Taphonomy in Focus: Current Approaches to Site Formation and Social Stratigraphy

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

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Taphonomy in Focus: Current Approaches to Site Formation and Social Stratigraphy" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

As the physical accumulations of artifacts, ecofacts, and sediments, archaeological deposits comprise the basic units of empirical analysis and are routinely the focus of methodological concerns. In recent decades, a growing body of literature has emerged that not only focuses on site formation as a set of cumulative taphonomic effects but also as a process of sociocultural, political, and affective negotiation both in the past and present. We seek papers that explore the complex interplay between the empirical and interpretive dimensions of deposition, assemblage, stratigraphy, and other concepts related to the formation of the archaeological record. Papers may address any geographical or temporal setting. We also welcome diverse methodological and theoretical approaches to the theme. Contributors might explore issues of scale, resolution, and temporality; the mnemonic or semiotic roles of deposits and assemblages; challenges and implications presented by contested, multivocal sites and landscapes; archaeological concepts as epistemological metaphor (sensu Foucault), and more.

Other Keywords
Ceramic Analysis • Historic • Taphonomy and Site Formation • Ideology • Colonialism • ontology • and Memory • Political economy • Zooarchaeology • Infrastructure

Geographic Keywords
North America (Continent) • North America: Northeast and Midatlantic • New Mexico (State / Territory) • Oklahoma (State / Territory) • Arizona (State / Territory) • Texas (State / Territory) • Sonora (State / Territory) • United States of America (Country) • Chihuahua (State / Territory) • Alberta (State / Territory)

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-7 of 7)

  • Documents (7)
Documents
  • The Afterlife of Feasts: Feasting and Ritualized Deposition in the Middle Woodland Tidewater (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Taylor Callaway.

    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. In this paper, I consider the Middle Woodland period (500 BC-AD 900), a time in which forager-fishers moved across the central Atlantic seaboard in seasonal rounds, regularly returning to particular locales for large-scale feasting events. By analyzing the ceramic characteristics and feature distributions...

  • Decolonizing Deposition (2024)
    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...

  • Doctrines of Discard in the Ìjẹ̀bú Kingdom: Social Stratigraphies of Refuse Mound Deposition in Southern Nigeria, AD 1400–1900 (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Tomos Evans.

    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. The Ìjẹ̀bú Kingdom (southern Nigeria) was for centuries involved in far-reaching trade networks – with the inland and coastal Yorùbá ìlú (city-states), European merchants from various nations, and eventually the British Lagos Colony following its establishment in 1862. During this period, the Ìjẹ̀bú...

  • Matters of Scale: Depositional Processes and the Archaeology of Daily Life at Bacon’s Castle (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebekah Planto.

    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. Home to Virginia’s oldest standing house, the Bacon’s Castle site is the most visible remnant of a (post)colonial landscape, continuously occupied as such since at least the 1640s. The extant portion alone, where archaeology has concentrated, has been inhabited over multiple generations by a complex...

  • “Picking at the Scabs of Ancient Wounds”: The Derry Excavations Collection (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Abigail Johnson.

    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. The “Derry Excavations Collection” (DEC) is a legacy collection recovered during a series of late 1970s salvage excavations conducted by archaeologist Brian Lacey in the city of Derry, Northern Ireland. This project focuses on a subset of artifacts associated with a seventeenth-century “town ditch”...

  • Temporalities of Disaster Taphonomy: A Contemporary Archaeological Case Study in Southern Puerto Rico (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Caroline Watson.

    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. Disaster landscapes dominate Puerto Rico’s Anthropocene, past and present. Yet, since the devastating 2017 hurricane season, climate change and coloniality have materialized unprecedentedly as roofless homes, shifting coastlines, and abandoned lots. As recovery practices become a part of everyday life in...

  • Toxic Taphonomy (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Haeden Stewart.

    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. We are living through an era that has been described as “the apotheosis of waste,” a globe brimming with greenhouse gasses, mountains of tailings, lagoons of pig-shit, and hangars of acidic sludge. The massive scale and persistence of industrial waste has not only transformed the air, water, and soil that...