SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

DOCUMENT Citation Only Craig Lee.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ice patch research in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE) is increasingly interdisciplinary. Efforts to obtain paleoclimatic proxies obtained from ice patches and peri-ice patch environments are being coupled with archaeoecological observations to posit linkages between climate and the activities of Indigenous populations during the Holocene. For...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Catherine Jalbert.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In San Antonio, city-led regulatory processes have played a critical role in balancing modern development with heritage preservation and management. In this context, the use of urban archaeology has been central to evaluating the presence and intactness of rich archaeological deposits and features beneath San Antonio’s well-developed cityscape. One of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Totsch.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The water-supply system of Pompeii has long been a source of renewed interest for archaeologists and provides a unique opportunity to examine the urban environment and infrastructure of the Roman city in the years leading up to the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. After an aqueduct was installed between 30-20 BC, water usage intensified throughout the site. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ignacio Lerma.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sihó, is a Maya city in the northwest of the Yucatán Peninsula, which had its apogee during Late and Terminal Classic Periods (ca. 600-900 A.D). Research developed in the last twenty years suggests that the settlement was the center of a royal dynasty and was inhabited by a complex and multistratified society. The horizontal excavations of eight...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Diana Chávez.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Maya archaeology has historically been an exclusive discipline, often closed off to Indigenous people, nonacademics, and the general public. Originating in the colonial period, it initially focused more on the extraction and collection of “treasures” rather than sharing knowledge. In recent decades, archaeologists have made significant progress in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lara Sánchez-Morales.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Alluvial sequences have proven to be useful archives retaining proxy information about past climate and environmental changes associated with episodes of human habitation in different contexts. In the insular Caribbean, proxy evidence from sedimentary records such as these have provided a window into understanding the timing and processes of human arrival...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Neil Hauser.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster presents the results of an investigation of differences in contracting stem point shape across the Great Basin, Colorado Plateau, and greater American Southwest. Contracting stem points from 17 locations or areas consisting of both excavated sites and surface collections were used. By comparing the occurrences of tightly constrained projectile...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caitlyn Young.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster highlights a community archaeology project in Surprise Valley, CA. The June 2023 workshop involved the Northern Paiute Gidutikad Band, the Kosealekte Band of the Pit River Tribe, and local residents. Activities included plant counts and collection, lithic reduction, traditional burn practices and drone photography, while emphasizing Indigenous...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tanner Guskey.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Within the United States Department of Agriculture lies the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). Its mission is to aid American Farmers through a variety of assistance programs. Archaeological work is intimately intwined in carrying out these programs. While it is necessary and good work, often the Archaeological work can slow or halt program...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Seungyeon Hong.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The capital region of the early Baekje state during the Three Kingdoms period of Korea (c. 300-475AD) underwent significant transformations in urban planning, associated with the dynamic population aggregation in the central Korean Peninsula. Previous studies have suggested that the region began from the medium-sized villages and developed to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chloe Hoelzel.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Silcrete used to make stone tools in South Africa ~70ka shows signs of being heat treated. There are debates over the type of heat treatment used, and unfortunately, there are minimal approaches to identifying different heating methods. Three methods have been proposed for this ancient heat treatment: (1) direct (2) ember and (3) sand-bath heat treatment....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Whitten.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ethnohistoric accounts from conquistadors in Pacific Nicaragua detail both the prevalence of maize as a part of the general diet of Native peoples, as well as the stories of migration from the Mesoamerican Chorotega- and Nicarao-speaking peoples into the region. Archaeologists have since used these accounts to frame excavations and interpretations of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Allison Thomson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Based on a previous Microsoft Access database created to organize data from the Michigan State University Bioarchaeology Laboratory, this project expands on the foundational elements of data management to enhance the accessibility, identifiability, and searchability of burial records, while incorporating visual data comparison. Utilizing an ArcGIS system...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Ciolek-Torello.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. <html> Most studies of urban development focus on sedentary agricultural populations. The nomadic empires of Mongolia provide an alternative perspective on urbanism. In 2024, archaeologists from Statistical Research, Inc. and the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Archaeology launched a multi-year study of urban centers built by the Uyghur Empire...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richie Valdez.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Between the massive Classic Period pueblos of Tonque and Paako runs an intermittent tributary of the Rio Grande River. Along the relatively lush banks of this drainage are a high density of small pre-contact structures, or field houses, as well as agricultural features including check dams, terracing, and grid gardens. The sites on this Tonque agrarian...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Cullison.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. It has been long understood that the trade routes for obsidian differ from that of other materials such as ceramic among the Ancestral O'odham (also known as the Hohokam). Previously conducted sourcing studies have shown that many materials including ceramic are exchanged among communities that share an irrigation canal. However, obsidian is seemingly...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lynn Dodd.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Empowering manuscript repositories and increasing audience agency in encounters with ancient materials is a key goal of the Virtual Reality Global Library (VRGL). Our research supports the dual--and often dueling--missions of preservation and access that curators and conservators confront daily. Moderately tech-savvy people gain a means of transforming...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jaxson Brewer.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We examine the architectural and artifactual patterns distributed across the Postclassic city of Mayapan (A.D. 1150-1450), located in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, by analyzing artifacts recovered from middens throughout the city. We synthesize data collected by the Carnegie Institute, which conducted extensive mapping and excavation at Mayapan during...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Torras Freixa.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Teotihuacan is not a “lost or abandoned city” it is a resilient settlement with a long human occupation to the present-day. Therefore, rather than looking for the reasons behind the collapse of the Classic city of Teotihuacan, the main goal of this contribution is to explore the ancient city of Teotihuacan by itself after this major event. In sum, our aim...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Christie.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. At the foot of Yanakauri Hill in the community of Koyoktor lies a stone water temple attached to a series of quadrangular Inka-style rock sculptures. Water appears to have been channeled down this mountain referred to by its Inka- Kañari toponym, to fill the carved canals and basins of the temple. This site and mountain are again being used for ceremonial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Mixter.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the Maya Lowlands, water is a precious but fickle natural resource. Too little water shrivels crops and leads to hunger, while too much water washes away fields and houses, transforming the land to mud and misery. To help manage these challenges, some ancestral Maya captured water into reservoirs, holding excess for times of need. Unlike at some Maya...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joseph Wayman.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Foot Cutters: A New Hypothesis for the Function of Acheulean Bifaces and Related Lithics, Joseph Wayman, Lithic Technology 2010, v35-2, I propose that the predominate toolkit of the Early/Middle Pleistocene were not used as hand tools, but instead were devices used to arm traps intended to damage the feet and lower legs of prey animals so that the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shelby Patrick.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Interactions between individuals and material culture present an invaluable resource to understanding not only people’s daily lives, but also how they navigated periods of environmental instability. From approximately 1375 to 1800 CE, Thule communities in Inuit Nunangat (Arctic Canada) faced the decreasing temperatures and increased sea ice associated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stella Holmes.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Textiles were important in ritual, economic, and social activities in the central Andes. Households were required to produce it for elites or local authorities, and in other instances, specialized workshops were exclusively producing textiles for the ruling class. Textile fragments were recovered within the public architecture at El Campanario site during...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jordan Pratt.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Weed Lake Ditch is a rare stratified open-air Western Stemmed Tradition site located in the Harney Basin, southeastern Oregon. The site is positioned along a relic shoreline of pluvial Lake Malheur and contains a strong Younger Dryas aged occupation component. At Weed Lake Ditch both Haskett points, crescents, bone needles, bone beads, and many additional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Magen Hodapp.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Jamestown’s First Well was dug by colonists soon upon their arrival to Virginia to access fresh water, but it was filled with domestic refuse by survivors of the disastrous Starving Time winter of 1609-1610 upon orders for a “cleansing” of the fort by incoming leadership. The Starving Time saw colonists resort to taboo dietary practices including the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paige Ford.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Imagery is a powerful tool for communication, one that both the humanities and sciences use for teaching and presentation. Words already paint a picture for the reader, but words combined with imagery can help deepen the reader’s comprehension of and connection to the material at hand. Comics and graphic novels constitute such combination of images and a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Taryn Johnson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Anthropological collections management professionals are increasingly challenged by the need to care for non-standard materials suspended in liquids. With shrinking budgets and personnel, establishing standardized practices for managing these materials is essential for both resource preservation and operational efficiency. Coprolites, in particular, have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelly Hoover.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In July of 2024, our team collected nearly 20 km of 600 MHz GPR data on the earliest large-scale monumental site in the region: Los Morteros, a Late Preceramic monumental site located in the Lower Chao Valley on the Northwest coast of Peru. Analysis and interpretation suggest the presence of a drape of aeolian sand over anthropogenic structures, including...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jackson Mueller.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Western Stemmed Tradition (WST) is the predominant late Pleistocene and early Holocene lithic tradition in the Great Basin. It features long- and short-stemmed projectile point types including Haskett, Cougar Mountain, and Parman. Square base Windust points are often assigned to the WST, but it remains unclear if and how they are related to these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Reed.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As many (myself included) have discussed in recent years, American archaeology is making a transition. Long-suppressed and ignored viewpoints are finally being heard and interpretations are broadening. In particular, archaeologists are working collaboratively with Indigenous peoples and other descendant communities with new and innovative approaches to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kate Trusler.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The location of sanitation facilities has important social and cultural ramification about the use latrines and management of waste in the ancient Mediterranean. Field work in Pompeii has led to a more precise understanding of residential and business latrines and downpipes (indicators of upper story sanitation features) by challenging commonly held...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Isabella Hernandez.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mollusks are one of the oldest known dietary staples in Chiapas, Mexico, with direct evidence for consumption as early as 9000 BCE, and continuing to the present day. The freshwater gastropod known as Jute or Shuti (Pachychilus sp.) is one of the most widely-consumed species, while a variety of marine species were widely exchanged as currency, ornaments,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jamie Meinsen.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Between 1995 and 1998, archaeological fieldwork was conducted by Martin Pickands, MA, and the New York State Museum Cultural Resource Survey Program at the request of the town governments of Montgomery and Shawangunk in New York State. Among several sites identified over the course of this fieldwork, the Wilemantown Farm Site (NYSM #10485) provided some...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joel Gunn.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the decades after the 1940s, Walter W. Taylor became famous worldwide for his vision of an archeology structured around many subdisciplines working together to form an enlightened vision of humans as builders of vast and complex social structures. William J. Folan, a student of Taylor's at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, followed his teacher's...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meredith Poole.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Colonial Williamsburg’s Department of Archaeology has been engaged since 2020 in the excavation and analysis of the First Baptist Church, site of one of the first churches in the nation established by and for an enslaved and free Black congregation. Excavation around the door of that structure recovered artifacts that could be interpreted as components of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam Rorabaugh.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In traditional Coast Salish societies of the Pacific Northwest Coast, the peoples of what is now Western Washington and Southwestern British Columbia, oral traditions were verified through a process called witnessing. Witnesses would be trained to recount and verify oral history and traditional teachings at high fidelity. Here, a simple model based on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mi Wang.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Black-skin pottery of the Neolithic Liangzhu Culture of the Yangzi River Delta, regarded as advanced craftsmanship for the third millennium BCE, is believed to have been centrally produced and/or distributed as a distinctive type of pottery, distinct from non-black-skin pottery. However, with no kilns discovered yet, this assertion is primarily based on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katina Lillios.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. <html> Agroal is a hilltop settlement located in a karstic landscape along the Nabão River in central Portugal. Three seasons of excavation and survey were conducted at Agroal between 1988 and 1990 and revealed two phases of occupation: the first, during the Bronze Age (2000-1000 BCE), and the second, between the 13^th and 17^th...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Wigley.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2021 through 2023, the Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Texas at San Antonio (CAR-UTSA) in consultation with the Intermountain Regional Archaeology Program of the National Park Service (NPS) conducted survey and subsequent testing at the Lyndon B Johnson National Historical Park in Gillespie County, Texas. One of the sites tested...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nathan Klembara.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There have numerous discussions about the role of social values and politics in archaeological method, theory, and interpretation, especially regarding the so-called “critical theories” of feminism, queer theory, indigeneity, critical race theory, and disability theory (among many others). What remains under-researched in this literature is a more nuanced...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fox Nelson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. What we wear, and why we choose to wear it, is a visual representation of our identity. Clothing in an anthropological context has been explored heavily in cultural anthropology, however due to many issues revolving around preservation clothing is rarely found in archaeological contexts. In cold and dry environments such as those in the Wyoming Basin this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chelsea Betts.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Given its position on the doorstep of the Neolithic, the Natufian period was marked by significant socioeconomic change. A gradual shift to sedentism and ultimately, agriculture was accompanied by the increasing visibility of new spiritual practices. Hilazon Tachtit, a 12,000-year-old burial site in northern Israel, is home to the earliest shaman burial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alisa Luthra.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Zooarchaeological research of Woodland period Florida Gulf Coast civic-ceremonial centers indicate that human-animal interactions, implicated through harvest and subsistence patterns, were linked to and affected by local environmental perturbations. Regional scale changes in site settlement and subsistence patterns at these coastal centers have been noted...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Olumide Ojediran.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Oyo Empire dominated the mainland of the Bight of Benin between the 17th and 18th centuries, with animals, especially horses, playing pivotal roles in its sociopolitical power, economy, ecology, and culture. Ede-Ile, located in the rainforest of southwestern Nigeria, was a crucial colony and military frontier of the Oyo Empire. However, the roles of...