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

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Walsh. Anna Prentiss. Megan Denis.

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. Geneticists have used phylogenetic analyses to model population movements associated with emergence and movements of distinct populations in northeast Siberia and the Americas. However, archaeologists have rarely taken advantage of this approach to examine the emergence and radiation of cultural traditions in these regions. In...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Hopt. Daniel Pettit.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) currently manages the 1,858 acre Denman Wildlife Area, located within the Rogue Valley of southwestern Oregon. The Denman Wildlife Area contains a dynamic fluvial and cultural history that makes archaeological management and habitat restoration of the wildlife area challenging. Included within the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rodrigo Guzman.

This is an abstract from the "Holtun: Investigations at a Preclassic Maya Center" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Water management is intrinsically associated with the development and support of complex societies. Water was a significant source of power among the ancient Maya. Although traditional research characterizes water management as homogeneous and monolithic, recent studies show that it was highly variable and adapted accordingly. The case...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jason Nesbitt. Bebel Ibarra Asencios. Lars Fehren-Schmitz. Eden Washburn.

This is an abstract from the "After the Feline Cult: Social Dynamics and Cultural Reinvention after Chavín" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The decline of the Chavín Interaction Sphere in the mid-first millennium BC was followed by major religious, cultural, and economic changes over a wide region of highland and coastal Peru. In this paper, we discuss these phenomena from the perspective of our ongoing research in the Chavín heartland of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marla Taylor. Laura Bryant. Laura Elliff Cruz.

This is an abstract from the "In Search of Solutions: Exploring Pathways to Repatriation for NAGPRA Practitioners (Part IV): NAGPRA in Policy, Protocol, and Practice" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For centuries, museums and academic institutions have acquired and amassed Indigenous cultural items for their own use and benefit with minimal consideration from descendant communities. The values expressed in stewarding those collections resonate...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Giulia Saltini Semerari.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While both gender archaeology and culture contact studies have well-developed bodies of theory, the intersection between these is undertheorized, especially outside more recent and better-documented historical archaeology. This is problematic, since any process of interaction potentially implicates divergent gendered expectations and norms, and can upset...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Terry Powis. Bryan Moss. Joey Case.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cummings (9BR710) is a multi-component site with occupations dating from the Late Archaic through the Middle Mississippian periods. It is located about three kilometers northwest of the Etowah Indian Mounds in Bartow County, Georgia. The site is situated about 500 meters from the Etowah River. Over the past five years archaeological investigations have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dana Moot. Alexandre Tokovinine.

This is an abstract from the "The Rollout Keepers: Papers on Maya Ceramic Texts, Scenes, and Styles in Honor of Justin and Barbara Kerr" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Distinct regional styles are a hallmark of Lowland Maya elite polychrome ceramic vessels during the Late Classic period (550–820 CE). However, our understanding of the phenomenon has not advanced beyond its mechanics - the presence of attached craft workshops at the courts of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erica Hill.

This is an abstract from the "Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Nineteenth-century Inuit and Yupiit living on the coasts and islands of the North Pacific inhabited a landscape populated by spirits, animal persons, and object-beings. Human observance of rules and rituals was necessary, but not sufficient, to regulate this fluid, animated ecosystem. Magical practices, deeply embedded in relational ontologies,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sara Pfannkuche. George Vassilatos.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological objects are frequently donated by private citizens to professional organizations. These include the legacy collections of professional or avocational archaeologists, many of which date to the period when the profession of archaeology was being formalized, and objects found in the attic of a grandparent’s house. These collections range from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine McEnroe. Sean Devlin.

This is an abstract from the "Individuals Known and Unknown: Case Studies from Two Burial Contexts at Colonial Williamsburg" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the last three decades, archaeological approaches to the excavation of human burials have radically shifted. These changes have demanded a large-scale reevaluation of the decision-making processes and research practices deployed not only during these excavations, but also in the approaches...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Hansell.

This is an abstract from the "Unraveling the Mysteries of the Isthmo-Colombian Area’s Past: A Symposium in Honor of Archaeologist Richard Cooke and His Contributions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama has become a key repository for archaeological materials collected within the country over the past 50 years. A number of these collections are also currently housed outside of the country at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Neeley. Craig Lee.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Forager mobility is often linked to the organization of technology through the continuum of curated and expedient technologies. Curated technologies are expected to be associated with higher levels of mobility reflecting transport costs and longer use histories, in response to reduced access to raw materials. In contrast, expedient technologies are more...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christina Giovas. Michiel Kappers. Kelsey Lowe. Yoshi Maezumi. Claudia Kraan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2022, the Curaçao Cultural Landscape Project (CCLP) initiated a long-term field investigation on the ecological legacy of Indigenous and European colonial occupation of Curaçao, in the southern Caribbean. Excavation at a recently identified rockshelter site along the inland bay of Rif St. Marie (RSMA) identified significant archaeological deposits...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caitlin Wichlacz.

This is an abstract from the "Ceramics and Archaeological Sciences 2024" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Between ca. 1300 and 1450 CE, Salado polychrome (Roosevelt red ware) pottery production and use spread rapidly, then persisted across the US Southwest, intersecting diverse cultural and regional traditions, and creating a material pattern termed the “Salado phenomenon.” In Arizona’s Phoenix basin during the Hohokam late Classic period, Salado...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacob Comer. Douglas Comer. Adrian Borsa. Bruce Chapman. Benjamin Holt.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With the advent of certain satellite-borne lidar instruments, the availability of free and extensive lidar data suitable for archaeological applications has become plausible. Here we use an airborne lidar data set collected over the island of Pohnpei, in the Federated States of Micronesia, as a reference to test the utility of two satellite-borne lidar...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Guengerich. James M. Crandall.

This is an abstract from the "After the Feline Cult: Social Dynamics and Cultural Reinvention after Chavín" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In contrast to a long history of study of the Late Intermediate period societies of the Utcubamba Basin, research focusing on pre-Middle Horizon social change has only begun within the last 10 years. In this paper we examine existing literature from early archaeological contexts and introduce findings from our...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carmen Ting.

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. Rooted in the Eurocentric concept of Classical antiquity, the “Classic” period is considered to have epitomized Maya civilization, standing in contrast to the developments that characterize the periods that came before and after. This dichotomy...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alyssa McDowell. Cindy Hsin-yee Huang.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Upper Paleolithic, microblade tools emerged in Siberia and northern China, representing a significant technological advancement in tool-making and tool use. It is hypothesized that microblades emerged early in Siberia as an adaptation to the cold high-altitude environments, and the intensification of forager mobility due to the harsh...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carlos Rodriguez-Rellan. Ramón Fábregas Valcarce.

This is an abstract from the "Local and/or Exotic Interactions: Symbols, Materials, and Societies" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, we aim to analyze a collection of singular artifacts recovered from various sites in the Iberian Peninsula, spanning from the Early Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age (approximately 5600–1800 BCE). Our primary focus will be on investigating the patterns of circulation and exchange of polished axes and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Novotny.

This is an abstract from the "Embodied Essence: Anthropological, Historical, and Archaeological Perspectives on the Use of Body Parts and Bodily Substances in Religious Beliefs and Practices" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeological record of the ancient Maya reveals many examples of the living returning to human interments to exhume skeletal elements, expose the elements to fire or smoke, or to paint them with red pigment. At the ancient...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hanna Erftenbeck.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Early Bronze Age (EB IB-III, 3300–2500 BCE) in the southern Levant is marked by significant social, political, and economic changes, as people aggregated into large, often fortified settlements for the first time in the region. These new sites differ in size, environmental setting, and in the degree of social differentiation and political organization....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Sayre. Silvana Rosenfeld. Erick Acero.

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. Chavín de Huántar is a very important Formative period site located in the Conchucos region of north-central Peru. It has unique monumental architecture, which includes a series of buildings with complex galleries and canals, as well as finely crafted stone sculptures. Although...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julieta Flores-Muñoz.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Within the Mesoamerican worldview, maize is synonymous with the body and represents the primary food of the human being, accompanied by a complex planting system known as milpa. Said system, we believe, celebrates the interrelation between the diversity of species, serving, in this way, as a metaphor to understand our social construction. In this metaphor,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marianne Sallum. Julieta Flores-Muñoz.

This is an abstract from the "Weaving Epistemes: Community-Based Research in Latin America" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper highlights the importance of agroforestry communities in Latin America as guardians of ancestral knowledge related to plant cultivation and ecological practices that have shaped the region's landscape and cultural heritage. These communities celebrate the interconnectedness between people and the environment,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only LisaMarie Malischke.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Colonial Archaeological Research in the American Midcontinent" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As archaeologists revisit old collections, we strive to develop new, efficient ways to analyze complex datasets with thousands of artifacts. My own work attempts to do so through a reanalysis of the collection and architectural features of Fort St. Pierre (1719–1729). Almost wholly excavated in the 1970s, Fort St....

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Dye.

This is an abstract from the "Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Demonstrating one’s spiritual power through dramatic theatrics, based on deceptions and illusions, has long been the purview of ritual practitioners in their efforts to gain, legitimize, and maintain political and social advantages. Exclusive and secretive ritual sodalities, which often form the institutional framework for corporate-based magical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Margaret Comer.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation will examine several museums and heritage initiatives connected to Nazi and/or Soviet violence in and around Tallinn, Estonia, through the lens of “dark” and “contested” heritage, as well as “competitive victimhood” and “securitization of the past.” It will analyze the narratives of victimhood, perpetration, and suffering that are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Pintar. Jorge Gabriel Martínez.

This is an abstract from the "The Global “Impact” of Projectile Technologies: Updating Methods and Regional Overviews of the Invention and Transmission of the Spear-Thrower and the Bow and Arrow" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation focuses on the use of the atlatl and dart system since the earliest known occupations in the Salt Puna of NW Argentina ca. 9800–7000 BP, specifically in the region of Antofagasta de la Sierra (Catamarca)....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melissa Torquato.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For over a century, the proliferation of archaeological excavations in the United States has generated a large amount of archaeological data. Much of this data is published in archaeological reports that are housed in state-run archives. These archives offer a wealth of information for scholars who explore research questions that require multi-site...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Guderjan. Alexander Parmington. Colleen Hanratty.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Surrounding the ancient Maya site of Xnoha in northwestern Belize are residential areas with houselots delineated by Linear Stone Boundary Markers (LSBMs). Lidar from 2016 revealed hundreds of such houselots. However, until now, we had no understanding of the dates of construction of the LSBMs. In 2023, backhoe testing was undertaken to determine that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kimberly Johnson. Hannah Lau. Lara Fabian. Jeyhun Eminli.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The mortuary site Nәsiri Kolat in the Lerik region of Azerbaijan was occupied from the Antik through the Middle Islamic Periods (11th-16th centuries), a fact further supported when the site is considered with the midden site Şәğolhoni. Ceramic analysis from these sites permit us to better understand how people in the Lerik region interacted with more...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Bellorado.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mural decorations on buildings can be used to express shared identities and cosmologies at a variety of scales. Stylistic links between murals at sites can reveal connected networks of practice within and between regions. Most prior studies focused solely on murals from a single structure or site that are dated at a relative-scale using ceramic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jo McDonald.

This is an abstract from the "Painting the Past: Interpretive Approaches in Global Rock Art Research" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Dampier Archipelago (including Burrup Peninsula) is one of Australia’s most significant rock art provinces. Recently nominated to the World Heritage List as the Murujuga Cultural Landscape, this talk describes efforts which are being made to directly-date this deep time rock art sequence, by innovative direct...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carlos Rincon Mautner.

This is an abstract from the "Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Subterranean" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Rectilinear planes cut into one of the gypsum outcrops near the base of the north face of Cerro Mequitongo, the hillock that rises above the south end of the massive Purrón Dam, created a subterranean space. The labor invested in excavating this man-made cave (Tc-511), its walls plastered with a thin veneer of stucco and decorated with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Víctor Emmanuel Salazar Chávez. Jeffrey Blomster.

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. Whenever we think of Mesoamerican foods, it is easy to imagine maize. It is particularly true during the Early Formative period, when the first sedentary villages appear in the region. Maize has been used almost exclusively to explain and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Krzysztof Makowski. Martha Palma. Ana Fernández.

This is an abstract from the "Beyond the Ancestors: New Approaches to Andean "Open Sepulchers"" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pueblo Viejo-Pucara, main settlement of mitmaqunas, Caringas de Huarochiri, is one of the emblematic cases of funerary behaviors involving the construction and use of open chambers. In most of the cases studied, the two-story structures of 1 m high each story, which fulfill the original function of storage rooms in each...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Karligkioti. Jane Buikstra.

This is an abstract from the "The Bioarchaeology of the Phaleron Cemetery, Archaic Greece: Current Research and Insights" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The abundance in textual sources and richness of its archaeological record make Athens one of the most studied Greek cities during Classical Antiquity. However, research has focused principally on Athens, leaving much of the periphery of the Classical world largely unexplored. Scholars have mostly...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Hansen. Eric Jones.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Historical and anthropological demography has long focused on the spread of infectious disease in urban spaces across time. However, few studies have examined disease in rural contexts over time. Using census records, township maps, and archaeological data to map locations and causes of death in GIS, this project examines mortality from chronic and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Celise Chilcote-Fricker.

This is an abstract from the "Centralizing Central America: New Evidence, Fresh Perspectives, and Working on New Paradigms" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The characteristics and roles of the preconquest cultures that once existed in Central America have long been the subject of debate, the main focus of which revolves around the nature of their relationships to the surrounding Mesoamerican and Chibchan cultural areas. Largely accepted that no...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Snider.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study addresses the contextual importance of human skeletal remains in identifying diachronic changes and constants in mortuary practices from the Mesambria necropolis, on the banks of the Black Sea in modern Nessebar, Bulgaria. Skeletal remains are the central element of mortuary practices but are often excluded from archaeological interpretation,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah McClure.

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. Richard Redding’s body of research pushed zooarchaeologists to think more deeply and creatively about human-animal interactions. His 1981 dissertation “Decision-making in Subsistence Herding of Sheep and Goats in the Middle East” set the stage for his impactful career, bringing together multiple...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Di Hu. Erik Marsh. Maria Bruno. Jose Capriles. Christine Hastorf.

This is an abstract from the "The Global “Impact” of Projectile Technologies: Updating Methods and Regional Overviews of the Invention and Transmission of the Spear-Thrower and the Bow and Arrow" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, we argue that both arrows and darts were used in the Taraco Peninsula (south Lake Titicaca) until the end of the Middle Formative period (around 250 BC), after which arrow technology began to predominate. A...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Simeonoff. Samantha Fladd.

This is an abstract from the "Taphonomy in Focus: Current Approaches to Site Formation and Social Stratigraphy" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists view deposition as existing at an interesting crossroads: it is both fundamental to our basic understandings of site formation and easy to dismiss as unintentional or of secondary importance. Detailed discussions occur most frequently either to explain away issues with the archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only J. Gregory Smith. Uzma Rizvi. Adam Green.

This is an abstract from the "Collaborative and Community Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Expanding the geographic coverage of the Collaborative and Community symposium to the Global South, this presentation covers the 25 years of community-based and participatory work done in South Asia, with a particular emphasis on the last five in Pakistan at the World Heritage Site of Mohenjo-Daro. Our archaeological collaboration is run under the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lane Fargher. Robert Cook.

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. The colonialist academic project has long obliterated complexity in the precontact Americas. From the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, the complexity of Mesoamerican societies was erased; for example, the massive cities encountered by Cortés were deconstructed as simple villages/towns inhabited by tribes. Not...

DOCUMENT Citation Only George Leader. Olav Bjornerud.

This is an abstract from the "The Arch Street Project: Multidisciplinary Research of a Philadelphia Cemetery" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Excavation of historic burial grounds produce a large number of coffins but they are often overlooked in favor of hardware and grave goods. Yet coffins were often produced by the same craftspersons producing fine furniture and are often infused with evidence of highly skilled carpentry. Here, we present a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Bowyer-Kazadi.

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. This paper will look at the religious phenomenon of anchoritism, popular in Western Europe during the medieval period and how we, in the twenty-first century can engage with it. The medieval anchorites (men) and anchoresses (women) lived in isolation in their anchorhold (cell) in order to live the life of a solitary...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Javier Sánchez-Martínez. Nolan Ferrar. João Cascalheira. Rafael Mora.

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. Expedient technologies are linked to low-cost behaviors, aimed at producing stone artifacts with low technical complexity and minimal temporal requirements. Traditionally, these have been associated with assemblages characterized by simple production systems mainly geared toward obtaining flakes. In recent...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Severin Fowles. Lindsay Montgomery. Michael Adler.

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. Provocative new evidence from research on tribal lands suggests that Picuris was already a demographic center of the Eastern Pueblo world at the start of the tenth century CE. In this paper, we report on recent surveys and excavations at the Eagle Pile Site, home to a large Developmental period (850–1150 CE) village. We...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Feng. Shu Kong. Timme Donders. Surangi W. Punyasena.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Archaeobotany, Part II" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pollen-based paleoecological reconstructions rely on visual identifications that can be automated using computer vision. To date, most automated approaches have focused on taxonomic classification of pollen in cropped images. There are fewer protocols for pollen detection (i.e., localization) in whole-slide images. New...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Brown. Michael Wiant.

This is an abstract from the "The Village, the Region, and Beyond: Stuart Struever (1931–2022) and the Lower Illinois River Valley Research Program" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. By 1972 the exposure of deeply buried occupation surfaces was a novelty in the Midwest. In Illinois, deep-site excavation experience was limited to the Modoc Rock Shelter exploration. Koster offered a new opportunity for a deep-site exposure, but one that raised...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nataliia Mykhailova.

This is an abstract from the "Embodied Essence: Anthropological, Historical, and Archaeological Perspectives on the Use of Body Parts and Bodily Substances in Religious Beliefs and Practices" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Deer Cult was a primary element of the myth-ritual complex of ancient hunter-gatherers. Deer worship included rituals related to natural and economic cycles, including the human life cycle. In the Upper Paleolithic,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Smeeks.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research advances the current theoretical agendas of warfare scholars, overcoming the limitations of earlier social evolutionary theories and examining the interrelationship between warfare and sociopolitical organization in the Huamanga Province of Peru during the Late Intermediate Period (LIP, AD 1000-1450). Only through the analysis of this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jesús Alberto Aldana Mendoza. Carlos Del Cairo Hurtado. Carla Riera Andreu. Laura Victoria Báez Santos.

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. Cartagena de Indias’ geostrategic importance for the European colonial powers in the eighteenth century led to the creation of defense infrastructures and the development of practices to strengthen and protect the coastal territory. All the infrastructures and cultural practices inherent to the “militarization” of this territory...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jordan Schaefer.

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Twelfth Unnamed Cave is a dark-zone cave art site in Tennessee that contains over 300 individual petroglyphs. Like many cave art sites in the American Southeast, the locations of the art within the cave appear to be structured. However, traditional spatial analytical methods have made it difficult to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Roos. Julie Field. John Dudgeon.

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. Remote islands in the Pacific Ocean experienced dramatic environmental transformations after initial human settlement in the last 3,000 years. Human causality of this environmental degradation has been largely unquestioned, but examination of regional records suggests a role for climate influences. Here we use charcoal and stable...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Xin Lin. Guopeng Chen.

This is an abstract from the "Misinformation and Misrepresentation Part 1: Reconsidering “Human Sacrifice,” Religion, Slavery, Modernity, and Other European-Derived Concepts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The procurement and consumption of jade are conventionally thought to have been under the control of Maya elites. Through cross-cultural comparison with ancient China as a representative jade-using culture, we argue that the multidimensional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Newland. Alex DeGeorgey.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past seven years, Alta Heritage Foundation (AHF) has responded to nearly a dozen catastrophic fires on the west coast. AHF is a 501(c) non-profit that works with canine human remains recovery teams to identify cremains, the cremated remains of individuals who were cremated prior to the fire and stored in private residences, and retrieve them for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erick Acero-Shapiama. John Rick. Rosa Rick. Lisseth Rojas-Pelayo.

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. A través del tiempo, la Plaza Circular y su atrio en el monumento Chavín de Huántar han tenido mucha importancia. Durante la fase Blanco - Negro, estas áreas, tuvieron pleno funcionamiento y albergaron una diversidad de contextos, donde destaca el descubrimiento de las galerías de la...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily McKenzie. Christine Hastorf.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Flotation remains one of the most important methods by which paleoethnobotanists recover botanical remains from archaeological contexts. However, logistics in the field can make supplying mechanized flotation machines with water (and subsequently powering motorized pumps) a challenge. This poster details the process by which we utilized bilge pumps,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Clark.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past few decades, lidar has been used to reveal the extent and complexity of cultural landscapes in different world areas. The Mississippi period (AD 1000–1550) is poorly understood in the Upper Central Tombigbee River Valley, especially as a broader Mississippian understanding of these settlement data come from Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kyra Miller. Carla Cugini. Anna Dhody. Kimberlee Moran.

This is an abstract from the "The Arch Street Project: Multidisciplinary Research of a Philadelphia Cemetery" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The goal of this project was to determine if the yellow fever virus (YFV) could be detected in historic remains by analyzing the proteins found in the dental pulp of the remains. Typical YF diagnostic techniques rely on blood or liver tissue so when these tissues are not recoverable, YF detection is currently...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mya Welch.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Between 10,000 and 5,000 years ago, sea level of the Apalachee Bay, Gulf of Mexico was roughly 20m lower than today, extending the paleoshoreline nearly 75km further south and providing significantly more habitable land for prehistoric populations (Faught, 2004). Although many submerged sites along the PaleoAucilla river channel have been surveyed, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Derek Hamilton. Sophia Adams. Kerry Sayle. Katharine Steinke.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Many of the central questions of archaeology engage directly with themes relating to movement, mobility, and migration. The two most common isotope systems that have been exploited for this purpose are strontium (87Sr/86Sr) and oxygen (δ18O), with sulfur isotopes (δ34S) being a much more recent addition to the isotopic arsenal for investigating residence...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jason Laffoon.

This is an abstract from the "Integrating Isotope Analyses: The State of Play and Future Directions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Isotope studies have become a common and effective method for inferring the geographic origins of a wide range of materials in various research disciplines, including archaeology. In recent years, such isotope approaches have also become more rigorous and quantitative, and increasingly make use of isoscapes (isotope...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Ray. Nadia Neff. Viorel Atudorei. Keith Prufer.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The agricultural-demographic transition highlights a positive correlation between increasing consumption of agricultural products and population. However, this correlation varies regionally. In Eurasia, agriculture and population growth coincide with increasing sedentism hypothesized to drive population change. In the Amazon, agriculture and sedentism...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexander Smith. Amalia Pérez-Juez. Kathleen Forste.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Menorca Archaeological Project (MAP) investigates the site of Torre d’en Galmés on the Balearic Island of Menorca (Spain). While the site is primarily known for its prehistoric Iron Age remains, it was also home to a small Medieval Islamic farming community, primarily in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries AD. built atop and between the Iron Age...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Diego Lombao. Juan Morales. Andreu Ollé. Marina Mosquera.

This is an abstract from the "Local and/or Exotic Interactions: Symbols, Materials, and Societies" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the second half of Middle Pleistocene in Europe significant changes occurred, including the emergence of Neanderthal anatomical features and behavioral shifts documented in the archaeological record, such as fire use, Levallois technology, and development of complex hunting strategies. These changes could reflect...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elspeth Geiger.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Wetlands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Nearly 15% of Michigan is covered by wetlands. These environments are widely regarded as critical components of Michigan's unique ecological makeup. From an archaeological perspective, the biological diversity, productivity, and dependability of these natural communities fulfill a variety of societal needs. Moreover, as a site for seasonal aggregation,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Samuelsen. Adriana Potra. Barry Shaulis. Erik Pollock.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Complications with diagenetic contamination of ancient human tooth enamel is of primary concern for Pb isotopic studies. While conducting a study of a Caddo skull-and-mandible cemetery in southwest Arkansas (in collaboration with the Caddo Nation), it became clear that many samples were contaminated by soil Pb. Additional samples from the same teeth were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ester Echenique. Francisca Gili. Paola González. Daniel Pavlovic. James Davenport.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Studies of Diaguita pottery have advanced towards the definition of decorative styles. In this regard, new studies and radiocarbon dating from the El Olivar archaeological site have significantly contributed to a new understanding of pottery traditions and chronological assignments of ceramic styles. The purpose of this work is to explore pottery...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Luis Flores-Blanco. Lucero Cuellar. Mark Aldenderfer. Charles Stanish. Randy Haas.

This is an abstract from the "The Global “Impact” of Projectile Technologies: Updating Methods and Regional Overviews of the Invention and Transmission of the Spear-Thrower and the Bow and Arrow" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The origins of Andean archery technology and its impact on social organization remain unclear. This analysis uses metric data from 1,179 projectile points from the Lake Titicaca Basin, 11–1 ka, to identify the timing of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yajaira Nunez-Cortes. Ashley Sharpe. Nicole Smith-Guzmán. Geissel Vargas.

This is an abstract from the "Unraveling the Mysteries of the Isthmo-Colombian Area’s Past: A Symposium in Honor of Archaeologist Richard Cooke and His Contributions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Richard Cooke dedicated his career to the study of past human groups on the lower Central American land bridge (southern Nicaragua to northern Colombia) and their diversification in the tropical landscapes of the region. He has argued that the diverse...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Thornton. Kitty Emery. Camilla Speller. Aurelie Manin. Joel C. Piñon.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the absence of morphological changes, clear genetic markers, and pen structures, the archaeological evidence for turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) husbandry and domestication in Mesoamerica relies primarily on identifying dietary shifts in ancient turkeys. As in the American Southwest, captive Mesoamerican turkeys exhibit greater consumption of maize than...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Rhode.

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 a history of prehistoric plant use based on starches recovered from plant processing tools at O’Malley Shelter, Lincoln County, Nevada. O’Malley Shelter (26LN418) is an important archaeological site in the Clover Mountains near the Great Basin’s southern margin, with an 8,000-year long record of occupation. Extraction and analysis of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kuei-chen Lin. Cheng-Yi Lee. Yu Itahashi. Zhiqing Zhou. Minoru Yoneda.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The extent to which aquatic resources influenced the dietary patterns of the Chengdu Plain's inhabitants is poorly understood, despite the region's intricate network of river channels. This research examines the nitrogen isotope makeup of specific amino acids in collagen derived from human bone samples collected from three sites in Sichuan. The objective...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniela Trujillo-Hassan. Julie Wesp. Sebastián Rivas. Ethan Hyland.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study analyzes the impact of environmental stressors on dietary practices within the Muisca society at the Nueva Esperanza archaeological site in the Cundiboyacense highlands during the Late Muisca Period (1000 AD - 1600 AD). This coincides with climatic changes associated with the beginning of the period known as the "Little Ice Age,” which was a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hernando Giraldo Tenorio. Marcela Benavides Imbachi.

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. Recientes investigaciones arqueológicas sobre las unidades políticas prehispánicas del suroccidente colombiano resaltan que las desigualdades sociales no fueron el resultado del control diferencial en la producción de ciertos bienes ni en la acumulación de riqueza por parte...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandra Derian. Paul Szpak.

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches in Zooarchaeology: Addressing Big Questions with Ancient Animals" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite their prevalence in zooarchaeological assemblages across Inuit Nunangat (the Inuit homeland), there is a paucity of information in the ethnographic and zooarchaeological literature about Inuit and Paleo-Inuit relationships with arctic fox (Vulpes lagopus). Furthermore, the information...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa Nagaoka. Jonathan Dombrosky. Steve Wolverton. Emily Jones. Susan Ryan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Differential recovery refers to the ways that faunal assemblages are sampled from the archaeological record. Its effects can be pernicious when interpreting data from multiple assemblages. As such, the topic is a mainstay in contemporary zooarchaeological research; however, in the U.S. Southwest differential recovery has received less attention. One reason...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Iris Puryear. Cate Garcia.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Decades of archaeological work at Flowerdew Hundred, a tobacco plantation located in the Chesapeake region of Virginia, have focused primarily on its 17th-century occupation by English elites, indentured servants, and enslaved Africans. This research perspective has obfuscated the presence and impact of the Weanock (a Late Woodland people situated in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samantha Turley. Steven Wernke.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists have long used architectural energetics to better understand the relationships between labor organization, political power, and materiality in pre-modern societies. The 16th century Spanish invasion of the Andes caused unprecedented societal upheaval and, in the 1580s, the physical upheaval of people as the Toledan reducción system resettled...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Conan Mills.

This is an abstract from the "*SE The New Normal: Approaches to Studying, Documenting, and Mitigating Climate Change Impacts to Archaeological Sites" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Digital archaeology provides opportunities to help safeguard and disseminate archaeological knowledge in the context of climate change. As environmental shifts intensify, archaeological sites are increasingly at risk, necessitating urgent measures to protect their...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Vargha. Martin Fajta.

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. The present paper introduces the ERC project RELIC and its sister WEAVE project REPLICO, modeling how the general population was involved in significant historical processes such as Christianization and state formation, by conducting a complex, comparative analysis and contextualization of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Ahern. Rory Becker. Ivor Jankovic. Lia Vidas.

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. Conducting archaeological investigations in cave and rockshelters presents researchers with multiple unique challenges as compared to typical open-air sites. Reduced space, low light, and complex stratigraphic sequences are frequently the norm. Additionally, the nature of limestone cave walls and floors is an undulating,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chelsea Gardner. Christine Johnston.

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 a 2021–2022 survey examining current uses of digital media and resources in teaching the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean, West Asia, and North Africa. For this study, digital media were defined as mass-communication products in different digital formats (videos, podcasts, blogs, etc.), while digital resources...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julie Wesp. Justin Johnson. Hope Eisenstein. Santiago Tobón Grajales S.J.. Felipe Gaitán Ammann.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Futures through a Virtual Past" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This interdisciplinary project uses photogrammetry and video game development software to capture and digitally recreate the interior of the San Ignacio church in Bogotá, Colombia. Established in 1610, this church served as the mother church for the Society of Jesus in Nueva Granada and continues to be one of the most spectacular examples of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carla Klehm. Stefania Merlo.

This is an abstract from the "Democratizing Heritage Creation: How-To and When" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Fostering digitally enabled equitable participation in heritage production is a major component of democratizing heritage creation. Whilst substantial progress has been made in ensuring that digital data and infrastructure complies with the principles of FAIR (findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability) and LOUD (linked...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alec McLellan. Cara Tremain.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Threats to ancient Maya cultural heritage sites – from modern construction, looting, agricultural intensification, and burgeoning tourism – are an ongoing challenge in Belize. This is especially true of the northwest region of Belize, in the periphery of the well-known site of Lamanai, which has been hard-hit by looting and a growing community of farmers...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Fletcher.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although field notebooks are created as a resource for future archaeologists to reference in their research, the labor required to digitize handwritten notes presents a barrier to their incorporation in state-of-the-art computational analyses. In this research, I explore if image pre-processing can improve the accuracy of text extracted from handwritten...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Qi Li.

This is an abstract from the "Resources and Society in Ancient China" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Located in the middle Yangtze region, the Panlongcheng site represents the southernmost extent of the Erligang civilization’s expansion during early Bronze Age China. While much scholarly work has concentrated on elucidating the site's significance and its implications for understanding the unique cultural expansion in ancient China, there has been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Liv Winnicki.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Kin Ya'a (towering house) is a prominent Chacoan great house that was the center of large community in the 11th and 12th centuries. This area has been utilized by the Navajo (Diné) over the course of two or more centuries. Nevertheless, there has been a shortage of research done on the Diné occupation of this particular region. According to oral histories...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michelle LeFebvre. Isabelle Holland-Lulewicz. Victor Thompson. Nicolas Gauthier. Kristen Grace.

This is an abstract from the "*SE Hope for the Future: A Message of Resiliency from Archaeological Sites in South Florida" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Accelerating shifts in climate and extreme weather events such as hurricanes threaten archaeological sites, especially in coastal regions which contain some of the most vulnerable forms of cultural heritage. As such, coastal archaeological sites provide exemplary locations for 1) the rapid study...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Isabel Rivera-Collazo. Jenniffer Santos-Hernández.

This is an abstract from the "Equity in the Archaeology of Disaster, Past, Present, and Future" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The IPCC 6th Assessment Report (2023) highlights that human-induced climate change triggers widespread and rapid changes that disproportionately affect communities in socially produced conditions of vulnerability to disasters. Academic convergence is needed as we search for solutions. Archaeology stresses that past...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Crystal Dozier.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The impending growth of the cultural resource management field (Altschul and Klein 2022) has brought the demand for well-trained archaeology graduates in the United States into sharp focus. In this qualitative study, we explored the relationships and disconnects between archaeology practitioners’ stated needs and desires in new graduates to the resources...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Korrin Lovett. Abbey Churney.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As small as they are, beads can create a window into past cultures. Their many uses demonstrate the intricacies of people’s personal preferences, socioeconomic status, religious practices, and much more. There has been no shortage of beads found at Fort St. Joseph, an eighteenth-century mission, garrison, and trading post. Made of glass, ceramic, or bone,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Weiland.

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. The Midwest Archeological Center (MWAC) of the National Park Service has completed the initial stages of identifying the hitherto undocumented Camp Guernsey, a segregated, African American Civilian Conservation Corps camp in Senecaville, Ohio. Using lidar and minimal ground truthing, MWAC staff, in collaboration...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Noah Place.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human treponemal diseases (yaws, endemic syphilis, and venereal syphilis) have a long and storied past in the North American Desert West, with the earliest case dating back roughly 1,500 years. The identification of lesions associated with treponemal disease at two Cienega phase (400 BCE–50 CE) sites in southern Arizona and northern Sonora, however, move...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelly Britt.

This is an abstract from the "Equity in the Archaeology of Disaster, Past, Present, and Future" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. When severe weather events strike, disaster ensues, leaving a catastrophic and at times an apocalyptic wake. This wake ripples through populations differently, generally preying on those already on the margins prior to the event and amplifying the structural inequities, whether they are economic, social, political, or...