Archaeological Anthropology Commons^™

Dynamics Of Land Use, Environment, And Social Organization In The Sasanian Landscape Of Eastern Iraq—Western Iran, Mitra Panahipour

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Understanding human-environment interactions has been one of the main challenges in archaeological studies over recent years. Past research on the Near Eastern territorial empires in general, and the Sasanian Empire in particular, primarily emphasized the dominant role of human on landscape transformation. In addition, politically centralized schemes such as agricultural intensification and expansion of water supply systems have been at the center of most of the discussions and remained the main hypothesis of the Sasanian land use practices.

This dissertation investigates population’s diverse responses to environmental variability during the Sasanian period (224-651 CE) across a landscape in eastern Iraq—western Iran. …

Cultures And Comfort: A Study Of Personal Adornment At Avery's Rest, Julianne Danna

Graduate Masters Theses

Avery’s Rest was a diverse, thriving plantation in Sussex County, Delaware in the late 1600s and early 1700s. John Avery, a flavorful character from England by way of Massachusetts and Maryland, settled the plantation in the late 1600s and made his final home there with his wife and children. After his death, the same site was then occupied by his daughter, Jemima, and her husband.

Excavated by the Archaeological Society of Delaware, the numerous artifacts from the archaeological site provide a glimpse into the lives of settlers on the colonial frontier as they fought to survive environmental challenges, negotiated continuous …

Eat This In Remembrance: The Zooarchaeology Of Secular And Religious Sites In 17th-Century New Mexico, Ana C. Opishinski

Graduate Masters Theses

This thesis examines the faunal remains from LA 20,000, a 17th-century Spanish estancia near Santa Fe, New Mexico that was inhabited by a family of Spanish colonists and indigenous laborers. The data collected from these specimens are examined to better understand the diet of the site’s inhabitants, especially in conjunction with existing data on the plant portion of the diet at this site. Creating a more complete picture of the diet, the analysis covers Number of Identified Specimens (NISP), Minimum Number of Individuals (MNI), potential meat weight represented by the various species, bone modifications, and ageing and kill-off patterns. These …

Archaeological Artifacts As Expressive Desire Of Hindu-Buddha Religions In Java In 8th–15th Centuries, Agus Aris Munandar

International Review of Humanities Studies

This study discusses the Hindu-Buddha religions in the ancient Javanese society which developed in 8—15 th Century AD when the centers of the kingdoms in the central part of Java. The case discussed in this paper is concerned with their ritual and ceremony tools used by the worshipped of Hindu-Buddha religions, especially in the regards with the statues of Hindu-Buddha gods, which are still used up to the present time. The statues of Hindu-Buddha gods are actually the realization of wishes to fulfill their worshipper hopes. This study in line with the opinion of Melford E.Spiro (1977), an expert on …

Understanding Cumulative Hazards In A Rustbelt City: Integrating Gis, Archaeology, And Spatial History, Daniel Trepal, Don Lafreniere

Michigan Tech Publications, Part 1

We combine the Historical Spatial Data Infrastructure (HSDI) concept developed within spatial history with elements of archaeological predictive modeling to demonstrate a novel GIS-based landscape model for identifying the persistence of historically-generated industrial hazards in postindustrial cities. This historical big data approach draws on over a century of both historical and modern spatial big data to project the presence of specific persistent historical hazards across a city. This research improves on previous attempts to understand the origins and persistence of historical pollution hazards, and our final model augments traditional archaeological approaches to site prospection and analysis. This study also demonstrates …

An Early Modern Human Outside Africa, Eric Delson

Publications and Research

Analysis of two fossils from a Greek cave has shed light on early hominins in Eurasia. One fossil is the earliest known specimen of Homo sapiens found outside Africa; the other is a Neanderthal who lived 40,000 years later.

Osl And Ceramic Analysis At The Humphrey Site, Ryan Mathison

Department of Anthropology: Theses and Student Research

The Sand Hills of Nebraska are a unique environment located in the west-central portion of Nebraska. This portion of North America has long supported human life. One group in particular that called the Sand Hills home are the Dismal River people. Dismal River is the name that archaeologists gave to a group of horticulturalists that lived in circular structures on the sand dunes, often near the rivers, in the Sand Hills. This group, while generally known through archaeology, also has a potential historic or ethnographic presence in the form of the Cuartalejo Apache visited by Ulibarri, and potentially mentioned by …

La Quina 5 Maxilla Fragment (Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis)

3D Hominin Artifact Models

Origin: France. Time Period: Late Pleistocene (~35-65 ka). Scanned from plaster cast.

Communities Of Consumption On The Southeastern Mesoamerican Border: Style, Feasting, And Identity Negotiation In Prehispanic Northeastern Honduras, Whitney Annette Goodwin

Anthropology Theses and Dissertations

Prehispanic northeastern Honduran communities were situated at the border between southeastern Mesoamerica and lower Central America. Previous studies of pottery style suggest that local groups shifted their affiliation from north to south at the end of the Classic period (ca. AD 1000). This study examines the contexts in which pottery, as a medium for style, was used, and how the food people prepared, stored, or served in these vessels offers a perspective complementary to pottery style for understanding how identity was actively negotiated in this region. In this view, other parts of the foodways system – the foods chosen to …

Legacy- July 2019, South Carolina Institute Of Archaeology And Anthropology--University Of South Carolina

SCIAA Magazine - Legacy & PastWatch

Contents:

Search of Old St. Augustine, Florida…p. 1

Director’s Notes…p. 2

Shipwrecks of America’s Lost Century Symposium…p. 4

Search Resumes for Le Prince…p. 7

Follow Up on the SUBMERGED Educational Programming…p. 8

Students Dive in for Maritime Archaeology Internships at MRD Charleston Field Office…p. 10

Cobble Cluster Features and the Occupation of 38AK155…p. 11

New Investigations at the Mulberry Site (38KE12) …p. 14

De Soto in Mississippi- Chicasa Project Update…p. 18

Investigations of an Old Bridge and Road on Property of Judy Bramlett in Travelers Rest, South Carolina…p. 22

SCAPOD: Looking to the 10^th Anniversary and Beyond…p. 24 …

The Ethnohistory Of Freshwater Use On Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile), Sean W. Hixon, Robert J. Dinapoli, Carl P. Lipo, Terry L. Hunt

Anthropology Faculty Scholarship

Sources of drinking water on islands often present critical constraints to human habitation. On Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile), there is remarkably little surface fresh water due to the nature of the island’s volcanic geology. While several lakes exist in volcanic craters, most rainwater quickly passes into the subsurface and emerges at coastal springs. Nevertheless, the island sustained a relatively large human population for hundreds of years, one that built an impressive array of monumental platforms (ahu) and statues (moai). To understand how Rapanui acquired their scarce fresh water, we review ethnohistoric data from first European arrival (1722) through the …

Late Classic Soil Conservation And Agricultural Production In The Three Rivers Region, Byron Smith, Stanton Morse

Humboldt Journal of Social Relations

Agricultural production during the Classic Period (c.1,700 to 1050 BP) in the Central Maya Lowlands was comprised of a variety of techniques that were used to satisfy dietary needs and to stimulate its subsistence economy. The complexity of those methods was a consequence of a variable topography and previous forest management practices that likely resulted in wide-spread deforestation, and subsequently large-scale erosion which limited arable land. The Classic Maya solution to limitations in arable land, augmented by increased erosion seems to have come in the form of geotechnical constructions placed in a variety of positions along the contours of hillsides …

Mapping Maya Hinterlands: Lidar Derived Visualization To Identify Small Scale Features In Northwestern Belize, Jeremy Mcfarland, Marisol Cortes-Rincon Ph.D.

Humboldt Journal of Social Relations

This paper will discuss the processes and methods of relief visualization of LiDAR-derived digital elevation models (DEM’s) and classification of secondary data to identify archaeological remains on the ancient Maya landscape in northwestern Belize. The basis of the research explores various Geographic Information System (GIS) and cartographic techniques to visualize topographical relief. Graphic terrain maps assist archaeologists with predictive settlement patterns. The Relief Visualization Toolbox (RVT 1.3) aids to visualize raster DEM datasets in the predictive identification and interpretation of small-scale archaeological features. This dataset and methodology can be utilized to answer questions of population estimates, mobility costs, and effectiveness …

Trends In Health, Stress, And Migration In The Pre-Contact Southwest United States, Alexis O'Donnell

Anthropology ETDs

The major goal of this dissertation was to examine migration and its impacts on health through use of dental morphological and paleopathological data. The case study is the Southwest United States between A.D. 1200-1400s. The second chapter, written with Corey Ragsdale, Biological Distance and the Fate of the Gallina in the American Southwest, examines where the Gallina people may have gone upon abandoning their homes in the late A.D. 1200s. We used dental data for 492 individuals and mean measure of divergence (biodistance) analysis to examine several hypotheses regarding where the Gallina went. We find that the Gallina may have …

Sexual Dimorphism In Homo Erectus Inferred From 1.5 Ma Footprints Near Ileret, Kenya, Brian Villmoare, Kevin G. Hatala, William Jungers

Anthropology Faculty Research

Sexual dimorphism can be one of the most important indicators of social behavior in fossil species, but the effects of time averaging, geographic variation, and differential preservation can complicate attempts to determine this measure from preserved skeletal anatomy. Here we present an alternative, using footprints from near Ileret, Kenya, to assess the sexual dimorphism of presumptive African Homo erectus at 1.5 Ma. Footprint sites have several unique advantages not typically available to fossils: a single surface can sample a population over a very brief time (in this case likely not more than a single day), and the data are geographically …

Becoming Chacoan: The Archaeology Of The Aztec North Great House, Michelle I. Turner

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

Between 900 and 1140 CE, people at Chaco Canyon and throughout its region built multistory monumental structures with hundreds of rooms, known as great houses. This dissertation reports on recent archaeological testing on one such great house, the Aztec North great house at Aztec Ruins National Monument.

I argue that Aztec North’s occupation represents an early, transitional period, as people previously not involved in the Chaco world made choices that increasingly brought them into Chaco’s orbit and changed their way of life forever. The structure represents a remarkable architectural experiment in large-scale adobe construction, one that likely was not terribly …

Explaining Variation And Change Among Late Pleistocene And Early Holocene Microblade-Based Societies In Northeastern Asia, Meng Zhang

Anthropology ETDs

This project aims to provide a culture-ecological explanation of variation and change among microblade-based societies in Northeastern Asia during the late Pleistocene and early Holocene between c. 30,000 - 6,000 years ago. Assuming that paleoenvironmental changes stimulated cultural changes due to available food resources and that local environment conditioned cultural variation, the development of microblade-based societies can be divided into four phases (c.30-22 kya, 22-15 kya, 15-10 kya, 10-c.1 kya uncal. BP) in four regions (north continental, south continental, north insular, and south insular).

The study’s macroecological approach based on Constructing Frames of Reference (Binford 2001) is applied to elucidate …

The Coastal Route: The Role Of The Pacific Northwest Coastline In Facilitating Human Travel Into The Americas, Andrew Nye, Carolyn Dillian

Honors Theses

How Homo sapiens first entered North America has historically been attributed to a crossing of Beringia and a subsequent movement south through an ice-free corridor in Canada. Biological and physical research of the history of the area suggests an ice free corridor could not have existed in the same time frame as the first human settlements. These biological constraints would not have been present along the North West coast of the continent. New archaeological discoveries show early human settlement along the North West coast. Used together, this new evidence supports a coastal human migration instead of an inland route into …

The Applications Of Gis On Lithic Raw Material Source Analysis, Sydney James, Carolyn Dillian

Honors Theses

Raw material sourcing has long been used to identify patterns of trade and exchange in archaeological research. More recently, geographic information systems (GIS) have provided other ways for archaeologists to identify these patterns through data visualization and various spatial statistical analyses. While these methods are frequently used individually, the combined use of these methods has potential to more closely examine the relationships between raw material sources and archaeological sites; this should be considered a necessary measure for methods of spatial analysis. This research applies existing raw material source data to quantitative GIS analysis as a way to demonstrate this claim.

A Community-Based Approach To Archaeological Site Preservation In A Changing Climate: A Proposed Risk Assessment Along The Lower Columbia, Phillip Daily, Virginia L. Butler

Student Research Symposium

Global climate change is an increasing threat to cultural resources, especially in coastal areas. Archaeologists have responded with risk assessments that gauge these threats and create preservation priorities for land managers. However, most assessments do not include input from descendant communities, which limits their potential value and relevance to archaeologists and tribal partners. We are in the initial stages of developing a risk assessment model for the Lower Columbia that includes a process for collaborating with tribes. In addition to incorporating the existing archaeological and ethnohistorical data typically used in risk assessments, our project will also incorporate indigenous stakeholder priorities …