clothing, footwear, and tools were recovered and analyzed using ZooMS (Zooarchaeology by Mass...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leah Grant. Scott Kirk.

This is an abstract from the "MARS General Military CRM Poster Session" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2002, the Installation Archaeologist at Fort Irwin National Training Center began an “Off Limits Monitoring” (OLM) archaeological site monitoring program to assess at-risk sites for disturbances and to provide recommendations on how to reduce risk and protect these sites in the training areas of Fort Irwin. A robust live-fire military training...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Helen Pollard. Dorothy Washburn.

This is an abstract from the "Ceramics and Archaeological Sciences 2024" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As a common material and highly plastic technology, in Mesoamerica ceramics are used to define spatial and chronological units of past social, political, and economic structures. In the present study, we compare (1) the use of the type-variety classification as a “chaîne opératoire,” (2) the use of INA and thin-section petrography in sourcing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Abigail Lewis. Jaime Awe.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Monkeys are prominently featured in Maya creation narratives, in Maya art, and more rarely in burial contexts. Despite their apparent importance in Maya ideology, however, previous research on monkeys in the Maya world has primarily focused on their primatological, and linguistic significance. In contrast to those studies, this research investigates the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robyn Cutright. Sarah Taylor. Gabriela Cervantes Quequezana.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Monte Lima is one of five large Late Intermediate sites in the lower Chira Valley described by Richardson et al. (1990) as representing a surge in local complexity resulting from Sicán and Chimú expansion to the far north coast. In 2023, we conducted preliminary excavations across this multicomponent site to establish chronology, better understand...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Brown.

This is an abstract from the "After the Feline Cult: Social Dynamics and Cultural Reinvention after Chavín" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The breakdown of Chavín interregional networks at the end of the Early Horizon had variable outcomes for high-altitude ceremonial centers in the Central Andes of Pasco, Peru. Within the Chaupihuaranga Canyon, neighboring mountaintop monuments have distinct sociohistorical trajectories that complicate temporal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Massey.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Proyecto de Investigación Arqueologica Tajahuana conducted excavations at two unique buildings located on the south summit of the Paracas site of Cerro Tajahuana in the Ica Valley, Peru. The larger of the structures, often referred to as a fortress, was built along the edge of a steep ravine above two large groups of figurative geoglyphs and isolated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Hechler.

This is an abstract from the "The Barbacoan World: Recognizing and Preserving the Unique Indigenous Cultural Developments of the Northern Andes" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Tawantinsuyu’s consolidation of northern Ecuador was characterized by unique moments of conquest, and reconquest, of the incredibly resistant Cara people. The principal Cara polities were the Cochasquí, Cayambe, Caranquí, Otavalo, and Quinche, each with monumental ritual...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sara Polk. Jeremy Wilson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since early archaeological investigations in the Ohio River Valley, scholars have speculated on the relationship between late pre-contact Fort Ancient villages and earlier Woodland mounds and earthworks. However, few have empirically addressed the association between these sites and their placement on a persistent landscape. We seek to determine the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dita Auzina.

This is an abstract from the "The Problem of the Monument: Widening Perspectives on Monumentality in the Archaeology of the Isthmo-Colombian Area" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Large stone and earth mounds of Cascal de Flor de Pino in the Caribbean of Nicaragua, which were built between 4 BC and AD 9, are unique in the region and have been suggested as a sign of social stratification and inequality. Indeed, reaching more than 30 m in diameter and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Francisco Corrales-Ulloa.

This is an abstract from the "The Problem of the Monument: Widening Perspectives on Monumentality in the Archaeology of the Isthmo-Colombian Area" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Several sites in the Diquis delta, an extensive alluvial plan in southeastern Costa Rica, present architectural ensembles consisting of artificial mounds up to 30 m diameter and a height between 1.1 and 1.4 m with cobblestone walls and ramp accesses, with stone spheres of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bettina Arnold.

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. Dead bodies are a source of a range of extreme emotions in human societies past and present, from superstitious fear of the dangerous dead (burials at cross-roads in medieval Germany) to ancestor veneration and the curation and display of skeletal remains (catacombs in Portugal, Italy, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only R. Carl DeMuth. Michael Workman. Amy Postalwait.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In today’s climate of budget cuts and decreasing enrollments, the importance of publicly engaged projects cannot be understated as they demonstrate our value to the public in a tangible way. Archaeological field schools represent obvious opportunities for public engagement and increased visibility for both archaeology programs and their host institutions....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Kansa. Sarah Whitcher Kansa. Joshua Wells. Kelsey Noack Meyers. Stephen Yerka.

This is an abstract from the "*SE Big Data and Bigger Questions: Papers in Honor of David G. Anderson" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists generate vast amounts of data in the form of databases, media files, spreadsheets, GIS files, reports, articles, and other literature. However, despite years of advocacy and data management investments, archaeological information is still poorly curated, scattered, incompatible, and haphazardly...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Ferrara.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Brewster-Mount home (ca. 1800) was razed in the 1960’s and excavated in 1982. An extensive assemblage of artifacts was recovered that ranged from construction materials, domestic ware, faunal remains, and more personal items. Recently, a new public history has highlighted the plurality of this home’s history as a site of African enslavement and labor...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Danielle Huerta.

This is an abstract from the "Hood Archaeologies: Impacts of the School-to-Prison Pipeline on Archaeological Practice and Pedagogy" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In archaeology, we like to theorize about those who lived at the margins of society, the systematically oppressed, the class struggle of those who existed at the bottom and the “creative” ways in which they “persisted,” “resisted,” and survived. However, despite this seemingly...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dennis Nicolas Lorenzo.

This is an abstract from the "Cuando los senderos divergen: Reconsiderando las interacciones entre los Andes Septentrionales y los Andes Centrales durante el 1ro y 2do milenio AEC / When Paths Diverge: Reconsidering Interactions between the Northern and Central Andes, First–Second Millennium BCE" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Morro de Eten is located on the coast of the Lambayeque valley, and due to the characteristics of its cultural material,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Gutierrez. Maria Clara Álvarez. Cristian Kaufmann. Agustina Massigoge. Luis A. Borrero.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mortality profiles are valuable for discussing hunting strategies and the effects of natural deaths on population age structure. Although these studies have been developed over several decades, there is still a lack of actualistic information that allows us to discuss patterns derived from different causes of death. This paper presents modern mortality...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Brown. Cory Look. Reg Murphy. Tamara Varney.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper discusses the preliminary results from recent excavations at Indian Creek, Antigua that have helped identify, document, and recover four late period Saladoid burials. Despite this being the longest continuously inhabited site on Antigua, and one of the longest continuously inhabited sites in the Caribbean, only one other complete burial has been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kendy Altizer.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Wetlands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Located between Charleston and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, the Santee Delta is a unique wetland habitat characterized by tidal marshes and low-lying barrier islands. Situated between the North and South Santee Rivers, the delta is a critical stopping point for a number of migratory birds and is also a popular duck hunting destination. However, historically,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara Veselka. Tessi Loeffelman. Joris Brattinga. Guido Van den Eynde. Christophe Snoeck.

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 urnfield cemetery of Tilburg-Udenhoutseweg was excavated in 2020 yielding a total of 230 cremation graves dating to the Late Bronze-Iron Age. The cremation graves were distributed over the entire cemetery as part of burial monuments, in clusters, or as individual graves. Osteological analyses of all the cremation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katie Zejdlik.

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. Mothers in academia occupy the intersection of two demanding worlds: the rigors of scholarly pursuits and the responsibilities of childrearing. They face systemic barriers, including gender bias, limited access to resources, and inflexible tenure-track structures. Balancing research, teaching,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Bacon.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster will discuss the benefits of using different combinations of rasters for large scale survey and the functional usage of viewing problematic mounds in the point cloud to weed away the false positives. Maya sites around Mesoamerica have and will be scanned with LiDAR. Since the turn of the century, technology has improved and now the data...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexander Geurds.

This is an abstract from the "The Problem of the Monument: Widening Perspectives on Monumentality in the Archaeology of the Isthmo-Colombian Area" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Isthmo-Colombian Area entails an archaeology of landscape engagement. Well-attested are the material traces of shifting networks of human ideas that, through communities of practice, led to the creation of monumental landscapes and, with regional specificity, shared...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David González-Álvarez.

This is an abstract from the "Developments and Challenges in Landscape Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. I envision Landscape Archaeology as a scientific program, comprising interdisciplinary methods and theories, that rigorously analyzes the long-term processes of landscape formation. This approach integrates archaeological, paleoenvironmental, and ethnographic datasets to produce socially relevant knowledge about human behavior,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Moriah McKenna. Kathleen Morrison. Jennifer Feng.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Archaeobotany, Part II" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Neolithic of southern India is notable for features known as Ashmounds, large accumulations of fired and often vitrified cattle dung. First described in the late nineteenth century, the dung-based composition of these impressive features was clearly established by the mid-twentieth century. To date, however, no...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zachary Hruby.

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. Lithic analysis at various sites in the Maya area, such as Plan de las Mesas, Kaminaljuyu, Copan, and Piedras Negras reveal regional differences between obsidian tool production, distribution, and consumption. Some patterns in obsidian economies were shared between these sites, as well as others more distantly located such as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Asta Rand. 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. Death was not the end for many members of Prehispanic Maya communities (250 BC–1560 AD). Indeed, the inclusion of human remains in structures that continued to function indicates that the dead (or their significance to the living) maintained social if not biological vitality. Although there is also ample evidence that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emmanuel Posselt Santoyo.

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. La conferencia pasada presenté algunas ideas sobre el estudio del movimiento en los sitios arqueológicos a partir del propio movimiento. Continuando con esta temática, en esta ocasión me enfocaré en la movilidad ritual al interior del sitio de Yucu Ñuu Dahui. Este asentamiento es emblemático de la Mixteca Alta debido a que se...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hannah Rucinski. Georgia Abrams. Tamira Brennan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2022, the Illinois State Archaeological Survey’s Curation Section undertook the monumental task of moving its ~24,000 ft3 Illinois Department of Transportation collections to a larger, modified-to-suit facility. These collections include some of the most significant projects carried out in Illinois. This paper addresses our methods for assessing the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Georgia Abrams. Hannah Rucinski. Tamira Brennan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As a result of moving its ~24,000 ft3 Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) collections to a more suitable facility, the Illinois State Archaeological Survey’s Curation Section is now more capable of addressing the present and future needs of the collections and its users. This paper details the move’s success and our ongoing efforts to create more...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandra Flores. Jarrod Burks.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ohio is home to a significant number of precontact period earthworks—mounds and enclosures—many of which have been affected by plowing to various degrees. While magnetometer surveys have produced remarkable images of earthwork ditches and embankments in the Middle Ohio Valley, few other instrument types have been employed. For this study, magnetometry,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emma Messinger. Bryan Hanks. Nick Suarez. Marc Bermann. Claire Ebert.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Preclassic (~1000 BC-AD 300) marked the appearance of increased socio-political integration and the emergence of inequality in the Maya lowlands. Over the course of the Preclassic, emerging elites invested in monumental construction projects and consolidated their ritual authority with ceremonial events, which occurred in large public plazas. As one of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Pierce. Brandon Ives.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Located along the Rio San Pedro in west central Nayarit, Mexico, the site of Peñitas was an important precolumbian center with at least two major occupational eras, achieving its greatest prominence during the Early/Middle Postclassic period as a major center within the Aztatlán Tradition. While few sites along the coastal plain have received detailed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandra Morton-Hayward. Beatrix Dudzik. Kimberlee Moran.

This is an abstract from the "The Arch Street Project: Multidisciplinary Research of a Philadelphia Cemetery" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As one of the first organs to decompose postmortem, brains are far more numerous than they should be in the archaeological record. >4,400 preserved human brains dating back some 12,000 years have been reported in the last four centuries; yet archaeological nervous tissues remain little-studied, with <1%...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Byram.

This is an abstract from the "The Ties That Bind: Cordage, Its Sources, and the Artifacts of Its Creation and Use" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since 2018, the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma Historic Preservation department has worked to reawaken pre-European contact knowledge of fiber technologies. Drawing on archaeological and ethnographic sources, this applied archaeology work is approached through both collaborative models of research and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hope Loiselle.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Around the Pacific Rim sea lions have served as a valuable food source for coastal communities throughout the Holocene and as a globally valued product in the expanding Eurasian and American colonial and imperial trade networks of the past few centuries. In this talk I discuss the hunting of both Japanese and Steller sea lions in the northwestern Pacific....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Smith. Samantha Krause. Amy Reid. Sabrina Boyd. Trey Lasater.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the 1970s, researchers recovered fluted points that appeared diagnostic of Clovis technology in Spring Lake, the spring-fed headwaters of the San Marcos River located along the Balcones Escarpment in Central Texas. Although recovered in mixed stratigraphic contexts, this evidence suggests that Ancestral Peoples may have visited the site for over 13,000...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emma Britton. John Welch. Brandi MacDonald. Fred Nials. April Oga.

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. As memories of World War II waned and the sixties swang, anthropologists developed a healthy distrust of State interests in our field. Relegated to the kids’ table, anthropologists disengaged from the State for many decades. Among the consequences of our broad professional disdain for officialdom is an inattention to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dominique Rissolo. Holley Moyes. Justin Simkins. Kay Vilchis Zapata. Graham Goodwin.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Actun Tunichil Muknal (ATM), located in Western Belize, is among the most touristed archaeological caves in the Maya area and is well known for its striking physical characteristics and intact cultural deposits. Though well surveyed and studied, the cave and its many fragile and at-risk offerings had not been digitally documented. A collaborative program...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Michalski. Brendan Nash. Thomas Talbot. Henry Wright. Elliot Greiner.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Excavations at the Belson site in southwest Michigan have revealed at least two stratified Clovis occupations below the plowed deposit. These data provide a rare opportunity to test foraging models against data from each occupation. With lines of evidence such as chert sourcing, technological analysis, and proteomics, we can begin to understand how...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meztli Hernández-Grajales. Luis Barba. Juan José García-Granero Fos. Alessandra Pecci.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mesoamerican food has been studied for years, and although much is known about many of the native practices and ingredients, the archaeological study of food in Mesoamerica is still developing and we are learning that we know far less of it than we thought. For this research, we applied a multiproxy approach, that involved the use of GC-MS, starch grain...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jack Berner. Denis Sharapov. Andrei Logvin. Irina Shevnina.

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. The Late Bronze Age (2100–1400 BCE) of the Ural-Tobol interfluve saw the emergence and decline of proto-urban fortified settlements occupied by pastoralists and metallurgists. These sites have been interpreted as centers for military defense, ritual-political nodes, strategic centers to protect natural resources or avoid...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chad Rankle. Hector Neff. Virginie Renson. Gina Buckley.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Migration and mobility have long been topics of interest in Nicaraguan prehistory, but research addressing these inquiries in the Greater Nicoya has relied primarily on linguistic analyses and the comparison of artifact typologies. Archaeological science is increasingly benefiting from the use of strontium isotope analysis as a proxy for mobility and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jerrod Seifert. Ashley Lingle. Attila Gyucha. Paul Duffy. Danielle Riebe.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Too often the conservation, visualization, and management of archaeological sites are afterthoughts of excavations. Heritage preservation and presentation are only considered after the trowels leave, with site managers working within the confines of what they’ve been given and the public viewing what is left . Excavation decisions – whether knowingly or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Velasco.

This is an abstract from the "Beyond the Ancestors: New Approaches to Andean "Open Sepulchers"" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Open sepulchers (chullpas) are typically thought to have marked the social and territorial boundaries of Andean ayllus, corporate landholding groups based on descent. This proposed relationship between chullpas and ayllus follows from colonial-era accounts of Andean mortuary practices and finds empirical support in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carson Manfred. Erika Hartley. Kieran Blake.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Firearms and ammunition were used by military officers, traders, European settlers, and Native Americans in hunting and warfare throughout New France. To better understand military forts, trading posts, and European settlements, flintlock-related objects can be examined to determine the types of firearms being used at Fort St. Joseph, who was using them...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lydia Wilson Marshall. Thomas Biginagwa.

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. Archaeologists have long considered surveillance as a tool of control—for example, over enslaved or colonized peoples. But what of cases where the gaze goes both ways? The first two decades of the twentieth century were marked by seismic sociopolitical upheavals in what is now southwestern Tanzania: German colonialism...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine Hernandez. Gabrielle Vail.

This is an abstract from the "The Ties That Bind: Cordage, Its Sources, and the Artifacts of Its Creation and Use" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ropes and cords in the form of twisted vegetal fibers, or entwined vegetation or serpent bodies, are a common component of Mesoamerican iconography from the Formative period (1500 BCE–250 CE) into the contact era. They serve a variety of functions such as measuring/framing devices, bindings for captives...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zoe Milburn.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. On October 18, 2022, the Department of the Interior published the Proposed Rule (87 FR 63202) seeking to revise the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (43 CFR 10). Modifications include the introduction of clearer timelines and terminology, an emphasis on forthright and effective consultation with stakeholders, and addressing problems...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Haas. Adrienne Frie. Kevin Garski.

This is an abstract from the "In Search of Solutions: Exploring Pathways to Repatriation for NAGPRA Practitioners (Part III)" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper provides a case study of NAGPRA implementation within the University of Wisconsin System focusing on two institutions: the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. Both institutions have long-standing programs of Midwest archaeology, within their...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Noah Safari.

This is an abstract from the "In Search of Solutions: Exploring Pathways to Repatriation for NAGPRA Practitioners (Part IV): NAGPRA in Policy, Protocol, and Practice" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. It has been over three decades since the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was signed into law on November 16, 1990. NAGPRA was passed in a different information environment than the one at present; electronic documents are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Basil Stewart.

This is an abstract from the "In Search of Solutions: Exploring Pathways to Repatriation for NAGPRA Practitioners (Part IV): NAGPRA in Policy, Protocol, and Practice" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. NAGPRA practice entails working with death. This occurs when practitioners are engaging with the Dead, the circumstances of their occurrence in collections, and the wider scope of systemic violence that prompted the need for NAGPRA. NAGPRA practice is a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joseph Lindler. Savannah Bornheim. Jordan Jeffreys. Greta Napotnik. Nina Schreiner.

This is an abstract from the "In Search of Solutions: Exploring Pathways to Repatriation for NAGPRA Practitioners (Part IV): NAGPRA in Policy, Protocol, and Practice" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Thirty years beyond enactment of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), there is still much to be done. The growing curation crisis and renewed efforts by Tribal Nations and archaeologists at the South Carolina Institute of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thatcher Seltzer-Rogers.

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. The passage of NAGPRA in 1990 has had a tremendous impact on archaeological investigations, museum curation practices, and active relationships with Native American communities, notably those federally recognized. Although many archaeologists fretted that NAGPRA would significantly...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Lim. Sean Gleason. Lynn Church.

This is an abstract from the "Collaborative and Community Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the face of a rapidly changing climate, Alaska Native Yup'ik (pl. Yupiit) communities on the Bering Sea are increasingly empowered and motivated to protect their landscape heritage—facilitated in part by collaborative projects with outside institutions like the Quinhagak Archaeological Project (2009–present). In this paper we show how high...

DOCUMENT Citation Only B Charles. Shannon Freire.

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. Throughout her career, Patricia Richards conveyed experience and knowledge through storytelling. Impassioned and insightful, these stories often reveal episodes forgotten by written history. As one example, the Milwaukee County Poor Farm Cemetery (MCPFC) represents thousands of stories,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Theodore Marks. George Leader. Abi Stone. Kaarina Efraim. Rachel Bynoe.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Namib Sand Sea (NSS) in Namibia is known to preserve a wide variety of Pleistocene-age archaeological sites. However, few Middle Stone Age (MSA) sites in this region have been systematically investigated and basic questions around chronology and technological organization remain open. Here we examine Narabeb Pan, an open air MSA surface site deep in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelsey Herndon. Rob Griffin. Brian Odom. Dan Irwin. Tom Sever.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For more than four decades, NASA has played an outsized role in advancing the use of satellite imagery for archaeological applications. Starting in the 1980s, NASA archaeologist Dr. Tom Sever organized the first conference on archaeological applications of remote sensing, infusing NASA Earth Observations into cutting-edge archaeological research being...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nick Long.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For the Summer of 2023, I traveled to Cortez, Colorado to participate in a lab internship at Crow Canyon Archaeological Center. I was given the opportunity to conduct a personal project dealing with a set type of artifacts of my own choosing. For my project, I decided to look at the gaming pieces from the Haynie site (5MT1905). My goal for this project was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tracie Mayfield.

This is an abstract from the "Building Bridges: Papers in Honor of Teresita Majewski" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The islands of Old Providence and Santa Catalina, located 130 miles of the coast of Nicaragua and around 8.5 square miles in size, have been a center of global trade, resource extraction, and military action since 1629, when the English Puritan venture capitalists of the Providence Island Company—whose shareholders also held stakes...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erwin Roemer.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Natural resources conservation arrangements, including easements on land, have existed in the US for many years, with origins in the Conservation Movement dating to the time and efforts of T.R. Roosevelt. In recent years, the land conservation movement has grown across the US, and often involves support from national, state and local governments partnering...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Seidemann. Christine Halling.

This is an abstract from the "*SE New Orleans and Its Environs: Historical Archaeology and Environmental Precarity" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Louisiana's River Parishes between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, alternately known as "the Industrial Corridor" or "Cancer Alley," has long been a place and landscape with clashing interests of industrial uses, economic development, environmental justice, and historic and archaeological preservation....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Gusick. Nakia Zavalla. Wendy Teeter. Amber Lincoln.

This is an abstract from the "In Search of Solutions: Exploring Pathways to Repatriation for NAGPRA Practitioners (Part I)" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In California, there are approximately 109 federally recognized tribes and at least 55 tribes not recognized by the federal government—the most of any state in the United States. Most, if not all, of these tribes have been displaced by the colonial occupation that ushered in the California...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Madeleine Yakal. Iman Nagy.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeology as a discipline emerged as an extension of colonialism, and although recent efforts over the last several decades have worked to "decolonize" the field, non-local perspectives continue to be prioritized by Western institutions. This paper seeks to address perpetual inequality within the field of archeology by highlighting normalized practices...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Abigail Judkins. Katherine Peck. Martin Welker.

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. European settlers in the Americas brought with them a familiar suite of domesticated plants and animals and frequently relied upon them for subsistence. Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, European colonial powers became involved in the fur trade,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Seymour. Jon Simon Suarez.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster highlights surveys by the US Army Corps of Engineers in North Carolina’s Outer Banks and Florida’s Tampa Bay. These studies illustrate how large-scale surveys and novel techniques are improving our ability to identify submerged resources, but are also increasing the need to develop strategies to assess the significance of potential features, in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lucía Cobo Sánchez. João Cascalheira.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Escoural Cave (Portugal) represents a key window into Neanderthal-carnivore interactions during the Middle Paleolithic. Excavations in the 60’s and 90’s unearthed abundant archaeological findings, including Neolithic burial grounds, cave art and Upper and Middle Paleolithic remains. The Middle Paleolithic layers are characterized by abundant quartz...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Enrique Baquedano. Juan Luis Arsuaga. César Laplana. Belén Márquez. Rosa Huguet.

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. In the Des-Cubierta Cave, in the Central System Range of the Iberian Peninsula, 35 crania of large herbivores (Bison priscus, Bos primigenius, Cervus elaphus, and Stephanorhinus hemitoechus) were recovered in an area where the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gavin Easley. Christine VanPool.

This is an abstract from the "Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Death exists at the cornerstone of every culture. Each culture has death rituals through which humans seek to control the unknown. These rituals may focus on the event of dying and “crossing over” as dictated by each culture, but also include the role the dead might play even after their bodily death. Archaeologists have focused on mortuary ritual,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Heath-Stout.

This is an abstract from the "Politics of Heritage Values: How Archaeologists Deal with Place, Social Memories, Identities, and Socioeconomics" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. When I told a leading Massachusetts disability activist that I was starting an archaeological heritage research project on the state institutions for people with intellectual disabilities, he flinched. “But those are sites of trauma and oppression, nothing empowering like...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dela Kuma.

This is an abstract from the "Crafting Archaeological Practice in Africa and Beyond: Celebrating the Contributions of Ann B. Stahl to Global Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. My research on local tastes and embodied practices during the Afro-European trade in Ghana is greatly influenced by Ann Stahl’s extensive theoretical work in West Africa. The 19th and early 20th centuries in West Africa witnessed a surge in the demand and export of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tom Moore.

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. The mega-sites that emerged in the European Late Iron Age (ca. third century BCE–first century CE), often referred to as oppida, have struggled to be understood in the context of traditional concepts of urbanism. Comparative approaches to urbanism have, however,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kasia Szremski.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Late Intermediate Period, the north-central coast of Peru was inhabited by a number of small but dynamic polities, or señoríos, that were actively engaged in interregional networks of trade, intermarriage, and warfare. However, even though the north-central coast was sandwiched between the Chimu and Inka, we know relatively little about how...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Madeline Snyder.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There has been a long history of settlement and household archaeology in the Belize River valley that has added significantly to our understanding of everyday people in the Maya lowlands. This research has allowed us to examine questions related to broader cultural norms and traditions, as well as better understand the distribution of settlement across the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Whittington. Soren Frykholm.

This is an abstract from the "Checking the Pulse II, Current Research in Oaxaca Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Intermediate levels of social organization—above the household, but below the entire settlement, city, or polity—are notoriously difficult to pinpoint in archaeological contexts, but they nevertheless represent a crucial frontier for building new archaeological theory to understand daily social life in the past. Ethnographic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arlene Rosen. Jennifer Farquhar. James Eighmey. Sarantuya Dalantai. Yadmaa Tserendagva.

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. Archaeological surveys in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia have begun to reveal new information about the landscape distribution and seasonal movements of mobile populations in this semi-arid steppe environment on the eve of the late Holocene adoption of pastoralism. However, until recently we’ve had little information about...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anneke Janzen. Kristine Martirosyan-Olshansky.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Pastoralism in a Global Perspective" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Neolithic settlements appeared across the Southern Caucasus in the early sixth millennium BCE. Ongoing excavations, along with zooarchaeological and isotopic research, are clarifying how these communities used the landscape and managed livestock in the context of mixed farming. In this paper we present new zooarchaeological data from recent...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniella Bar-Yosef Mayer. Iris Groman-Yaroslavski. Naomi Porat.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) site of Nahal Hemar Cave in the Judean Desert yielded, among others, many beads made of wood, plaster, shell and stone. The study of 35 stone beads recovered at the site highlights three main inter-related aspects: a broad range of raw materials used, the workmanship of bead production according to their types, and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Suzanne Pilaar Birch.

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches in Zooarchaeology: Addressing Big Questions with Ancient Animals" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper synthesizes zooarchaeological and stable isotope evidence from the eastern and western Mediterranean to consider the influence of humans on island landscapes and ecosystems from the earliest Neolithic through the Bronze Age. How did the importation of new faunal species, whether...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Luis Soto Rodriguez.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Applications of Network Analysis" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper seeks to present the results of network analysis for the case of the chiefdom communities that inhabited the northwestern slope of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta from AD 400 to 1600 in the El Congo microbasin. Through the use of statistical algorithms in R language and databases in geographic information systems, this paper...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Schwendler. Charles Egeland. Jing Deng. Minjeong Kim. Christopher Nicholson.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Applications of Network Analysis" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Magdalenian (ca. 20,000 to 14,000 cal BP) of western and central Europe witnessed both a rapid expansion of Upper Paleolithic human populations after the Last Glacial Maximum and the creation and circulation of an unprecedented abundance and diversity of portable decorated items. The materials, design details, and chrono-spatial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hannah Hoover.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Applications of Network Analysis" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The application of social network analysis to archaeological research in the US Southeast has largely focused on interregional mobility and exchange. In this paper, I instead explore how small-scale social networks maintained by households shape larger-scale community structures. For several millennia in the US Southeast, households were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara Mills. Kelsey Hanson.

This is an abstract from the "States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives." session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2006, Lynne Sebastian synthesized political models used for Chaco society and argued that past interpretations were too heavily reliant on outdated models that stressed hierarchy and neo-evolutionary typologies. She especially drew on Susan McIntosh’s (1999) book “Beyond Chiefdoms: Pathways to Complexity...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elysia Petras. Brandi MacDonald.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents the preliminary results of neutron activation analysis (NAA) conducted at the University of Missouri Research Reactor’s Archaeometry Lab on coarse earthenware sherds recovered archaeologically from three pre-emancipation era plantation sites on Anguilla and three on Sint Maarten. Using sourcing studies, this research investigates...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Kerr.

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. Buildings archaeology somewhat lags behind the broader discipline of archaeology in its adoption and creation of new theoretical propositions possibly due to the misconception that the built environment lies solely in the remit of architectural historians rather than archaeologists. It is not, however, sitting...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karolina Werens. John Pouncett. Christophe Snoeck. Rick Schulting. Andrzej Weber.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A new bioavailable strontium isotope (87Sr/86Sr) baseline was created for the Baikal region, covering c. 1.5 million square kilometres. With an ongoing, extensive archaeological investigation of c. 200 prehistoric cemetery sites in this vast area, there is a need for a reliable isotopic model of environmental strontium variation to contextualise human and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dakota Larrick. Charlotte Pearson. Christopher Baisan. Nicholas Kessler.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the years, several thousand archaeological wood samples have been collected across Northwest Mexico, but dating them has proven problematic because of short tree ring sequences, poor sample quality, and complex growth patterns. A majority of these originated in cliff dwelling sites, which form a central part of an inter-regional network of relatively...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lawrence Loendorf.

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. The shield-bearing warrior, a widely recognized rock art motif on the Northwestern Plains, has a more complex pedigree than archeologists originally recognized. Examples in northcentral Montana are radiocarbon dated to the Late Archaic while other sites in southwestern Montana may date to the same time. Adding to the...