Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Subterranean

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Subterranean" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Subterranean features are particularly significant archaeologically because of the importance of the sacred, animate Earth in Amerindian indigenous cosmology. The subterranean is additionally important in often holding purely ritual assemblages that represent the field’s best context for studying the archaeology of religion. A focus of growing importance is the examination of subterranean spaces where human remains are found because it is our contention that the deposition of human remains is always a significant event. In recent years the use of aDNA has helped to clarify the nature of the remains. This session brings together papers providing the latest insights from field investigation and laboratory research.