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

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mallory Matsumoto.

This is an abstract from the "Beyond Maize and Cacao: Reflections on Visual and Textual Representation and Archaeological Evidence of Other Plants in Precolumbian Mesoamerica" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological, ethnohistorical, art historical, and ethnographic evidence attests to extensive use of reed mats over millennia across the Maya region. In addition to being used for sleeping or sitting atop benches or floors, mats partitioned...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Haagen Klaus. Edgar Bracamonte. Ignacio Alva. Izumi Shimada.

This is an abstract from the "Ritual Violence and Human Sacrifice in the Ancient Andes: New Directions in the Field" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Diverse new understandings involving human sacrifice on the north coast of Peru have surfaced since 1994. In the Lambayeque Valley Complex on the northern north coast of Peru, an extensive and diachronic record of human sacrifice from several sites spanning nearly 400 individuals have been documented...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Eeckhout. Lawrence Owens.

This is an abstract from the "Ritual Violence and Human Sacrifice in the Ancient Andes: New Directions in the Field" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The excavation of numerous subadult burials from late prehispanic contexts at Pachacamac led us to question the archaeological and anthropological criteria used to identify human sacrifice. Identifying this practice requires a robust conceptual framework and analytical approach, and this is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alejandra Aguirre.

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. The complex Mesoamerican cosmovisión includes myths about the cultures to try to understand, their history, natural events, and their universe, through narrations and fantastic facts, which gave them an explanation about everything that they did not understand. As a consequence of this, the invention of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katarzyna Mikulska.

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. The aim of this paper is to analyze the meaning encoded in the "curved like obsidian" graphic pattern present in the cap and face of Itztlacoliuhqui, the Nahua god of frost. Though supposedly it is a pattern that encodes "obsidian," the sacrificial obsidian knives are painted in a different way. On the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jiajing Wang. Xiaoli Qin.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Archaeobotany Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Late Neolithic Longshan culture in China witnessed profound social and political transformations, characterized by the emergence of increasing social competition, long-distance trade, and inter-polity warfare. These developments eventually culminated in the formation of the first state-level societies in the Central...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aldo Watanave. Michelle Watanave.

This is an abstract from the "Beyond Borders at the End of a Millennium: Life in the Western Andes circa 500–50 BCE" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Salinar phenomenon began after the collapse of the Chavín culture in part of the north coast of Peru around 500 BC. According to several studies, the Salinar period was a time of significant changes in the area. The inhabitants intensified agricultural production, connected with other regions, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only T. L. Thurston.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Property Regimes" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Into the earlier, local common pool resource systems of Iron Age and early medieval Scandinavia, the increasingly incompatible taxation and land tenure concepts of developing state governments were imposed on Arctic and peri-Arctic populations. This paper examines the archaeological and historic record of conflicts, disputes, and uprisings that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victoria Ingalls. Mara De Gregori. Brett Houk.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2023, the Belize Estates Archaeological Survey Team (BEAST) field assessed recently acquired LiDAR data. This effort included documenting a previously unknown large ceremonial center, Ayiin Winik, located between the La Lucha Escarpment and the Rio Bravo in northwestern Belize. Exploration of the site identified a rare double ball court, a parapet-lined...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julienne Bernard.

This is an abstract from the "AD 1150 to the Present: Ancient Political Economy to Contemporary Materiality—Archaeological Anthropology in Honor of Jeanne E. Arnold" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper examines and celebrates the scholarship of Jeanne Arnold within her life as a friend, colleague, and mentor. Coming of age in a decidedly masculine and sometimes antagonistic era of California archaeology, Jeanne emerged as a leading and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melissa Ritchey. Grace Cesario.

This is an abstract from the "Small Dwellings on the Viking Frontier: New Research from Kotið, North Iceland" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We present food production data from the 2022–2023 excavations at Kotið, a small, non-elite Viking Age (ninth century AD) domestic dwelling located in Skagafjörður, North Iceland. Macrobotanical and zooarchaeological remains provide key data to better understand early subsistence strategies, including...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelly Goldberg. Stacey Young.

This is an abstract from the "Collaborative and Community Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sesquicentennial State Park, built by the Civilian Conservation Corps and opened to the public in 1940, contains multiple archaeological sites representing both precontact and historic occupations. Current archaeological excavations are focused on investigating the history of nineteenth and twentieth century African American communities which were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lydia Cristina Allué Andrés. Theodore Gragson.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Property Regimes" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Alfonso I took Daroca, an important city in the Upper March of Al-Andalus since the ninth century, by conquest in AD 1120. He granted the city a large rural territory that evolved by AD 1248 into a new property regime called the Comunidad de Aldeas de Daroca. Four such entities emerged in the southern borderlands of Aragon independent of the control...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ellen Moriarty. Matthew Moriarty.

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. Community outreach has played a major role in the Castleton Hidden History Project, which highlights a diverse and inclusive history of the Castleton, VT area from the end of the Ice Age through the present day. Since 2023, a significant part of outreach programming has...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nick Harvey.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists strive to improve the methods used to record and preserve the archaeological record for future research, interpretation, and outreach. The process of photogrammetry has improved their ability to curate and share archaeological evidence by using photos to create 3D images of excavation units, features, and artifacts. Using this technology,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Knut Ivar Austvoll.

This is an abstract from the "In Defense of Everything! Constructive Engagements with Graeber and Wengrow’s Provocative Contribution" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A pungent statement in *The Dawn of Everything* is that the enormous diversity in hunter-gatherer societies makes it impossible to talk about one transition to agriculture. There are several consequences to this statement. One is that hunter-gatherers did not wait for an inevitable...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christophe Helmke. Bruce Love. Arlen Chase.

This is an abstract from the "“The Center and the Edge”: How the Archaeology of Belize Is Foundational for Understanding the Ancient Maya" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The epigraphic corpus of Belize is often considered as being limited in scope, with few monuments and few contributions to the historical sources of the Classic Maya. Yet, discoveries in recent years have considerably changed this picture. Some of the more spectacular discoveries...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Autumn Melby.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists working in isolated rural locales continue to face the challenge of protecting archaeological sites from threats of looting and vandalism. Whether physically secluded beyond a watchful eye or simply located on private lands with few legal protections, sites in these rural spaces are at particular risk for damage or (un)intentional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cheryl Foster. Heather McKillop. E. Cory Sills.

This is an abstract from the "Underwater Maya: Analytical Approaches for Interpreting Ancient Maya Activities at the Paynes Creek Salt Works, Belize" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Excavations in the spring and summer of 2022 were carried out at the underwater ancient Maya salt work of Ek Way Nal in Punta Ycacos Lagoon in Paynes Creek National Park, Belize. Ek Way Nal provided salt to the ancient Maya during the Late and Terminal Classic periods...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Conner Flynt.

This is an abstract from the "Underwater Maya: Analytical Approaches for Interpreting Ancient Maya Activities at the Paynes Creek Salt Works, Belize" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ancient Maya created a culture with writing, religion, and vast trade networks. These trade networks are evident on the southern coast of Belize, where archaeologists have found sites dedicated to salt making. This paper will discuss Ta’ab Nuk Na, one of these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Isabel Rivera-Collazo.

This is an abstract from the "At the Frontier of Big Climate, Disaster Capitalism, and Endangered Cultural Heritage in Barbuda, Lesser Antilles" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sea-level rise, coastal erosion, and other climate-related hazards pose threats to coastlines around the world. Understanding these nuanced processes sheds light on the risks that local communities and heritage managers face, as well as on the longer-term impacts of human...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Landazuri.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This thesis sets an initial foundation for an archaeo-ornithological approach to understanding past El Niño events on the coast of Peru and the use of avifaunal remains as proxies for ecological conditions. Here I examine the extent to which El Niño phenomena could influence avifaunal resources and the effect this would have had on the subsistence...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Albert Pecora. Jarrod Burks.

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. During World War II, the United States and other countries lost many airmen in plane crashes. Crash sites vary considerably in size and complexity, with buried and near-surface components that must be located, assessed, and perhaps excavated. Geophysical survey is one way to improve the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steven De Vore. David Watt. Adam Wiewel.

This is an abstract from the "New and Emerging Geophysical and Geospatial Research in the National Parks" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. On August 10, 1861, Federal forces under Brigadier General Nathaniel Lyon and Confederate forces under Brigadier General Ben McCulloch and Major General Sterling Price were engaged in a six-hour fight on the rolling hills surrounding Willson’s Creek in Greene and Christian Counties in southern Missouri. Following...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anne Curry.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1705, Spanish commander Roque Madrid led a group of soldiers and Pueblo allies on a 20 day excursion through the traditional Navajo homeland in northwest New Mexico. The goal of this excursion was to burn Navajo cornfields and resources as punishment for raiding and general resistance. Madrid kept a campaign journal during these days, describing the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Colleen Hanratty. Thomas Guderjan.

This is an abstract from the "Prehispanic Maya Marketplace Investigations in the Three Rivers Region of Belize: First Results" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Marketplaces are a vital component for the economic interdependence of ancient Maya kingdoms. In our view, marketplaces were also definitional components of Maya central places of power as much as the presence of ostentatious presentations of architecture were. The Blue Creek Archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jason Wenzel.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster exhibits current research by Gulf Coast State College in examining sites associated with the “lost” town of St. Andrews, which was initially established in 1827 on St. Andrews Bay in northwestern Florida. Believed to be abandoned in 1863 during the American Civil War, archaeological investigations at properties associated with the town’s early...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michelle Wurtz Penton. Myles Miller. Mark Willis. Michael Stowe. Chet Walker.

This is an abstract from the "Application of Geophysical Techniques to Military Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the fall of 2017, the Fort Bliss Cultural Resources Team funded a unique project to assess the potential for using remote sensing technologies to analyze the subsurface characteristics of buried cultural sites to support National Register of Historic Places nominations. Geophysical remote sensing and aerial multispectral...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Macrae. Vo Thi Phuong Thuy. Ekaterina Menkina. Le Ngoc Han.

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. Established in 968 CE the city of Hoa Lu was the first unified capital of the Dai Co Viet. This ancient capital is found in the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Trang An Scenic Landscape Complex, Vietnam. It was constructed of two enclosures bounded by a series of embankment walls adjoining steep cliff faces created by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jon Krier.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Beringia is central (both physically and theoretically) to most out-of-Asia theories for how humans first came to the Americas. Understanding the chronology of the peopling of the Americas is complicated by the fact that roughly two million km2 of Beringia (an area larger than the modern US state of Alaska) was submerged over the course of the late...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Contreras. John Rick. John Wolf. Matt Sayre. Silvana Rosenfeld.

This is an abstract from the "Chavín de Huántar’s Contribution to Understanding the Central Andean Formative: Results and Perspectives" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Even after more than a century of research at Chavín de Huántar, two key questions remain about who the ceremonial center was built for and who it was built by. As research attention has largely focused on pilgrims, priests, and peer polities, the labor force and craft specialists...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Weinstein. David Kelley. Charles Pearson.

This is an abstract from the "Submerged Paleolandscape Investigations in the Gulf of Mexico" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since 1975, personnel at Coastal Environments Inc. have applied a geophysical and geological approach in their search for drowned prehistoric sites on the outer continental shelf of the Gulf of Mexico and within marshlands of south Louisiana. Initial efforts culminated in the retrieval of numerous vibracore samples from the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Richardson. Timothy Matney. Britt Hartenberger. Mary Shepperson. Tina Greenfield.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The preliminary season of the Sebittu Project on the Erbil Plain of Iraqi Kurdistan was conducted over four weeks this summer. The project includes seven Neo-Assyrian sites on the plain with the goal of documenting the agrarian economy during the Neo-Assyrian period (c. 900-600 BC) in northern Iraq, the heartland of the Assyrian empire. The initial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only April Nowell. Jennifer French. Mary Lewis.

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. In recent years, archaeologists have made real progress in understanding the lived lives of Paleolithic children, but adolescents from this period remain understudied. In this study, we use maturational markers developed on the skeletons of medieval English children to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Kenny.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The passage tombs of Atlantic Europe are a lasting memorial to a society with a knowledge system encompassing aspects of engineering, astronomy, and stone-working. The stones used to build these monuments have been explored from a range of perspectives. It seems likely that stones were chosen based on criteria such as color, source, and texture, and some...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Espenshade.

This is an abstract from the "*SE Stakes and Stones: Current Archaeological Approaches to Fish Weir Research" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A recent resurgence in fish weir research has revealed limitations in the NRHP evaluation of such sites. With few weirs having been directly dated, and with a general lack of excavation of associated processing sites, it is often difficult to define the chronological context needed for a proper evaluation. In...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Grant Wilson. Burchell Hayes. Terry Hayes. Jordan Ralph.

This is an abstract from the "Juukan Gorge: The Story of Destruction, Excavation and Rebuilding" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Following the destruction of Juukan Gorge, the PKKP Aboriginal Corporation led the Juukan Gorge Remediation Project, which saw the rehabilitation of the broader Juukan Gorge area within line of site from the Juukan-2 rockshelter. This paper is an exploration of those rehabilitation efforts, which includes the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pere Gelabert. Victoria Oberreiter. Lawrence Straus. Manuel Ramon Gonzalez. Ron Pinhasi.

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. Humans and carnivores competed for the same ecological niche during the Paleolithic, including caves used as shelters that they even alternately occupied in many cases. Through the presence of archeological material, including animal bones, we can assess the human occupation periods and their intensity. Iberia represents one...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Isabella Erter. Robert Cook. Emiley Gottwald.

This is an abstract from the "Improving and Decolonizing Precontact Legacy Collections with Fieldwork: Making Sense of Harvard’s Turpin Site Expedition (Ohio)" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists are often good at communicating with each other, but not usually at conveying our findings to wider audiences. This seems particularly true in the US Midwest, where visibility of the remains of ancient sites is low, in contrast to places like...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tatiana Niculescu. Eleanor Breen.

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. In 1961, the city of Alexandria, Virginia financed one of the first municipally funded archaeological projects in the country, laying the groundwork for today’s Alexandria Archaeology which curates three million artifacts from over 250 sites. Since the 1960s, the program has witnessed urban renewal, the birth of the CRM...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dmitri Beliaev. Simon Martin. Sergei Vepretskii.

This is an abstract from the "The Rise and Apogee of the Classic Maya Kaanu’l Hegemonic State at Dzibanche" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2017 previously unknown mid-sixth-century Kanul king K’ahk’ Ti’ Ch’ich’ Aj Saakil was identified in Classic Maya hieroglyphic inscriptions. He acceded as “high king” (kalomte) in AD 550 and was responsible for the defeat of Tikal in AD 562 and the expansion of Dzibanche hegemony through the Southern...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kylie Quave.

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. Excavations at the fifteenth- to sixteenth-century Inka royal estate installation of Cheqoq (Maras, Cusco) reveal domestic spaces likely inhabited by both the watched (the retainers to the nobility) and the watchers (the intermediate elites overseeing laborers). Typical interpretations of the presence/absence of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Theodore Kmiec.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ideological concept of the World Tree can be found in ancient and living cultures throughout the world. Many cultures located in Mexico and Mesoamerica have incorporated this tradition in their ancient indigenous art, ceremonies, and recorded oral histories. The ideology of a culture may evolve or transform due to internal and external factors over...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Whittaker Schroder.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Archaeological Investigations in Chiapas, Mexico" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over three field seasons, the Lower Lacantun Archaeological Project has examined the political organization and settlement of the region surrounding the confluence of the Lacantun and Usumacinta Rivers in Chiapas, Mexico. This riverine landscape is unique in the Western Lowlands, presenting risks and opportunities related to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zhuo Sun.

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 Panlongcheng site was the largest urban settlement in the middle Yangtze River during the Xia and early Shang period (1500–1300 BC). In recent years, the joint archaeological expedition has carried out archaeological excavation at the Yangjianwan North and Wangjiazui locus of the Panlongcheng site. The new discoveries in the two loci reveal the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Xanti Ceballos.

This is an abstract from the "Aguada Fénix and the Middle Usumacinta Region: Interregional Interactions and Social Transformations in the Middle Preclassic Period" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper examines the settlement patterns transition from the Middle Formative to the Classic period through a low-resolution lidar analysis in Southern Mesoamerica, over a 25 km2 area. Based on previous lidar research carried out by the Middle...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Felix Kupprat. Debra Walker. Verónica Vázquez López. Joshuah Lockett-Harris. Fernando Flores Esquivel.

This is an abstract from the "New and Emerging Perspectives on the Bajo el Laberinto Region of the Maya Lowlands, Part 2" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Calakmul is the largest site on the northern edge of the Bajo el Laberinto and has been investigated intensively since the 1980s. Previous research has produced valuable data regarding the general urban extent and the Late Preclassic monumental architecture surrounding the main plaza, as well as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kayla Golay Lausanne.

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. This paper explores the formation, morphology, and neighborhood organization of two early urban settlements on the north coast of Peru – Grupo Gallinazo (~100 BCE–700 CE), Virú Valley, and Cerro San Isidro (~800 BCE–1500 CE), Nepeña Valley. Investigating variations in spatial arrangements and settlements at these two...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marie-Laure Chambrade.

This is an abstract from the "Water in the Desert: Human Resilience in the Azraq Basin and Eastern Desert of Jordan" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The end of the neolithization process (seventh–sixth millennium cal BCE) was a period of settlement peak in the arid margins of the Fertile Crescent. In northeastern Jordan, the combination of a long sequence of Neolithic occupation and several decades of field investigation provide the opportunity of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Natalia Égüez. Oula Seitsonen. Sarah Pleuger. Jamsranjav Bayarsaikhan. Jean-Luc Houle.

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. The Mongolian Bronze Age (2500–700 BCE) was a period of greater social interaction and important transformations (e.g., the adoption of domestic livestock herding and intensification to widespread mobile, mounted pastoralism) that prompted social inequality and the formation of the first nomadic states. What is known...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Olganydia Plata Aguilera. Erin Pugh.

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. This paper tracks the relationship between Picuris Pueblo and San Antonio del Embudo, a settlement in the Picuris homeland downstream of the Rio Pueblo. Embudo (now known as Dixon) is the product of two colonial regimes, beginning with the Spanish appropriation of the lower Picuris watershed to create the Embudo Land Grant in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Gonzalez.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The study of mesowear on ungulate teeth is a useful tool for reconstructing environmental conditions. The method has seen several improvements over the past decade, resulting in its increased applicability to a greater number of species and dental elements as well as the development of fine-tuned digital measuring techniques. Recent mesowear studies have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bryon Schroeder. Devin Pettigrew.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Perishable Weaponry Studies: Developing Perspectives from Dated Contexts to Experimental Analyses" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The arid west Texas region has a wealth of large perishable assemblages offering unexplored research potential. This talk focuses on weapons systems recovered from both recent excavation work and existing collections from this area. We provide an overview of the diversity and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicole Isenbarger.

This is an abstract from the "The Elemental Analysis Facility at the Field Museum: Celebrating 20 Years Serving the Archaeological Community " session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The restoration of Charles II to the English throne created a flourishment of economic growth, philosophical change, and a new focus on scientific experimentation in the English empire. The Carolina colony was founded in 1670 with the intent to create an ordered and profitable...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Pollack. A. Gwynn Henderson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The 2023 investigation of the seventeenth-century Fort Ancient village of Augusta, Kentucky, focused on a section of the community’s cemetery and ritual space. It was conducted in advance of planned improvements to the historic town of Augusta’s sewage treatment system. Although six extended adult burials were documented within an 80 m2 excavation block,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susannah Clinker.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Gut-sewing technology was utilized by Inuit communities until the early 20th century. Despite gut-sewing being a successful and advantageous technology for thousands of years, it is scarcely practiced today. This is in part due to the availability of synthetic materials but also because these kinds of traditional practices have been lost over generations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Zeanah. Robert Elston.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A recent reinterpretation of global ethnography challenges the "men hunt, women gather" stereotype, finding cross-cultural evidence that women regularly hunted in foraging societies. Another study finds bioarchaeological evidence of women's role in hunting large game during the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition in the Americas. Although provocative, these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kevin Hanselka. Leslie Bush. Chlöe Fackler. Phil Dering.

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. The value of several significant archaeological sites investigated by the Ancient Southwest Texas Project in Eagle Nest Canyon (Val Verde County, Texas) is a testament to the conservation and stewardship of landowners Jack and Wilmuth Skiles. From the beginning it was anticipated that these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bonnie Clark. April Kamp-Whittaker. Steven Sharpe. Greg Kitajima.

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. Trees—whether planted, pruned, or left to grow in their natural setting—can provide detailed evidence about intention, expertise, and aesthetics of the people who planted or lived among them. This paper overviews the methodologies employed and research findings of scholars studying the trees of Amache, Colorado’s WWII-era Japanese...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Diane Chase. Elizabeth Graham. Melissa Badillo.

This is an abstract from the "“The Center and the Edge”: How the Archaeology of Belize Is Foundational for Understanding the Ancient Maya" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Without Belizean archaeological data, we would know very little about the Maya Postclassic period (CE 950–1530). While viewed as a period of lesser cultural development by earlier researchers, Postclassic archaeological research in Belize was published as early as 1898 but...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Bishop.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation details a zooarchaeological analysis of a horse skeleton, stored unstudied for decades previous in a university teaching collection. Originating from an archaeological site outside of Chicago in Cook County, Illinois, the skeleton displays notable pathologies and other osteological changes that potentially reflect its living use and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Kracht. Lindsay Bloch.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ceramic rattles and rattle vessel adornos have received little attention in current Caribbean archaeology literature. These rattles may be overlooked or misidentified in Caribbean ceramic collections due to their minimal audibility or “failure” during the construction process due to their technical complexity. Here, we evaluate existing reports of rattle...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Carpenter. Elisa Villalpando. James Watson.

This is an abstract from the "13,000 Years of Adaptation in the Sonoran Desert at La Playa, Sonora" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Our research at the extraordinary La Playa Site (SON F:10:3) is now entering its twenty-third year. This site is located at the Boquillas Valley about 10 km north of Estación Trincheras and some 27 km west of Santa Ana, Sonora. The La Playa site presents an archaeological landscape revealing evidence of continuous...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine VanPool. Gavin Easley.

This is an abstract from the "Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Altered states of consciousness (ASC) is a defining characteristic of shamanism. ASC, however, is not unique to shamans nor is it a single neurological/physiological phenomenon. Mystics and mediums also use ASC, and mediums are even “possessed” to greater or lesser degrees. In contrast, most shamans go on soul flights during “ecstatic” trances....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Chacon.

This is an abstract from the "Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This lecture will focus on the multifaceted world of shamanism. The presentation will show how shamans serve as vast repositories of traditional indigenous knowledge and native beliefs. The effectiveness of shamans as health care practitioners will be considered. The ingestion of mind altering substances by Amazonian shamans as part of their curing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan Nishida.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. New ways of looking at old evidence can help develop a better understanding of the relationship between early urbanism and social differentiation in the ancient Near East. In the Southern Levant during the Early Bronze Age I (c. 3700-3000 BCE), the site of Bab adh-Dhra’ was a center for mortuary activities for EBA communities. Bab adh-Dhra’ is an important...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Linn.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Humans have a variety of means of coping with the inevitability of death that is expressed in material culture. To interpret burials as the material remains of ritualistic processes, multiple variables need to be assessed, such as the construction, location, spatial distribution of graves, and associated grave goods. Two types of tombs were uncovered at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Oystein LaBianca.

This is an abstract from the "World-Systems and Globalization in Archaeology: Assessing Models of Intersocietal Connections 50 Years since Wallerstein’s “The Modern World-System”" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Southern Levant region is critical to our understanding of the nature of globalization and connectivity in prehistoric as well as historical era contexts. This presentation will explore the challenges in shaping WST and global history...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jason Kennedy. James Berry.

This is an abstract from the "Experimental Pedagogies: Teaching through Experimental Archaeology Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The study of archaeological ceramics has relied on a reconstruction of the techno-functional choices made by potters in the past through a chaîne opératoire approach. However, the insights gained through this analysis have largely confused or eluded our students due to a lack of practical experience with ceramic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Renata Araujo. Mercedes Okumura. Astolfo Araujo.

This is an abstract from the "“The South Also Exists”: The Current State of Prehistoric Archaeology in Brazil: Dialogues across Different Theoretical Approaches and Research Agendas" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Geometric morphometrics is a powerful analytical method developed in evolutionary biology to study, quantify, and compare shape variations in biological specimens. Archaeologists have been applying geometric morphometric methods (GMM) to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Winston Hurst. Fred L. Nials.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Newly available USGS LiDAR imagery has confirmed the reported existence, and greatly expanded the known extent, of ancient ritual and agricultural earthworks in the northern San Juan region. These findings are transforming our understanding of early Puebloan landscape manipulation, with large implications for Puebloan community organization and food...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Said Ennahid. Néjat Brahmi.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the recurrent themes of French colonial-period discourse on conducting archaeology in Morocco was the belief that the state and the people had little or no interest in their pre-Islamic past or its material correlates. To explore and deconstruct this theme, we will examine a set of never-before-published archives consisting of 8 firmans (also...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carolyn Dillian. Katie Stringer Clary. Cheryl Cail. Harold Hatcher.

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. The Waccamaw Indian People (WIP) are a close-knit community that shares knowledge of the relationships, culture, and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) of their ancestors. Working collaboratively, we have created an outdoor exhibit and interpretive trail that embraces TEK as a means for the public to learn about Indigenous...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Diana Carvajal Contreras.

This is an abstract from the "Past Human-Shark Interactions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The data obtained from the zooarchaeological remains of some Panamanian Pacific sites and Colombian Caribbean Sites allowed for unprecedented discussions about the role of sharks in the lifestyle of precolumbian inhabitants on the intermediate area. People captured and processed sharks, using their body parts both as a food source and for ornaments. These...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Simon-Pierre Gilson. Christian Gates St-Pierre. Andrea Lessa.

This is an abstract from the "Past Human-Shark Interactions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Precolonial Brazilian coastal sites are rich in shark centra and teeth. They are frequently found inside the sediment matrix or as funeral deposits. The presence of shark teeth has been approached from zooarchaeological and ethnohistorical perspectives along with experimental archaeology and use-wear analysis. The Rio do Meio site was used as a study case....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aubrey Farrell.

This is an abstract from the "Past Human-Shark Interactions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The study of sharks in the archaeological record provides plentiful research opportunities within the lenses of social zooarchaeology and materials science. The convergence of these two themes when analyzing artifact shark teeth presents unique advantages and challenges to understanding how past people perceived sharks and made use of their physical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniela Klokler.

This is an abstract from the "Past Human-Shark Interactions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Precolonial groups used various types of raw materials for manufacture of tools and adornments: rocks, clay, fibers, bones, shells, among others. In general, lithic and ceramic assemblages gain more focus from researchers due to their ubiquity and better preservation. Shell mound sites, however, provide a context in which faunal remains are the main...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mairead Doery.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. "Tool grooves”, "incised lines" and “axe-sharpening marks” are some of the varying names used to describe linear rock modifications found across western North America. Previous ethnoarchaeological research has examined methods and motivations surrounding the creation of such markings, but consideration of their individual landscape contexts remains...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Phillip Mendenhall. Alysha Lieurance.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Compared to new archaeological data acquisition by traditional excavation and analysis, research and related funding associated with archival collections remains stagnant and is not proportional to the quantity of data present. This presentation highlights three cases of current research projects associated with the extant collections housed at the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only June Burke.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Current studies on nacreous shell jewelry, those with an iridescent inner layer, during the Early Agricultural period (2100 BC - 150 AD) (Vint 2017) have chiefly examined how the material was brought into the Tucson Basin without much consideration for if it’s presence in the region was purely due to chance or if it was specifically chosen. Central to that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patrick Faulkner. Akshay Sarathi.

This is an abstract from the "Social Archaeologies and Islands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Zanzibar Archipelago experienced dramatic socioeconomic and socioecological changes over the last 2,000 years in line with the rest of the Swahili Coast. The onset of Iron Age transformations linked to foraging and farming economies, connections via the broader Indian Ocean trade network, through the colonial period and into the present day, together...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Isabelle Holland-Lulewicz. Jacob Holland-Lulewicz.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Property Regimes" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. How do human settlements grow sustainably? What is the capacity of both our institutions and our local ecologies to mediate the pressures of demographic growth? Nowhere are these questions and challenges more critical today than in coastal zones, where populations grow exponentially. For millennia, Indigenous populations across the globe have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kaelyn Schenkenberger. Ryan Harrod. Norma Johnson.

This is an abstract from the "Community Engaged Bioarchaeology: Centering Descendants" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation is focused on highlighting the value of conducting bioarchaeological research that not only works with descendant communities, but is driven by the questions they want answered and adheres to their goals and management expectations surrounding their ancestors. Bioarchaeological projects that partner with Alaska...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shayna Lindquist.

This is an abstract from the "El principio del fin, el inicio del principio: Arqueología de la transición del Formativo al Clásico en Los Tuxtlas, Veracruz, México" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. By the Formative period, prehispanic societies in southern Veracruz primarily relied on obsidian for numerous daily activities. However, as the geological sources of obsidian that were exploited occur in central Mexico and the Guatemalan and Honduran...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jose Miguel Perez Gomez.

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. This presentation underlines the importance of Venezuela’s underwater cultural heritage through continued research into the shipwreck of French King Louis XIV’s fleet, which struck reefs in the Las Aves de Sotavento, in Las Aves Archipelago, Venezuela, the night of May 11, 1678. The fleet consisted of 30 vessels. At least 12 ships...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marta Arzarello.

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. The early European peopling (about 1.5 Ma) is characterized by a low number of sites and lithic assemblages often consisting of a few hundred pieces. Despite these limitations, it is possible to define the technical behavior of these early Europeans with sufficient accuracy. The reduction sequences are always...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lauren Jones.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Osteoarchaeology, including bioarchaeology and zooarchaeology, has been a staple in our field for decades. Now, archaeogenetics (or aDNA) has also become a staple. But how do we decide when to use one approach or the other? What provides the best data for one's research questions? Here, I present data from a study of archaeological gophers from the Hall's...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Blackwood.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Creating 3D models of cultural materials raises ethical concerns for how they are captured, stored, displayed, and utilized. Mainly, who is and who has the right to make these decisions? Professional societies and associations have established principles and codes of ethics related to best practices, but language pertaining to 3D models or digitally...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Izumi Shimada. Ken-ichi Shinoda. Hideaki Kanzawa-Kiriyama.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Why are there clustered and dispersed Middle Sicán (900-1100CE) monumental mounds in the Lambayeque region of northern coastal Peru? What do these mounds reveal about Sicán politics and demography? As one investigative avenue to answer these questions, DNA was extracted from 15 human burials excavated at three mounds of the Sicán capital: Ventanas, Loro,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristen Pearson.

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. Though the well-preserved textile finds from Noin Ula are some of the best known archaeological objects from this period in Mongolia, textiles and leather objects from Xiongnu circular graves are comparatively understudied. In part this is due to differences in preservation; circular graves are shallower than terrace tombs...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacob Freeman.

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. Over the last 12,000 years human populations have expanded and transformed critical earth systems. Yet, a key unresolved question in the environmental and social sciences remains: Why did human populations grow and, sometimes, decline in the first place? Our research builds on 20 years of intense...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Slack.

This is an abstract from the "Juukan Gorge: The Story of Destruction, Excavation and Rebuilding" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper discusses the archaeological excavations at Juukan Gorge in 2008 and then in 2014. We present a Late Pleistocene and Holocene chronology for the Gorge (see Slack et al. 2009), indicating that Aboriginal people first occupied the interior of the Hamersley Plateau in Western Australia over 46,000 years ago....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Zimmerman. Mikheil Elashvili. Giorgi Datunashvili.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2019, a three-year NSF IRES grant (#1854153) was awarded to Bridgewater State University, Ilia State University, and the Cyberarchaeology Lab at U.C. San Diego to engage U.S. undergraduate students in interdisciplinary research of historical and ongoing human-environmental interactions in the Shiraki Plateau in the southeastern part of the country of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gerad Smith. François Lanoë. Joshua Reuther. Charles Holmes. Barbara Crass.

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 and compares site assemblages dating to the Denali and Northern Archaic transition in central Alaska. This time period, ~10,000-6,000 cal BP, represents an understudied period in the region. The paper presents data from the Carpenter, Hollembaek, North Gerstle Point, and Swan Point assemblages. It further discusses apparent adaptive...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Helen Haines. Anabel Ford. Thomas Guderjan. Sherman Horn.

This is an abstract from the "“The Center and the Edge”: How the Archaeology of Belize Is Foundational for Understanding the Ancient Maya" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Nearly 60 years ago Gordon Willey’s team published "Prehistoric Maya Settlements in the Belize Valley," initiating the study of ancient Maya communities with a focus at Barton Ramie in Belize. The lead continues to this day with the first archaeological application of lidar by the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Malkia Okech.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Futures through a Virtual Past" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. African Digital Heritage (ADH) is a Nairobi-based nonprofit organization working to encourage a more critical, holistic, and knowledge-based approach to digital solutions within African heritage. Through this, we hope to cement the place of African culture in an era of rapidly changing technologies and endless frontiers. Our focus areas are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Margaret (Meg) Wilkes. William Griswold. Joel Dukes. Wayne Page. Jacob Ulmer.

This is an abstract from the "New and Emerging Geophysical and Geospatial Research in the National Parks" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Early on the morning May 28, 1754, Lt. Col. George Washington and Mingo allies exchanged fire with a party of French soldiers encamped in a glen, close to the English base camp at Great Meadow, in southwestern Pennsylvania. This skirmish, at what is now known as Jumonville Glen, was the first conflict between the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Delvaux.

This is an abstract from the "New Work in Medieval Archaeology, Part 2: Crossing Boundaries, Materialities, and Identities" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Viking ships were slave ships. Between 750 and 1100 CE, clinker-built vessels were used across Northern Europe on raids for collecting captives and transporting them on routes that linked the North Atlantic to Central Asia. We have extensive knowledge about these ships through a unique...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rosa Fregel. Sara Armas-Quintana. Clara Díaz-Pérez. Javier Serrano. Alejandra Ordóñez.

This is an abstract from the "Islands around Africa: State-of-the-Art and Future Directions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One key period of history involved the forced migration of millions of people due to slavery. Information on the origins of the enslaved individuals has been reconstructed from historical records and, more recently, through the use of paleogenomic techniques. However, all these ancient DNA studies have been performed on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tamara Moore. James Aimers.

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. Ancient Maya E-Groups have been a subject of archaeological fascination for nearly a century, resulting in extensive literature on E-Groups. However, consistency in that literature is hard to find. In this paper, we review some problems with...