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

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Hampton.

This is an abstract from the "Thinking with, through, and against Archaeology’s Politics of Knowledge" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeology’s role and capacity to present multiple narratives about the past situates the discipline as a locus for competing power dynamics: What stories about the past are prioritized? How are stories constructed? Which stories are utilized for crafting a generalizable theory about “human nature”? At the same...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Suzanne Baker.

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. Ometepe is the largest island in Lake Coçibolca (Lake Nicaragua), itself the largest body of freshwater between Lake Titicapa in South America and the Great Lakes of North America. Its topography is unique, composed of two volcanoes—one active (Concepción) and one ancient...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christina Torres.

This is an abstract from the "The Marking and Making of Social Persons: Embodied Understandings in the Archaeologies of Childhood and Adolescence" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent conversations about body modification demonstrate that alterations to human form are experiential and are not solely oriented towards a final product. In thinking of prehistoric head shaping practices—practices engaged in with the bodies of infants—archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alejandra Gutierrez Lara.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. I use an autoethnographic and feminist perspective to reflect on how the field practice of preventive archaeology has been developing in Colombia. I draw on experiences from my own work to question the naturalization of inequalities and violence present in everyday interactions during the implementation of development projects, involving different actors...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melissa Burham.

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 Maya site of Ceibal, Guatemala, became a preeminent center in the Pasión Region of the southern lowlands over the Preclassic period (ca. 950 BCE-350 CE). During the latter centuries of this period, minor temple complexes were built at regular intervals within the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Walker.

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 Llanos de Moxos (Moxos) in the Bolivian Amazon is a useful case study for questions of settlement pattern, agricultural intensification, and social organization, particularly in light of its ambiguous status as both Amazonian and Andean, and neither Andean nor...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joey Williams. Rui Mataloto. Karilyn Sheldon.

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. If visibility is undertheorized in archaeology, then invisibility is doubly so. This paper investigates the avoidance of surveillance in a colonial context. The central Alentejo, Portugal, was, in the first century BCE, home to watchtowers established under the new Roman administration of the region. In this remote...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jenny Ni. Severin Fowles. Richard Mermejo.

This is an abstract from the "Collaborative Archaeology at Picuris Pueblo: The New History" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A portion of a retired race track was excavated in 2023 on Picuris tribal lands within the right-of-way of a planned infrastructure project. Just one of Picuris’s many race tracks, the feature draws our attention to the ongoing heritage of Chacoan “roads” in the northern Rio Grande region, while also underscoring the local...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tristram Kidder. Seth Grooms. Maggie Spivey.

This is an abstract from the "*SE Not Your Father’s Poverty Point: Rewriting Old Narratives through New Research" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Poverty Point site in northeast Louisiana is unique—in size, monumental architecture, artifact content, and history—and the site defies standard functional explanations for hunter-gatherer settlements. In contrast to existing concepts arguing that the site’s monumental constructions were built over...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Norman Easton.

This is an abstract from the "Posters on the Archaeology of the Southern Yukon-Alaska Borderlands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Little John site (Borden #KdVo-6) holds a sequential record of human occupation from the Allerød through to the present day, including early and later expressions of the Chindadn complex, the Denali complex, the Northern Archaic tradition, the Late Prehistoric/Dene, the Contact Transitional of the nineteenth and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brendan Culleton. Margaret Davis. Richard Rosencrance. Thomas Connolly.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As part of an ongoing collaboration dating ethnographic collections, the University of Oregon sent a piece of a leather moccasin to the PSU Radiocarbon Lab for dating. The moccasin was recovered in 1938 from a near-surface deposit of Roaring Springs Cave, Oregon. Another moccasin from this context produced an anomalously old radiocarbon age – 7670±35 BP –...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily McCuistion.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Eagle Nest Canyon, Texas: Papers in Honor of Jack and Wilmuth Skiles" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents the historical and contemporary context of radiocarbon dating in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands (LPC) archeological region of southwest Texas. It entwines discussions of early radiocarbon dating history, evolving dating technology and standards, regional infrastructure development,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Morgan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Radiocarbon summed probability distributions (SPDs) have become increasingly popular as means to track demographic trends, and by association, any variety of explanations for changes in past behavior. This paper uses SPDs from across California to develop hypotheses as to the ostensible effects of climate, technological change, population movements, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Pestle. Carmen Laguer-Díaz. M. Jesse Schneider. Stephen Jankiewicz. Clark Sherman.

This is an abstract from the "Coloring Outside the Lines: Re-situating Understandings of the Lifeways of Earliest Peoples of the Circum-Caribbean" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent fieldwork in the intertidal zone of southwestern Puerto Rico has revealed a landscape of over 40 heretofore undocumented shell mounds (some as large as 4,200 m2 and as tall as 10 m above the surrounding tidal plain) formed by millennia of targeted human foraging...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marc Wolf. Elisandro Garza.

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. Mesoamerican archaeological sites often take advantage of the surrounding natural landscape to enhance both the political machinations of the ruling elite and the sacred ideals of the community at large. In Guatemala, Belize, Mexico, and other highland or steep regions, archaeologists have repeatedly demonstrated the dynamic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Will Pratt. Gregory Knapp.

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. Beginning around AD 600, the Barbacoan speaking peoples of the northern Ecuadorian highlands began building alternating ridge and canal raised field systems. One of the leading hypothesized functions of these raised fields is their role in nutrient cycling. In this scenario,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Olivia Jones. Megan Leight.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology to Transform and Disrupt: Teaching, Learning, and the Pedagogies of the Future" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Students studying anthropology and art history at West Virginia University (WVU) have not always had access to experiential learning and laboratory training experiences. However, recent initiatives by early career faculty have boosted student engagement and prompted career success. In this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Utting. Agustin Capriati. Annette Oertle. Dylan Gaffney.

This is an abstract from the "The Current State of Archaeological Research across Southeast Asia" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation will introduce the Raja Ampat Project, a multidisciplinary effort to explore evidence for 1) the initial settlement of eastern Wallacea, and 2) how humans adapted to and transformed island environments over time. The Project has four main strands: 1) excavations of new material, 2) material culture...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Delancey Griffin. Emily Pihlaja. Jared Barlament.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ralph Solecki, made famous for his work arguing for the “humanity” of the Neanderthals of Shanidar Cave, contributed invaluably in his early career to Northeastern American archaeology by excavating sites in the New York metropolitan area which would soon become inaccessible due to urban expansion. First collected in the 1930s, the materials in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Liye Xie.

This is an abstract from the "Resources and Society in Ancient China" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper explores a series of inquiries regarding the role of rammed-earth construction during the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age in China, specifically focusing on how the organization of human resources propelled social transformation. The study encompasses the following dimensions: First, community dynamics. How did the collaborative...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Kelly. Madeline Mackie. Andrew Kandel.

This is an abstract from the "Big Ideas to Match Our Future: Big Data and Macroarchaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Researchers have long been aware of an apparently rapid increase ca. 40,000–45,000 BP in the frequency of “symbolic” artifacts in the Old World paleolithic record. However, some hypothesize that if not for taphonomic loss the data would instead show a gradual increase in such artifacts’ frequency during the Middle Stone...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Poister. Steve Baumann. Richard Greene.

This is an abstract from the "Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Subterranean" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. After more than a century of sustained looting, the lava tube caves of El Malpais have lost volumes from what was once an unparalleled record of cave use by Ancestral Pueblo people. Occasionally, artifacts stolen from the caves appear on public auction blocks, offering a brief glimpse of what used to be. In general, archaeologists seeking...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nolan Ferar. Jonathan Haws. João Cascalheira.

This is an abstract from the "Expedient Technological Behavior: Global Perspectives and Future Directions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Expediency, in the sense of applying low-cost, informal technological solutions, characterizes a great deal of hominin technological behavior over time. The degree to which expedient technological behaviors are culturally-laden versus culturally-void remains an open question—one with important implications for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carrie Heitman. Octavius Seowtewa. Curtis Quam. Gilbert Yuselew. Michael Gchachu.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Native communities have long been excluded from the process of knowledge construction about their ancestral places. This exclusion has taken many forms: lack of voice or authority in museum excavations, curation, and exhibits; inaccessibility of collections that were removed from Native lands to geographically distant institutions or sold to collectors;...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tomás Gallareta Cervera. George Bey III. Rossana May.

This is an abstract from the "The Bolonchen Regional Archaeological Project: 25 Years of Research in the Puuc" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From 2007 to 2016, a team of archaeologists under the direction of George J. Bey III excavated Structure N1065E1025, a pyramid temple dated to the Terminal Classic period and located at the Yaxché group in the heart of the archaeological site of Kiuic, Yucatán. The structure had a complex construction...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Heaney. Bradymir Bravo. Frank Salomon. Chris Stantis. Tiffiny Tung.

This is an abstract from the "Arqueología colaborativa en los Andes: Casos de estudios y reflexiones" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. To prehispanic Andeans in central Peru, donning a facial-bone mask, a wayu, reanimated the dead and honored ancestral victories. Following these masks’ description in the c. 1608 Quechua-language manuscript of Huarochirí, scholars presume Spanish priests destroyed them to extirpate the “idolatry” of ancestor worship....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Coughlan. Kelly Derr. David Lewis. James Johnston. Bart Johnson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Oregon, Indigenous oral histories and ethnohistories document the use of fire as an important part of the Indigenous subsistence system. Fire was used for plant tending, harvesting, and collecting, but also in hunting. Transitions in hunting technologies are often associated with significant changes in entire subsistence systems. For instance, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Clasby.

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. The border between Peru and Ecuador has often been viewed heuristically as a boundary between the cultures of the Northern...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael D'Aprix. Nicola Sheyhing. Jesper de Raad.

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 present the outcomes of a second survey of European and world archaeologists intended to understand and explore the realities of early career archaeologists in commercial settings. The first survey conducted by the European Association of Archaeologists Early Careers Archaeologists Community focused only on academic archaeologists while...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ismael Sánchez-Morales.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The cave of El’Aliya on the Atlantic coast of Morocco contained a Middle Stone Age (MSA) occupational sequence that produced Aterian lithic assemblages (i.e. with tanged tools) dated to Marine Isotope Stage 3 (Layers 6 and 5). The site was excavated during the late 1930s and 1940s and the lithic assemblages from the MSA deposits were originally described...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jordan Thompson. Rachel Horowitz. John Blong.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Bitterroot Mountains mark both an ecological and social margin between the Southern Columbia Plateau and the Plains region. The Nez Perce (Nimíipuu) Tribe traditionally followed a seasonal subsistence cycle routinely crossing these ecological and social boundaries, referencing long-term landscape and resource knowledge while negotiating complex social...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Bollwerk. Jillian Galle. Fraser Neiman.

This is an abstract from the "Storeroom Taphonomies: Site Formation in the Archaeological Archive" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Flowerdew Hundred, a 1,000-acre plantation tract located on the south side of the James River in Virginia, was the focus of decades of excavations by the College of William and Mary and University of California, Berkeley. Three Flowerdew sites are among the earliest seventeenth-century settlements occupied by enslaved...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Natalia Moragas.

This is an abstract from the "What Happened after the Fall of Teotihuacan?" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Life in the ancient city of Teotihuacan did not end with the collapse of Classic period society, but rather, until the constitution of the current zone of archaeological monuments, the area was a place of residence, rituals, and somewhat later, pastures and crops. We must remember that the period from AD 600 until 1521 occupies a broader...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kara Larson.

This is an abstract from the "Breaking the Mold: A Consideration of the Impacts and Legacies of Richard W. Redding" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Current discussions of herd management strategies employed in the Early Bronze Age III (EB III) in southern Israel-Palestine are often painted with a generalized brush. However, emergent data from the early urban EB III site of Tell el-Hesi, Israel, suggests a site-level perspective is required,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Grillo. Mary Prendergast. Natalie Mueller. Agness Gidna. Giuseppina Mutri.

This is an abstract from the "Exploring Long-Term Pastoral Dynamics: Methods, Theories, Stories" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Scholars increasingly emphasize that pastoralist foodways centered on livestock systems—being variable and flexible—are especially responsive to climate stress and other drivers of food insecurity. We ask something ostensibly simple but as yet poorly understood in eastern Africa: How, and why, have pastoralist foodways...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Rafael McCormick Alcorta.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Networks of long-distance exchange in quotidian commodities are essential aspects of prehistoric economies. On the Pacific Slope of Guatemala, there was no more important commodity than obsidian, which accounts for almost all cutting edges found in archaeological contexts. Obsidian sourcing studies on the Pacific Slope have been limited, relied on very...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tatsuya Murakami. Shigeru Kabata. Julieta M. Lopez J.. Jorge Humberto Toledo. Hironori Fukuhara.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Tlalancaleca was one of the largest settlements before the rise of Teotihuacan in Central Mexico and likely provided cultural and historical settings for the creation of Central Mexican urban traditions during later periods. Yet its urbanization process as well as socio-spatial organization remain poorly understood. The Proyecto Arqueologico Tlalancaleca,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lee Reininghaus. Allyson Pease.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of the Southern Yukon-Alaska Borderlands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The headwaters of Beaver Creek are located in the Nutzotin Mountains in northeastern Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve. Beaver Creek originates at Beaver Lake near the community of Chisana and flows east to the to the Alaska-Yukon border before heading north to join the White River. An important feature of the Beaver...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Benjamin. Michael O'Leary.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2020 the Deep History of Sea Country project team published the discovery of two underwater archaeological sites in Murujuga Sea Country (Dampier Archipelago), Western Australia. Further lab analysis and field-based observations have been since undertaken, and these contribute to our understanding of the submerged sites within the broader setting within...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Conard.

This is an abstract from the "Examining Spatial-Temporal Variation in the Lithic Technology of the Early Upper Paleolithic" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The study of the Swabian Aurignacian goes back to fieldwork in the 1880s in Bockstein Cave in the Lone Valley. Subsequent generations of archaeologists have excavated well-known sites including Hohlenstein-Stadel and Vogelherd in the Lone Valley and Geißenklösterle, Hohle Fels, and Sirgenstein...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Philip Mink. Michael Detisch. Jacob Coffey. Alan Sullivan III.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster presents the results of recent geochemical analysis of ceramics and other clay artifacts in the Upper Basin Region of the Baaj Nwaavjo I'tah Kukveni Grand Canyon National Monument. We will compare the geochemical composition of Tusayan Grayware and San Francisco Mountain Grayware sherds, acquired by portable x-ray fluorescence (pXRF), to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Semon. Rachel Cajigas. Elliot Blair. Matthew Sanger. Alain Plattner.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this poster, we present the preliminary findings on recent fieldwork at the Musgrove Shell Ring. Due to the ring’s low topography and dense vegetation coverage, archaeologists did not identify the ring prior to the review of new LIDAR data, which showed an anomaly approximately 60 m in diameter. Fieldwork consisted of a shell density survey and multiple...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Collard. Jayc Sedlmayr.

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. When considering the claim that it has long been common for people to attribute spiritual power to certain body parts and bodily substances of humans and nonhuman animals and incorporate them into their religious beliefs and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Roberto López Bravo.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Five years of survey and excavations are providing data regarding Postclassic and Contact-period Central Chiapas, allowing new proposals regarding the functioning of the Chiapanec polity. This study presents an analysis of the distribution of the population near ancient Chiapan, the capital of the Chiapanec polity at the time of the arrival of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mikael Voltaire. Timothy Pugh.

This is an abstract from the "Hydro-Ecological System of the Maya in Petén, Guatemala" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. E-Groups in the Maya world are believed to have had ritual purposes, serving as meeting centers where political meetings or markets may have taken place. They are also believed to have celebrated solar cycles. At Nixtun-Ch’ich’ three or four E-Groups are aligned on the site’s east-west axis. Our excavation in one of the E-Groups...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alex DeGeorgey.

This is an abstract from the "Fulfilling a Nation’s Promise: The Search, Recovery, and Accounting Efforts of DPAA and Its Partners" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) is dedicated to identifying and honoring missing US service personnel, particularly from World War II and other conflicts. Recent search and recovery efforts conducted by Alta Archaeological Consulting (ALTA), through the DPAA Partnerships and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carole Nash.

This is an abstract from the "Putting Archaeology to Work: Expanding Climate and Environmental Studies with the Archaeological Record" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists have long recognized that partnerships with practitioners from allied disciplines enrich our contributions and create many-layered interpretations of the sites and communities we study. Working in the context of climate change, collaborations between archaeologists and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Guy Duke. Aleksa Alaica. Lindsey Paskulin.

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. Feasting has long been acknowledged as a central element in Andean social and economic life. Crucial to this emphasis on feasting during the Late Moche period (AD 600–850) is the need for tribute and the redistribution of the goods brought in by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Ng.

This is an abstract from the "Activating Heritage: Encouraging Substantive Practices for a Just Future" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Rock Springs Chinatown in Wyoming was the site of the 1885 Chinese Massacre, where a white mob murdered 28 Chinese coal miners. Survivors took refuge at the Evanston Chinatown, approximately 100 miles west. While archaeological research led by Dudley Gardner has been ongoing at both Chinatowns for over three...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Holly Norton. Heather Shotten.

This is an abstract from the "Collaborative and Community Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Between 1880 and 1920, Colorado hosted nine institutions that focused on the assimilation of Native youth, including day schools, on-reservation boarding schools, and off-reservation boarding schools. One institution in particular, Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School, became a state college with the intent to serve the Native population. Today Fort...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mica Jones.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Great Zimbabwe (GZ) is key for understanding precolonial African urban systems. Cattle bones are some of the most common materials recovered from GZ and have played a central role in interpreting the ways power was enacted at the site over time. Scholars use dental wear and eruption data from cattle molars and long bone epiphyseal fusion patterns to argue...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jillian Mollenhauer.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For decades debate among Formative scholars has raged over whether to classify Gulf Olmec societies as archaic states or chiefdoms; yet scholars on both sides have assumed that these societies were governed by elites under the jurisdiction of a single hereditary ruler. Stone monuments in the form of altar-thrones, stelae, and—most particularly—colossal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michelle Pigott.

This is an abstract from the "*SE The State of Theory in Southeastern Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Late Mississippian world was populated with several chiefly polities competing for regional dominance in a constantly shifting socio-political landscape. In the mid-sixteenth century, two Spanish entradas, led by Hernando de Soto and Juan Pardo, would become entangled in this competitive landscape, attempting to bring late Medieval...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Antje Gunsenheimer.

This is an abstract from the "Misinformation and Misrepresentation Part 2: Reconsidering “Human Sacrifice,” Religion, Slavery, Modernity, and Other European-Derived Concepts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The contribution deals with the question of how crimes were punished in the Aztec penal system. We know that Aztec society—as many other premodern societies—did not have prisons for long-term punishment of crimes, nor for any forms of preventive...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Christie.

This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Persistent Places: Relationships, Atmospheres, and Affects" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Western-trained scholars like to take for granted that the discipline of archaeology plays a foundational role in providing data from ancient sites from which scientists reconstruct histories, social organization, and what drew people to such places. Government institutions use such information to assign values to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justine Shaw.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. After many sites in the Southern Maya Lowlands were abandoned during the major societal transformation known as the “Maya Collapse,” settlements in the North grew markedly in size. In the Cochuah region of the Yucatan peninsula, and elsewhere, some of the largest architecture ever built was constructed. More residences than had been seen before, or since,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Markens.

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. Monte Albán’s Tomb 7 is the most famous prehispanic find in Oaxaca owing to its exquisite mortuary offering. Since 1932 when Dr. Alfonso Caso and his colleagues discovered the treasure, archaeologists have routinely ascribed the deposit to Mixtec migrants since the tomb’s objects were rendered in the Mixteca-Puebla...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mariana Favila Vázquez.

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. En esta ponencia se presentará la metodología refinada del análisis geográfico de textos que permite relacionar nociones espaciales concretas con expresiones lingüísticas con distintos niveles de precisión. En particular, me concentraré en el problema de las rutas acuáticas que aparecen dispersas en numerosas fuentes escritas del...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Clarissa Cagnato. Nawa Sugiyama. Laura Longo. Elena Longo. Matteo Parisatto.

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. Archaeobotanists (paleoethnobotanists) often come across small, amorphous carbonized objects (ACO) in their flotation samples. However, identifying ACO’s is often difficult, and as such, they mostly remain unidentified. New ways are therefore necessary to study these objects, which, we hypothesize are in some...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Milena Carvalho. Lukas Friedl. Michael Benedetti. João Cascalheira. Jonathan Haws.

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Research into the Late Pleistocene of Europe" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Portuguese Estremadura (central Portugal), is an understudied region in Paleolithic research with several key Middle and Upper Paleolithic sites that have provided important information on human lifeways in westernmost Europe during the Late Pleistocene. One of these is Lapa do Picareiro, a rare type of site on the Iberian...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Crock.

This is an abstract from the "Coloring Outside the Lines: Re-situating Understandings of the Lifeways of Earliest Peoples of the Circum-Caribbean" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Significant site loss due to sea-level rise and modern development significantly impacts the known and potentially present inventory of archaeological sites attributable to the initial peopling of small islands in the northern Lesser Antilles. Coastlines available for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dilpreet Basanti.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper uses micro-CT and funerary taphonomy to reconstruct ancient Aksumite burials (50-400 AD). Aksum, in northern Ethiopia, was the capital of an ancient polity that spread across the northern Horn of Africa and became a major power in the Indian Ocean trade. The most notable remains of the ancient capital are its towering funerary stelae and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zachary Boal. Emily Zavodny. Carla Hadden. Sarah Barber.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Understanding patterns of localized environmental change in the past can provide valuable insight into modern environmental patterns, as well as comparative options for modern day environmental planning. This research analyzes Donax variabilis associated with the Burns Mound Site (900 to 1600 CE), located on Cape Canaveral Space Force Station along the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lee Ann Monaghan. John Pohl. Manuel Hermann. John Monaghan.

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. Precolumbian manuscripts provide a view of indigenous life that is largely unmediated by Spanish colonialism. The Colombino-Becker is one of the masterpieces of the Mixtec Codices, but poor preservation, missing pages, and an effort to make the manuscript more palatable in a Christian context by erasing not only...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Scott. Finola O'Carroll. Laura Corrway.

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. The Dominican friary in Trim, Co. Meath, Ireland was established in AD 1263 by Geoffrey de Geneville, then Lord of Trim. Located just outside the town wall, the Black Friary was an important institution during the late medieval period, as indicated by its large size and double cloister as well as its use for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ishmael Medina. Brian Codding. Kenneth Vernon. Jerry Spangler.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Maize (Zea mays) was one of the most widespread domesticated plants in the Americas before European colonization. Despite its widespread distribution, explaining how and why ancient maize farming spread into Utah remains a central research question in Southwest archaeology. To understand how ancient maize spread, we need a comprehensive suitability model...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Schurr. Terrance Martin. Madeleine McLeester.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Wetlands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The same glacial processes that produced Lake Michigan in midwestern North America also produced numerous wetlands of many types at the southern end of the lake. A diverse wetland matrix of smaller lakes, rivers, streams, ponds, marshes, swamps, bogs, and fens was once found throughout the region. Many of these wetlands have been destroyed or altered by urban...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Keri Porter. Susan Sheridan. Anna Osterholtz.

This is an abstract from the "Continued Advances in Method and Theory for Commingled Remains" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. When analyzing traumatic injury in highly commingled and fragmentary collections, interpreting violence can be particularly challenging as reconstructing the full extent of fractures in an individual is not possible, and not all traumatic injuries are indicative of violence. In these cases, cranial trauma can be the most...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sachiko Sakai. Steven Wong.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology of the Virgin Branch Puebloan Region" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The goal of this study is to gain a better understanding of the settlement patterns among the Virgin Branch Puebloans, who were small-scale farmers living in the marginal environment at the Mt. Trumbull area in the Arizona Strip. The Zip Code Site (131BLM) is a large site with multiple pueblo structures at least 200 m long. One of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kimberly Wooten.

This is an abstract from the "Putting Archaeology to Work: Expanding Climate and Environmental Studies with the Archaeological Record" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological site records are a tool for recording not only a site’s cultural constituents—landscapes, features, artifacts, built environment components, etc.—but also a format for documenting any adverse impacts that have occurred to those resources. What if those site record forms...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kendall Hills. Calen Kestle. William Feltz. Ivan Cultura. Gregg Abbang.

This is an abstract from the "Fulfilling a Nation’s Promise: The Search, Recovery, and Accounting Efforts of DPAA and Its Partners" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency’s (DPAA) mission is to provide the fullest possible accounting of missing service members from past conflicts. More than 81,000 service members remain missing, and almost 50% of those losses are attributed to America’s efforts during the Second World...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julio Sanchez Garcia. Bradymir Bravo Meza. Debora Infanzon Soriano. Fabrizio Mora. Luciana Miovich.

This is an abstract from the "Arqueología colaborativa en los Andes: Casos de estudios y reflexiones" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. En tiempos prehispánicos, las comunidades ubicadas en la Meseta de Marcahuasi (San Pedro de Casta, provincia de Huarochirí, Lima) manejaron las estaciones lluviosas y secas de su territorio mediante el uso de sistemas de siembra y cosecha de agua para el abastecimiento de una sostenible economía agrícola. Con el...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lucas Kellett.

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. Traditional models of ancient cities have dominated archaeological discourse for nearly a century. This paper seeks to diversify definitions and assumptions regarding ancient cities, especially during periods of heightened economic and social risk. Using the large Late Intermediate Period (1000-1400 CE) ridge-top site...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dayna Thomas. Andrew Womack. Anke Hein. Ole Stilborg. Katherine Brunson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Johan Gunner Andersson’s collection of artifacts excavated from archaeological sites in northern China has been residing, largely unstudied, in the storage rooms of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, as well as other institutions, for nearly 100 years. During this time a variety of inventory systems, loans, reorganizations, and moves has led to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Keely Lewis-Schroer. Amanda Rasmussen.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Francis Marion and Sumter National Forests in South Carolina include over 11,000 archaeological sites spanning major events throughout history. The Revolutionary War is no exception but represents an understudied portion of the Forest’s history despite its namesakes. As part of the Forests’ efforts to further site stewardship and a better understanding...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Astrid Runggaldier.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation addresses data from the Maya “small finds” category in the laboratory assemblage of collected and excavated materials of the Belize River East Archaeology (BREA) Project, which beginning in 2011 has been documenting and researching the cultural and environmental history of the Belize River drainage, comprising Preceramic period land- and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexis Clark.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As archaeologists, we have a heightened awareness that the objects we discard in our daily lives persist and tell a story about contemporary society. But do we give enough consideration to the items we discard through the process of archaeological research? In 2012, an article published in the SAA Archaeological Record titled “Zero Waste Archaeology”...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Magen Hodapp. Chrissina Burke.

This is an abstract from the "Storeroom Taphonomies: Site Formation in the Archaeological Archive" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Animal bones and the artifacts manufactured from them have long existed in conflicting archaeological and museum classification systems. Curating institutions once classified them as non-artifactual, or as ecofacts, and only in more recent years have worked animal bones been categorized as artifacts. Regardless of these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Gibbs.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The San Giuliano Archaeological Research Project (SGARP) began excavations in 2016 to elucidate the complex occupational history of the San Giuliano landscape in Lazio, Italy. The archaeological record indicates diachronic habitation spanning the Bronze Age to the medieval period evidenced by a large Etruscan necropolis and a hilltop medieval...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jada Ko.

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 extraction and utilization of natural resources often come with an underlying question of sustainability. At present, there are constant debates on and readjustments to how sustainability is measured. One of the biggest challenges is to establish suitable baselines to evaluate the balance between resource economies, resource availability, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sophie Chorek. Cecelia Chisdock. Keri Porter. Susan Sheridan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Individuals at Early Bronze Age Bab adh-Dhra’ (located in modern Jordan) lived in densely populated, walled towns, which led to increased physiological stress. Cribra orbitalia, likely resulting from nutritional deficiency, was used as a measure of such stress. A new method of assessing cribra orbitalia using a Bone Porous Lesion Evaluation (BoPLE) form...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bradie Dean.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Early Caddo ethnobotany is understudied compared to later periods due to a variety of factors, including preservation and sample size issues. The Hurricane Hill Site (41HP106) is an Early Caddo site with carbonized plant materials previously examined by Gary Crites and Eileen Goldborer. This study analyzed a subsample of Hurricane Hill macrobotanicals...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Hare.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. I present a workflow for optimizing the classification of airborne laser scanning point data and the selection of appropriate surface visualization techniques to improve the identification of archaeological and environmental features at the Postclassic city of Mayapán. The initial 2013 digital elevation model enabled the identification of thousands of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amber Johnson. Jessica Totsch.

This is an abstract from the "Global Perspectives on Human Population Dynamics, Innovation, and Ecosystem Change" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Previous research that derived expectations from hunter-gatherer macroecology demonstrates that the combination of effective temperature zones and setting near coastlines or very large interior lakes display distinct patterns of resource intensification. These patterns allow researchers to predict the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samantha Sanft.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, I refine fifteenth- and sixteenth-century village relocation sequences for Haudenosaunee sites located on both the eastern and western sides of Cayuga Lake (in what is today central New York State). This area is the traditional homeland of the Cayuga Nation. First, I present information on Cayuga sites, including data on settlement types and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandria Firenzi.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. I examine the potential for using higher resolution environmental records to expand on existing Ideal Free Distribution (IFD) model applications on California’s Northern Channel Islands. In this project, I take advantage of recent advances in paleoenvironmental research and higher resolution proxy methods (e.g., sclerochronology) since previous...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Mitchell. Guy Hepp.

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. In this paper, we present a refinement of the human burial sequence at the Early Formative Period (2000–1000 BC) site of La Consentida, in Oaxaca, Mexico. Previously, the chronology of mortuary spaces at La Consentida has been supported by nine radiocarbon dates (2020–1510 cal BC) from secure contexts, including charcoal,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Ashley.

This is an abstract from the "Transformations in Professional Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past three decades, archaeology has experienced a paradigm shift with the integration of digital recording and publishing methodologies. This “paper” critically examines whether, in our pursuit of technological advancements, we have remained true to the core principles of archaeological ethics. Are we on the brink of a digital dark...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anabel Ford.

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. It was the writing and award of NSF Women in Science grant that brought to the fore for me the issues of women in archaeology. Motivated to build on my associations, I sought speakers in archaeology that could represent the world of possibilities. In that search, I was able to meet many women in the field and learn of existing informal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only J. Joseph.

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. David Anderson’s archaeological career took root in the fields of cultural resource management and his research on the Richard B. Russell (RBR) Reservoir was integral to his intellectual development. Through three seasons of fieldwork and subsequent analysis and reporting, he directed archaeological excavations at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Grace Alexandrino Ocaña. Carla Márquez Abad.

This is an abstract from the "Arqueología colaborativa en los Andes: Casos de estudios y reflexiones" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. ¿Es posible hacer arqueología colaborativa en Perú? De serlo, ¿Cuáles son las características locales de está practica? Debido a movimientos sociales de reivindicación de los derechos de comunidades descendientes, desde la década de 1990 la arqueología colaborativa es tendencia en el mundo anglosajón. Regulaciones y...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Leventhal.

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. In many parts of the world, it is assumed that the most important heritage are the ancient sites that are visible on the landscape. This is certainly true within the Maya region of Central America. Projects often start out with the assumption that contemporary Maya...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gloria Hernandez-Bolio. Patricia Quintana-Owen. Nadia Neff. Keith Prufer. Vera Tiesler.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Understanding dietary patterns in past societies is critical for interpreting economic and social transformations. The analysis of dietarily derived isotopes is a reliable source of categorical information about the types of foods consumed by an individual. Furthermore, multisystem-isotope analyses can clarify inferences about food sources and relative...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily McClung De Tapia. Diana Martínez-Yrízar. Carmen Cristina Adriano-Morán. Emilio Ibarra-Morales.

This is an abstract from the "What Happened after the Fall of Teotihuacan?" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Significant changes in sociopolitical and economic organization following the collapse of the Teotihuacan state between the sixth and seventh centuries CE are evident in settlement patterns as well as archaeological materials including ceramics and lithics. The potential magnitude of this event and subsequent ramifications within the valley...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan Conger. Sam Olvey. Leonardo Umberger. Carla S. Hadden. Amanda D. Roberts Thompson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since at least 1972, the Center for Applied Isotope Studies (CAIS) at the University of Georgia (UGA) has maintained an archive of the pretreated and unpretreated remnants of samples sent for radiocarbon dating and stable isotope analysis. This growing archive now contains over 15,000 archaeological and geological specimens. In August 2022, CAIS initiated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nam Kim.

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. Archaeologists continue to be interested in the development of political complexity and early forms of “states.” There is compelling evidence that leadership strategies and political centralization in such polities involved modification and reengineering of both social and landscape topographies, making...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emma Ludvigsen. Emily Demers. Jacqueline Nash.

This is an abstract from the "Capturing and Sharing Vermont’s Past: 3D Imaging as a Tool for Undergraduate Research and Community Engagement" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Castleton campus of the new Vermont State University is one of the oldest institutions of higher education in the country, first opening its doors to students in 1787 and serving as one of New England’s leading medical colleges from 1818 to 1867. Today, the few reminders of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Regnier. Scott Hammerstedt. Patrick Livingood.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Spiro Mounds, located in eastern Oklahoma, is known almost solely for the spectacular collection of well-preserved ritual objects unearthed when looters tunneled into the Craig Mound in the 1930s. The dramatic story of the looting and subsequent dynamiting of the Craig Mound has led many archaeologist to believe the site has no remaining intact...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Fedoroff.

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. The Pine Hills of Mississippi is an understudied research area in archaeology with even less work done in collaboration with Indigenous descendant communities (both resident and removed). The current project was undertaken in collaboration with the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma to better understand earth-oven...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Johannes Neurath.

This is an abstract from the "Sacrificial and Autosacrifice Instruments in Mesoamerica: Symbolism and Technology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Mesoamerican religious practice, ritual killings (allosacrifice) and so-called practices of self-sacrifice (autosacrifice) often coexist simultaneously. Therefore, the ethnographic, iconographic, and historical analysis should therefore focus on what may be called the condensation of ritual relations....